Number of Protestants in historically Catholic Mexico now exceeds 10% of population

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – A new census shows that the number of Protestants in Mexico now exceeds 10 percent of the predominantly Catholic population, Christianity Today reports. Mexico has historically been dominated by the Catholic Church and ranks as one of the most strongly Catholic countries in Latin America.

Newly released data from Mexico’s 2020 census shows that the number of Protestants/Evangelicals in the country went up from 7.5 percent in 2010 to 11.2 percent last year. Christianity Today reports that the Catholic majority in Mexico is now decreasing rapidly.

“It took 50 years—from 1950 to 2000—for the proportion of Catholics in Mexico to drop from 98 percent to 88 percent. Now, only two decades later, that percentage has slipped another 10 points to 77.7 percent,” CT said in its report.

Mexican church leaders have said the rise in Protestantism is due, among other factors, to the evangelical outreach of Americans and evangelical Latin Americans: there are almost one million American-born people in Mexico and many thousands from South American countries including Guatemala and Venezuela, CT reports.

According to Rosa A. Duarte de Markham, coordinator of the department of biblical translation at the Missionary Cooperation of Mexico (Comimex), another contributing factor to the decline of Catholicism is that Mexicans are drawn by the moral and family values they have seen among evangelicals around them.

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