South America
Even though many peoples have suffered physical and cultural extinction since the first contact with Europeans, the religious life of indigenous South American peoples is vibrant and varied. Linguists have described as many as 1,500 distinct languages and native cultures in South America. Very few surviving communities, however, have been uninfluenced by Christian missionaries. For centuries Roman Catholicism was the dominant Christian influence on Native American peoples. In the 20th century various forms of Protestant Christianity have taken hold, especially Evangelical and Pentecostal.
Nevertheless, indigenous religious ideas and practices have endured, even in communities that have long had involvement with Christian beliefs. In many of these cases, Christian views have been creatively absorbed and reframed within native worldviews. In some instances native myths have borrowed Christian features in order to offer a criticism of Christianity, putting forward Christ-like supernatural heroes who led rebellions against colonial rule and missionary zeal. A sense of the nature and variety of religious life in South America can be conveyed by examining beliefs about creation, practices associated with the calendar and with the initiation of new adults, forms of special religious authority, and prophetic movements concerned with the end of the world.