Latin American societies have fostered an abundance of religious revitalization movements since the early colonial period. Ongoing religious ferment and innovation in Iberoamerican contexts has often been interpreted as an adaptive response to such conditions as land dispossession, widespread poverty, racialized social systems, acculturative processes, political instability, and the demands of nation-building. Explanations of these movements must also consider the fact that religious systems have long played central roles in constructing and critiquing the social order in Latin America. Since remote antiquity, the indigenous peoples of the Americas have fashioned highly adaptive cultures centered on mystical cosmologies that encompass all aspects of life and natural relationships. The Spanish and Portuguese colonizers, and the later independent states, espoused forms of governance and culture rooted in an almost hermetically Catholic conception of social life. The encounters of these religious influences...