Maya Christians and Their Churches in Sixteenth-Century Belize

10. What Europe Did for Us

ten What Europe Did for Us In the foregoing chapters I examine the conversion process with reference to the Maya of Belize, and I focus in particular on the towns of Tipu and Lamanai , where we have archaeological evidence of church complexes that served as modest but pivotal “theaters of conversion.”  1 In this chapter, which forms the first part of my synthesis and conclusions, I examine particular aspects of the context of conversion. The chapter title is taken from the name of a British television program that examined the contributions made by earlier societies to modern Britain, such as “What the Romans Did for Us” or “What the Victorians Did for Us.”  2 My interest, however, is not in the legacy of sixteenth -century Spain per se, but instead in what about Europe’s past led to the sixteenth-century attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that were exported to Mesoamerica. First I examine the roots of the obsession with idolatry and hence the justification for its extirpation. I then examine Christianity’s links to imperial strategies. Finally, I isolate particular phenomena in the Christianization of Europe that I believe help to explain what happened in Mesoamerica. Idolatry The claim made by Spanish authorities, and particularly religious officials, that the Maya practiced idolatry provided the primary justification for suppression of time-honored cultural practices and for the destruction of material culture that reflected vibrant pre-Columbian traditions: buildings, records , books, paintings, reliefs, and representational imagery. Some religious were not hostile to the Maya past, but these were not the individuals whose wisdom prevailed. Even Las Casas believed that the devil controlled the Indians ’ imaginations, because they had not been exposed to doctrine and grace.3 + + 263 264 Maya Christians and Their Churches in Sixteenth-Century Belize The triumph of conversion under these conditions should be examined both for the effects on the Christianity that ensued, and perhaps for the implications of the legacy for the modern world. In the medieval West, Christian proselytizers explained the origin of pagan gods in two ways: they were either demons who had deluded humans, or they were historic individuals who had been mistakenly or falsely deified by their people after they died.4 The second alternative was the option exercised predominantly during the Christianization of Europe, a process which was completed by about a.d. 1000 with the conversion of the peoples of Scandinavia and eastern Europe.5 By the time of contact with the Maya of Yucatan and Belize, the gods of “the other” were viewed as demons.6 The question might arise as to why the gods of the Maya were not just written off as the products of ignorance; the answer is that, given the tenor of Christianity in the sixteenth century, the devil loomed too large. In chapter 3 I have provided some background on the origins of the devil, who had changed from a creature completely subordinate to the will of God to a force to be reckoned with in his own right. Attitudes fluctuated over time, with claims of the devil’s influence dismissed with skepticism by church authorities in Mexico by the closing years of the seventeenth century.7 In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, devil-worship and idolatry were real threats and constituted crimes against God and the church.8 The particular conjunction between the sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury fear of the devil and the spiritual conquest of the New World is admirably described by Cervantes.9 He traces some of the significant developments that would affect sixteenth-century religious thought to the monastic reform movements—or perhaps, more accurately, to the context that produced these movements—of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,10 such as those associated with Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzman, which I have touched on in chapter 6. From as early as the late eleventh century, those seeking spirituality within religious orders began to leave the shelter of monasteries to operate in the secular world, a move that paralleled a more widespread trend toward spirituality, introspection, and lay piety. A concomitant development was that the devil assumed a more insidious character than had been the case in monasteries (where the devil could be controlled) or in the pre-twelfthcentury secular world (where the devil was doomed to defeat by the bearers of a militant faith). The devil came to be seen as having the power to penetrate individuals’ souls or consciousness without their knowledge, hence laying the groundwork for...