Nicaragua's indigenous peoples, among them Chorotega, Nicarao and Chibchan speaking communities, held their own ceremonial and cosmological traditions before Spanish contact in the early sixteenth century. Colonization brought Catholic evangelization under the Patronato Real, the arrangement by which the Spanish Crown administered the Church across its American territories, and friars and secular clergy became the chief teachers, record keepers and builders of the colonial order.
The Catholic Church remained the dominant religious and social institution through independence in 1821 and deep into the twentieth century, controlling much formal education and standing close to the landowning elite through the long rule of the Somoza family. Liberation theology, the movement linking Catholic teaching to the struggles of the poor, took hold among a younger generation of clergy from the 1960s onward. Some, including the priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal, served openly in the Sandinista government that took power in 1979, while the church hierarchy under Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo kept its distance from the revolution's Marxist current. Rome under John Paul II moved against politically active clergy through the 1980s, and the pull between a socially engaged priesthood and a cautious hierarchy has recurred in Nicaraguan Catholicism since.
The later twentieth century also brought rapid evangelical Protestant growth, reshaping a religious landscape that had been almost uniformly Catholic for four centuries into the mixed composition recorded today.