Garry Sparks Is Changing the Way We Think About Religion in the Americas

We typically picture the Spanish invasion of Latin America as one of conquistadors forcing their rule and religion upon Indigenous populations. The moments of first contact in the 1500s, however, were much messier and more interesting, according to religion professor Garry Sparks. Christian missionaries sometimes collaborated alongside Maya elites to translate and interpret religious ideas in a way that has left an indelible impression on Mesoamerican culture.

“We have this remarkable paper trail of documents in Native languages of the time,” says Sparks, who draws upon Princeton’s collection of some 300 such manuscripts — one of the largest collections in the world. 

Sparks first became interested in Central American culture while volunteering with the influx of refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala when he was a student in Texas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, later spending three years among the Highland Maya in Guatemala. Since earning a doctorate at the University of Chicago, he has dedicated his research to exploring these connections, including co-teaching a two-week summer workshop to bring international, scholars together. “There is a profound ignorance and misunderstanding of Latin American religion today,” he says. “My hope is to get back to cycles of respect, mutuality, solidarity, and constructive engagement.”

Quick Facts

Title
Associate Professor of Religion

Time at Princeton
1 year

Recent Class
Special Topics in the Study of Religion: Inventing “Indians” and “Religion”

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Illustration by Mikel Casal

A Unique Collaborative Theology

Much of Sparks’ research focuses on a tome called Theologia Indorum (“Theology for/of the Indians”), a remarkable text written in multiple Mayan languages by a Spanish Dominican priest in the 1550s. And Princeton’s Special Collections hold nine of the 20 known versions. Sparks has worked to reconstruct and translate the 800-page text — one of the longest written documents in any Native American language. The work draws from Maya myths and cosmology in translating Christian concepts, for example, presenting God as both “mother and father” — an idea more in line with 20th-century feminist theology. “It shows an amazing amount of chutzpah, as well as optimism in the intellect of the Indigenous audience,” Sparks says.

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Illustration by Mikel Casal

Ancient Songbook

Another manuscript at the Library of Congress offers a fascinating mystery — lyrics to some 50 Christian songs written also in the 1550s in K’iche’, one of the languages of the Theologia Indorum. Legend has it that the Spanish military gave Dominican priests five years to peacefully persuade the Maya, and the missionaries entered singing. “Whether or not that’s true, these seem to be among the first original pieces of Christian music composed in the Americas,” says Sparks, who is working on a translation with another scholar. He believes they may be connected to another manuscript at Princeton with musical notation for Gregorian chants, which could provide melodies to the lyrics in songs that were reportedly still in use by Maya into the 1860s.

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Religion On-screen

Along with his work on Native religions, Sparks also teaches a popular course on religion and film, exploring classic and modern movies that depict various aspects of religion, such as The Ten Commandments and The Last Temptation of Christ, as well as decoding religious archetypes in ostensibly secular movies, including Star Wars, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Big Lebowski. “They are all films that are notable in the history of film — for good or for ill, they were thrown into the pond of cinematic history and cause huge ripple effects,” Sparks says. “And they are all doing something with religion that may not be as obvious as they appear — sometimes even to the film producers themselves.”