Leaving Religion in Mexico City

Mexico City is the largest Catholic city in Latin America by some measures and the seat of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, one of the most-visited Catholic shrines in the world. The Catholic infrastructure is dense, the cultural inheritance is total, and the Virgin of Guadalupe is a national symbol as much as a religious one. Many of the people who would be "ex-Catholic" in Mexico City are operating as cultural Catholics — they stopped practicing years ago, they no longer believe much of the doctrine, but they still go to Mass with their grandmother on her birthday and they still light a candle in front of the Virgin when their child is sick.

There is also a fast-growing Pentecostal and evangelical scene in working-class areas of the city, often imported American forms with intense expectations around tithing and lifestyle compliance, and the deconstruction from these churches looks more like the ex-evangelical exit further north.

The pillar page on Catholicism applies for the cultural Catholic exit, and the page on Pentecostalism for the more recent megachurch exits. The page on holidays is especially relevant given how much of Mexican family life organizes around the Catholic ritual calendar.

Elder X has been through the religious exit himself — the family rupture, the guilt that would not stop, the psych wards, the isolation of being the person nobody in your family understands anymore. If you are in Mexico City and that description lands, reach out. Not therapy. Personal advice from someone who made it to the other side.