Religion and History in Honduras

Western Honduras holds Copan, one of the great ceremonial cities of the Maya world, where dynasties raised stelae to their deified ancestors and the ballcourt and altars staged a religion of calendars, sacrifice and royal communion with the gods until the city's ninth century collapse. The Lenca peoples of the highlands, whose compostura ceremonies still pay the earth for harvests, and the Garifuna of the north coast, whose dugu rites feast the ancestors with drumming, dance and cassava beer, kept distinct sacred worlds through and beyond the Spanish conquest.

Colonial Catholicism organised itself around Comayagua's cathedral and the mining and cattle towns, and after independence the liberal reforms of the 1880s disestablished the church early by Central American standards, leaving it culturally dominant but institutionally thin, chronically short of priests and reliant on lay delegates of the word in the countryside. That thinness is one reason the Evangelical wave that swept Central America from the 1970s ran strongest here: Pentecostal congregations multiplied through the barrios and villages, hurricane disasters and migration deepened the demand for tight communities of mutual aid, and by the 2010s surveys were finding Evangelicals at parity with Catholics or ahead, making Honduras one of the first mainland Latin American countries to approach a post Catholic majority.