About 1/3 of the world’s Catholics are in Latin America. The Catholic Church has been present from the time of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the New World in the 1500s, when indigenous people were indoctrinated to adopt the new way of life. According to survey data gathered by Latinobarómetro, though, that way of life is becoming increasingly unpopular in the region. From 1996 to 2020, the percentage of people that identifies as Catholic dropped from 80% to 57%.
The religious mix of each Latin American country remains quite varied. Some countries like Paraguay, Mexico, and Peru maintain a solid Catholic population, all above 70%. In Central America, Evangelism has been rising steadily, with Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua all having close to 40% of their populations practicing. Guatemala has elected two Evangelical presidents since 1990. Unlike Catholics, Evangelicals don’t have a centralized authority, relying instead on the Bible as the “ultimate spiritual authority” and believing that they must “be born again” to be saved.
There’s a third growing category described as “non-religious” which represents 18% of Latin America, but it is quite fluid. The category includes people that identify as non-practicing, agnostic, or atheist. Interestingly, a tiny portion of that category describes itself as atheist. In fact, atheism has gone down from 2% to 1% in Latin America since 1996. Atheism is the lack of belief in God or gods. Almost everyone in the region continues to hold spiritual beliefs like life after death, miracles, and an emerging one, which is predominant in Argentina, “spiritual energy.”
