Maya Christians and Their Churches in Sixteenth-Century Belize

5. The Environment of Early Contact

105 five The Environment of Early Contact I ended the previous chapter with the idea that Christianity can mean different things to different people. Among the Maya, variations in meaning were partly the consequence of Christianity’s newness in a land with its own distinctive cultures, world views, and histories of growth and interaction, and partly a consequence of the process by which Christianity becomes molded according to personal experience. It follows that it is important to consider all the factors that might have affected the lives of Maya individuals in the towns and villages of Belize when Christians from Europe first appeared in the offing.1 Of the many factors to be considered, the choice made by Spanish Europeans not to settle the mainland, coast, and cayes that are now Belize is perhaps the most significant. There are no rivers whose mouths would have made good land-locked harbors, nor was there a single lagoon “in which all the ships of Spain could lie and be safe.”2 The consistent preference for places other than Belize meant that after the first flush of conquest and the establishment of the Belize missions, which was concentrated in a period from the mid-1540s to about 1570, the effectiveness of Spanish efforts to administer the region diminished considerably.3 This could be said to be a reflection of the inability to marshal the necessary resources and the scant attention given to the matter.4 Where Christianity took root in the land that became Belize, it was left veritably to its own devices. Such a situation was not uncommon in the early days of Christianity in a number of places in the world, one of which was Late Antique Britain. Britons are thought to have converted rather early, probably in the second century, because Christians are recorded to have been living in Britain by the opening years of the third century.5 St. Patrick, known for evangelizing + + 106 Maya Christians and Their Churches in Sixteenth-Century Belize Ireland, was born into a Christian family, probably in the early fifth century, in what was then the Roman province of Britannia.6 Christianity at that time was only one of a wide range of beliefs and practices on offer. Deities and spirits with a range of origins were worshiped: Romano-Greek, native British (Celtic), oriental (such as Mithra or Isis), and some that represented the blending of Romano-Celtic traditions.7 The context of early Christianity in Mesoamerica was not dissimilar to the environment of Roman Britain, in that the many languages spoken, the several languages written, and the intensity and historical depth of interregional trade and communication imply the existence of a wide range of religious beliefs and practices. There was some contact between Christian communities in Britain and Gaul,8 but it is safe to say that British Christianity developed indigenously according to its own distinctive trajectory.9 The Christianity that characterized the establishment and spread of monasticism in Britain in the sixth century,10 and that came to be associated with the Anglo-Saxons by the seventh century, was almost another religion. The hostility expressed by the Britons toward anything Anglo-Saxon was rooted in the late fourth and fifth centuries, when Angles, Saxons and Jutes—some as invaders and some as mutinied militias employed by the Britons—had succeeded in displacing local rulers and their kingdoms, particularly in the east and southeast.11 It is noteworthy that even when the Anglo-Saxons were persuaded by later missionaries (none of them Britons) to convert to Christianity, religion provided no bridge between them. The reaction of the Anglo-Saxons, such as Bede, was to denigrate British Christianity. What was the nature of indigenous Christianity? Local ruling elites— Celtic rulers in the case of Britain, and Maya lords in the case of Belize— brought their own historical depth and sense of place to their encounters with Christianity, and to its course of development.12 From the perspective of the later church, this kind of Christianity was “steeped in sin.”13 But in Roman and post-Roman Britain, the autocratic institution of the church as the dominant voice in interpreting Christianity had yet to appear on the horizon, and when it did appear, it slept with the enemy. In the case of the Belize Maya, the sixteenth -century church was a presence from the beginning, but was altogether too distant to dominate. In a sense, it, too, slept with the enemy.14 The church as...