Uruguay has been the least-religious country in South America due to nineteenth-century political events influenced by positivism, secularism, and other beliefs held by intellectual Europeans.
Some investigations present that in recent times, secularism and non-religious beliefs have grown in the religious landscape of Uruguay due to the influence of postmodernism, as in Western Europe.
Catholicism was easily introduced to Spaniards and mestizos and, until the first half of the nineteenth century, the church regulated the state, a number of institutions, and land as it did in other Latin American countries.
[6] According to some historians, the Uruguayan dioceses were South America's least powerful; Spanish and Italian priests, less able to teaching religion, preferred to evangelize the rural poor.
After independence, cultured Uruguayans began espousing secular and humanist political views against the Catholic Church and the small (but growing) number of Afro-Brazilian religious practitioners.
José Batlle y Ordóñez revived the movement early in the 20th century, allowing women to divorce and banning religious symbols from children's hospitals.