ABSTRACT
Protestants found an uneasy base in Mexico as early as the colonial period. Their numbers increased during the Mexican-American War of 1845, when the United States promoted missions as a means of undermining Mexican resistance (Levine and Stoll 1997; Sullivan 1998:113). The “historic churches,” that is, those that had been in the country the longest, such as Presbyterians and Methodists, were often sponsored by Latin American governments to curb the power of the Catholic Church during the liberal period, when the nations of Mexico and Central America sought a territorial rather than a religious basis for unity.
