Pagan and Christian Concepts in a Mexican Indian Culture

Abstract

The capacity of many societies to take some of the formal aspects of Christianity without understanding its meaning has disturbed many a missionary as he has watched what seemed to him to be an unholy mixture of pagan and Christian practices develop, or has found it already fully established. In this article Dr. Wonderly discusses some aspects of this problem in relation to Mexican Indian life, and comes to the conclusion that any profund teaching of Christian ethics can be done satisfactorily only through the life of a community of believers, through the application of principles to specific situations in the cultural milieu. The illustrations are derived from Mexico, and have to do with Catholic contact with Aztec life, but the problem is a universal one in the spread of the gospel