How did Santa Muerte, a Mexican folk saint, become the fastest growing new religious movement in the West?

The leading expert on the fastest growing new religious movement in the Americas, Dr. Chesnut will explain how Mexican folk saint, Santa Muerte (Saint Death), has gone from only a few thousand devotees in 2001 to some 12 million today.  

 

Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut earned his Ph.D degree in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and joined the History Department faculty at the University of Houston in 1997. He quickly became an internationally recognized expert on Latin American religious history Professor Chesnut was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at VCU in 2008. He authored the first and only academic book in English on the Bony Lady “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint”. (OUP, 2012 and 2017). 

 

Dr. Kate Kingsbury obtained her doctorate in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. She currently teaches at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on religion, in particular exploring its entanglement with gender and politics.Her forthcoming book “Daughters of Death: The Female Followers of Santa Muerte”, co-authored with Andrew Chesnut, will explore the unique appeal that Santa Muerte has to women in Mexico and across the Americas.