Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Countries

Mexico

Also Known As Mexican
Americas

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Mexico is predominantly Roman Catholic, a legacy of Spanish colonization layered over pre-Columbian religious systems including Aztec and Maya cosmology, and the country's Catholicism carries a distinct character shaped by that fusion, most visibly in the veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose basilica in Mexico City is one of the world's most visited Catholic pilgrimage sites. Indigenous ritual calendars, deity cults and sacrificial practice, known mainly through Aztec and Maya sources, are held in the atlas as a distinct pre-Christian layer beneath the colonial Catholic one. Day of the Dead observances blend Catholic All Souls practice with indigenous traditions of ancestor veneration. Protestant and evangelical communities have grown substantially in recent decades, and small Jewish and Muslim populations also exist alongside the Catholic majority.

Facts
Law and State
Establishment Status
No Establishment 4
No established church; a 1992 constitutional reform restored legal personality to churches and reestablished diplomatic relations with the Holy See, ending decades of formal estrangement rooted in the 1917 constitution's anticlerical provisions.
State Funding Mechanism
Mexico has no state funding mechanism for religion. The constitutional reform of January 1992, which amended Articles 3, 5, 24, 27 and 130, and the Law on Religious Associations and Public Worship signed that July restored legal personality to churches and ended the ban on monastic orders after decades of anticlerical restriction, but established no funding channel alongside those grants: the state remains formally laico, and neither the Catholic hierarchy nor most other religious bodies came away satisfied that the 1992 settlement went far enough. 5
Registration or Recognition Regime
A 1992 constitutional reform restored legal personality to churches and religious associations, letting them register, hold property and operate schools under Mexican law after decades of unrecognised status under the 1917 constitution's anticlerical provisions. 3
Concordat BasisSourced to the subject's own account
Mexico holds no concordat with the Holy See. Diplomatic relations were severed for over a century, from the anticlerical rupture of the Reform War through the 1917 Constitution's restrictions on the Church's legal existence, and were restored only in September 1992 under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the same year Congress passed the Law on Religious Associations and Public Worship removing the prior constitutional restraints. The restoration is a diplomatic and domestic legal change, not a bilateral treaty, and no concordat has followed it. 6
Demographics
Religious Composition
About 78-80% Catholic per recent census figures, down from over 90% decades ago; growing Protestant/Pentecostal and religiously unaffiliated populations (Mexico national census; Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). 1
Geography
Latitude
23.6 degrees north 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Longitude
102.6 degrees west 2
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a country's extent has no single center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a survey measurement.
Government
Capital
Mexico City (Ciudad de Mexico) 2
Government Type
federal presidential republic 2
Sovereignty Status
Sovereign UN member state 2
Established Year
1810 2
16 September 1810 (declared independence from Spain); 27 September 1821 (recognized by Spain)
Status
Legal Status
A 1992 constitutional reform restored legal personality to churches, permitted religious education in private schools and reestablished diplomatic relations with the Holy See, ending decades of formal estrangement rooted in the 1917 constitution's anticlerical provisions; Mexico remains constitutionally secular with no official religion. 3
Location
Location of Mexico Afghanistan Albania Algeria Angola Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Chile China Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia Federated States of Micronesia Fiji Finland France French Polynesia Gabon Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Guam Guatemala Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kuwait Laos Latvia Lebanon Libya Lithuania Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Mali Malta Mauritius Mexico Moldova Mongolia Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nigeria North Macedonia Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tanzania Thailand Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Uruguay Uzbekistan Vanuatu Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe
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Religion and History in Mexico

Mexico remains majority Catholic, around 78 to 80 percent per most recent census figures and estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, though the Catholic share has declined from over 90 percent decades ago as Protestant, especially Pentecostal and evangelical, communities and religiously unaffiliated Mexicans have grown substantially.

Spanish colonization following the 1519 to 1521 conquest of the Aztec Empire brought mass forced Christianization of Mexico's indigenous population, though the 1531 reported apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the indigenous convert Juan Diego, producing an image now housed in Mexico City's Basilica of Guadalupe, one of Catholicism's most visited pilgrimage sites worldwide, became a powerful vehicle for indigenous Catholic identity and is widely credited by historians with accelerating and localizing indigenous conversion by presenting Mary in indigenous-coded imagery.

Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican religion, including Aztec, Maya and Zapotec traditions centered on complex calendars, human sacrifice and a vast pantheon led by deities such as Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl, was suppressed but never entirely eliminated, and syncretic practices blending Catholic saints with indigenous ritual, including the Day of the Dead's ancestor-honoring customs, remain widespread and are recognized by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.

The Cristero War and Anticlerical Constitutional Legacy in Mexico

Mexico's 1917 revolutionary constitution imposed some of the most stringent anticlerical restrictions adopted by any country, banning religious orders, forbidding clergy from voting or criticizing the government, prohibiting religious education in schools and stripping churches of legal personality and property rights, provisions rooted in nineteenth-century Liberal anticlericalism and the Catholic Church's historical alliance with colonial and conservative political power. These restrictions, enforced with particular severity under President Plutarco Elias Calles in the 1920s, provoked the Cristero War of 1926 to 1929, a bloody Catholic uprising in central and western Mexico fought under the banner Viva Cristo Rey, that killed tens of thousands before a negotiated, informally tolerated truce ended most active persecution without formally repealing the constitutional restrictions themselves. These anticlerical provisions remained on the books, if loosely enforced, for decades until a 1992 constitutional reform under President Carlos Salinas formally restored legal personality to churches, permitted religious education in private schools and reestablished full diplomatic relations with the Holy See, ending nearly seven decades of formal church-state estrangement even as Mexico remains constitutionally a secular state with no official religion.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Mexico directly: "Ancient West Mexico, edited by Richard Townsend for Thames and Hudson with the Art Institute of Chicago, 1998, is a scholarly edited volume, produced to accompany a museum exhibition."

This source names Mexico directly: "Apostolic Journey to Mexico and to the Republic of Cuba, the Holy See Press Office's own 2012 official record of Pope Benedict XVI's 23 to 29 March 2012 journey, published on vatican.va, includes..."

The empire ruled central Mexico until 1521, and the excavated Templo Mayor now stands open in the middle of Mexico City.

Source The Great Temple of the AztecsEduardo Matos Moctezuma

This source names Mexico directly: "and dug up in the main square of Mexico City on 17 December 1790."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

He worked in New Spain from 1529 until his death.

Source Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New SpainBernardino de Sahagun; translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble

This source names Mexico directly: "ethnographic work in colonial Mexico with the direct expertise of a leading historian of Nahuatl culture and language."

Source Bernardino de Sahagun: First AnthropologistMiguel Leon-Portilla

This source names Mexico directly: "century Dominican friar in colonial Mexico who wrote this account of Aztec gods, rites and the calendar based on interviews with indigenous informants and access to now lost native pictorial..."

Source Book of the Gods and Rites and The Ancient CalendarDiego Duran; translated by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden

This source names Mexico directly: "Blessed Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in Mexico City on 31 July 2002, published by the Holy See."

About 78 to 80% Catholic, a legacy of Spanish colonization layered over Aztec and Maya cosmology.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020Pew Research Center

This source names Mexico directly: "folk saint of death venerated across Mexico and increasingly in the United States."

This source names Mexico directly: "strongest in central and southern Mexico."

Source Death and the Idea of MexicoClaudio Lomnitz

Provincial of the Franciscans in Yucatan and, from 1572, its bishop.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

This source names Mexico directly: "it: the chroniclers of conquest-era Mexico and Peru, the founders of comparative religion and the history of religions, and the ethnographers who documented shamanism, folk belief and indigenous..."

This source names Mexico directly: "Huei tlamahuicoltica, printed in Mexico City in 1649 and compiled by Luis Lasso de la Vega, contains the Nican Mopohua, the earliest surviving published narrative of the Guadalupe apparitions and..."

Source Huei tlamahuicoltica (the Nican Mopohua)Luis Lasso de la Vega (compiler); traditional attribution in part to Antonio Valeriano is contested

This source names Mexico directly: "made by an Aztec artisan in central Mexico in the final decades before the Spanish conquest of 1521, that reached Elizabethan England and became the best documented of the scrying instruments..."

Source The Mirror, the Magus and More: Reflections on John Dee's Obsidian MirrorStuart Campbell, Elizabeth Healey, Yaroslav Kuzmin, Michael D. Glascock

This source names Mexico directly: "The material culture of ancient Mexico and Central America excavated and dated on its own physical evidence."

This source names Mexico directly: "the Indigenous convert Juan Diego near Mexico City in 1531."

This source names Mexico directly: "the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City, the institution that holds, conserves and catalogues the 24-ton basalt disc rediscovered beneath the city's Zocalo in 1790."

Source Piedra del Sol: The Aztec Sun Stone (Museo Nacional de Antropologia)Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historiathe holders' own account

This source names Mexico directly: "buildings in the historic center of Mexico City."

Source Programa de Arqueologia Urbana: the Huei Tzompantli excavations at the Templo MayorInstituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia

This source names Mexico directly: "matching coverage from Searchlight New Mexico, Source New Mexico and other outlets on the same federal proposal to roll back protections near Chaco Canyon."

This source names Mexico directly: "especially among Cuban diasporas in Mexico and the United States."

Source Santeria (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Mexico directly: "study of the Day of the Dead in Mexico and its diaspora, tracing the holiday's history, its indigenous and Catholic strands, and its transformation as it spread beyond Mexico."

This source names Mexico directly: "Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, Anthony F."

Source Skywatchers of Ancient MexicoAnthony F. Aveni

This source names Mexico directly: "of his earlier Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, is the standard scholarly account of Mesoamerican astronomy and calendrics, covering the Maya Tzolk'in and Haab cycles, the 52-year Calendar Round, the..."

This source names Mexico directly: "at Aztec period sites in central Mexico underpin much of what the book reports, so its authority rests on that direct fieldwork record as well as on the wider literature it draws together, not on..."

Source The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition)Michael E. Smith

This source names Mexico directly: "of the great Aztec temple complex in Mexico City comes directly from the excavator's own documented findings rather than from a secondhand report of someone else's dig."

Source The Great Temple of the AztecsEduardo Matos Moctezuma

This source names Mexico directly: "of all in Latin America, above all in Mexico, Brazil and Chile, and growth in Africa accelerated markedly after a 1978 policy change opened priesthood ordination and temple access to Black members..."

Source The Oxford Handbook of MormonismTerryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (eds.)

This source names Mexico directly: "published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1996, is a comparative scholarly study of the matachines dance as performed in both Hispano and Pueblo communities of northern New Mexico..."

This source names Mexico directly: "record for the Maya Codex of Mexico, formerly known as the Grolier Codex, published following non-destructive testing including particle induced X-ray emission analysis that confirmed pre-Hispanic..."

Source The Maya Codex of Mexico: authentication of the former Grolier Codex (INAH, 2018)Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historiathe holders' own account

The colonial territory where both the episcopal and formal phases of the tribunal operated.

This source names Mexico directly: "to the Pachuca deposit in central Mexico and dating the manufacture to the final decades of Aztec rule before the 1521 Spanish conquest."

Source The Mirror, the Magus and More: Reflections on John Dee's Obsidian MirrorStuart Campbell, Elizabeth Healey, Yaroslav Kuzmin, Michael D. Glascock

This source names Mexico directly: "excavation of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City for decades, and this University Press of Colorado monograph, translated into English, is his scholarly analysis of the ritual deposits and offerings..."

Source The Offerings of the Templo Mayor of TenochtitlanLeonardo Lopez Lujan

This source names Mexico directly: "Aethyrs, an undertaking he began in Mexico in 1900 and completed in Algeria in late 1909 working with Victor Neuburg."

This source names Mexico directly: "Yaqui life on both sides of the US Mexico border."

Source The Yaquis: A Cultural HistoryEdward H. Spicer

This source names Mexico directly: "America and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and this 2018 book re-examines the 1519 meeting between Hernan Cortes and the Mexica ruler Moctezuma II."

This source names Mexico directly: "published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1996, is a widely cited scholarly study of Western Apache place-names and the narratives attached to them, written with named Western Apache..."

This source names Mexico directly: "Greenleaf was a historian of colonial Mexico, and this Academy of American Franciscan History book is his scholarly study of the apostolic inquisition held by Bishop Juan de Zumarraga from 1536 to..."

Source Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536-1543Richard E. Greenleaf

Conducted

Contains

Originated Here

Aztec, Cultures

Mexico holds the former Mexica homeland and the site of Tenochtitlan beneath modern Mexico City.

Source The Great Temple of the AztecsEduardo Matos Moctezuma

Born at Amecameca in Chalco and employed as steward of the church of San Antonio Abad in Mexico City.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

Descended from the ruling house of Texcoco and employed as a court interpreter in the viceregal administration.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

A Nahua ritual specialist and merchant of the early colony, tried by the episcopal Inquisition under Zumarraga in 1536 and 1537 and sentenced to exile in Spain.

Source Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536-1543Richard E. Greenleaf
Maya, Cultures

Mexico holds much of the Maya homeland, including the Yucatan Peninsula.

Source The Maya (9th edition)Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston
Nahua, Cultures

Tlatoani of Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico from 1431 until his death in 1472.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Yucatec Maya, Cultures

Spread Events Here

Hispaniola first, then New Spain and the wider Spanish and Portuguese Americas; anchored to Mexico as the best documented single mainland case in the scholarship cited here, though the process ran empire-wide across Spanish and Portuguese America, an approximation named here rather than rounded silently.

Worship Of

Sources
1. Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2025View the Source
2. The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency)
Central Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence AgencyView the Source
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
4. International Religious Freedom Report
United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom, US Department of State, 2023View the Source
5. Mexico's Churches Dispute Details of New Law on State and Religion (Christian Science Monitor, 1992)
Christian Science Monitor staff, Christian Science Monitor, 1992View the Source
6. Holy See-Mexico Relations (Wikipedia)
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
The Itza Maya: Rulership and Rebellion at Lake Peten
Grant D. Jones, Stanford University Press, 1998Originated Here: Itza
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