A century ago, Mexico’s countryside erupted in an episode of religious violence known as the Cristero War, in which Catholic partisans launched a holy war against Mexico’s revolutionary state. In the decades since, and in particular since the 1973 publication of Jean Meyer’s seminal La Cristiada, a host of historians (myself included) have pored over archival documents in Mexico, the United States, the Vatican, and elsewhere in order to understand and reconstruct the dramatic story of this three-year-long conflict (1926–29). With its cast of heroes and villains; its transnational networks connecting Catholics in the United States, Europe, and Rome; its spies, gunrunners, and women’s brigades; and its pantheon of unofficial and canonized martyrs, the Cristero War has proven a compelling subject of standalone historical study.

Yet this Catholic conflict did not emerge in isolation. Instead, like most violent cataclysms, it had deep historical antecedents and long reverberations after its conclusion. Participants in the Cristero War certainly understood themselves to be part of this longer history. In 1927, for example, a Cristero rebel named Simón Tenorio launched a small, and ultimately doomed, revolt along the US–Mexico border. He carried a manifesto that promised “to initiate an armed movement under the flag of the Three Guarantees and in the spirit of vindicating the death of the Father of our country, Don Agustin de Iturbide” as well as “to overthrow the Bolshevik tyranny in its most recent incarnation, Callismo.”Footnote ¹ Tenorio’s manifesto explicitly linked the rebellion to the brief reign of Mexico’s first post-independence leader, a self-designated Catholic emperor, more than one hundred years beforehand. At the same time, it blamed the contemporary anticlericalism of the 1920s on an external enemy.

Recent scholarship has increasingly embraced an analysis of Mexican religious conflict from the perspective of the longue durée. Taken together, the six books under review span the period from independence to the late twentieth century, collectively challenging and reframing two enduring narratives regarding the trajectory of the Catholic Church and the Mexican nation-state. The first narrative, common among liberals and the left, has posited that Mexico embarked on an inevitable progression towards liberalism and secularization after independence, with periodic episodes of revanchist Catholic resistance representing temporary and futile aberrations from this path. The second, more common among conservatives and the right, has portrayed Mexico as a fundamentally Catholic country, and depicts attacks on the Church as the work of external enemies—Protestants, Masons, Anglo-Saxons, and others—who sought to eradicate Catholicism in Mexico.

Both narratives elide the complexities embedded in Mexico’s history of religious conflict. The secularization narrative underestimates the enduring strength of both institutional and popular Catholicism. While it is true that the proportion of Mexicans identifying as Catholic has declined from 98 percent of the population to 78 percent over the last century, the country remains the second-largest Catholic nation in the world, and religious debates continue to influence public life and electoral politics.Footnote ² As the books under study here demonstrate, Mexican modernity looks much more Catholic than secularization theory predicted.

On the other hand, the old notion that Mexico is a monolithic Catholic country, and that threats to Catholicism have come primarily from non-Catholic outsiders, is clearly wishful thinking. Most importantly, this narrative ignores the extent to which anticlerical and reform movements have often been driven by actors who are themselves Catholic. Because Catholicism was the ocean everyone swam in from the colonial period onward, religious conflict frequently emerged from tensions within Mexican Catholic society. While the growth of Protestantism in Mexico caused significant consternation, it nonetheless remained relatively modest in comparison to neighboring Central America. It never actually posed an existential threat; at times, it even even served as a common enemy, and therefore a unifying force, for otherwise fractured Catholic factions. Religious struggle in modern Mexico was often influenced by external ideologies, but it was not externally imposed. Indeed, as they engage with a rich Mexican historiography, all six authors demonstrate that, more often than not, the call was coming from inside the house.

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Pamela Voekel’s For God and Liberty: Catholicism and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1790–1861, provides a vital starting point for examining the internal tensions within Mexican Catholicism at the eve of independence. Though not exclusively focused on Mexico, her work situates Mexico’s post-independence religious conflicts within the wider political currents of Spain and the Atlantic World. Voekel pushes back against scholarly assumptions that the Age of Revolution was the first step on the path to secularization, arguing that “religion lay at the center” of conflicts in the Atlantic world from the late 1700s to the 1860s (15). Voekel demonstrates that colonial subjects who responded to the crisis of the Spanish Monarchy (the establishment of the liberal Cortes de Cádiz in 1810 and the publication of the Constitution of 1812) always did so through the lens of their Catholicism. While both sides of the independence movement remained Catholic, they held competing visions about the Church’s role, not only in relation to the nation-state, but also in its alignment with Rome and the papacy.

In the first chapter, Voekel discusses the split between sanjuanistas (who wanted more church and state governance) and rutineros (conservative Catholics loyal to the pope and the absolute monarchy) in the city of Mérida on the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico (then New Spain); these were the predecessors of the liberals and conservatives who would fight to shape newly independent nation-states in the Atlantic world. The central chapters of the book are more transnational in focus, covering Catholic debates in the Kingdom of Guatemala, the Viceroyalty of Granada, and then in these regions after Independence. Voekel’s final chapter returns to Mexico during the reform era (1858–61). Here, she offers a new interpretation that challenges traditional understandings of liberals as secularists. Instead, she argues, they sought to create a new type of Catholicism, “refashioning the Catholic Church from within” rather than eradicating religious belief altogether (224). Ultimately, Mexico’s civil war was one in which “liberals fought to define God and to reform religious practice … They were the heirs of a Reform Catholic International anchored in the former Spanish Empire” (250). Voekel’s sweeping hemispheric approach reframes Atlantic independence movements as a “transnational Catholic civil war” (1).

Focusing exclusively on Mexico and taking a more episodic approach than Voekel, David Gilbert, in The End of Catholic Mexico (1855–1861): Causes and Consequences of the Mexican Reforma, delves more deeply into the reform period. Gilbert also frames the period of reform as a religious conflict, rather than as a “classic nineteenth-century political struggle” (3). He notes that liberals, who were Catholics themselves, deployed “religious language and imagery” (37) to fight for the marginalization of the Catholic Church. Gilbert traces the origins of the Reforma to the turbulent four decades of instability between independence and reform—a period defined by liberals’ and conservatives’ struggle for government control, Santa Anna’s dictatorship, and the disastrous loss of territory to the United States after 1848. Eventually (in a pattern that would repeat itself later) the Catholic hierarchy attempted to shield itself by backing the corrupt and unpopular leader, betting that he would protect religion and religious privileges. It was a bad bet, and, once he was overthrown, “many liberals identified the entire clerical establishment with the hated regime” (27). Meanwhile, conservatives turned once again to ultramontanism and “took refuge in the Hispanic past and their Catholic identity” (27).

This ideological polarization led to a cycle of liberal crackdown and Catholic resistance that became increasingly violent over the course of 1856–57. Using previously unexamined pamphlets in the Biblioteca Eusebio F. Kino, as well as “political tracts, petitions, essays, sermons, and speeches” and “forgotten plays and novels” (7), Gilbert reconstructs the dramatic breakdown in communications between liberals and conservatives. Across the country, liberals sought to close church buildings and restrict the power of the church. In response, priests launched blistering sermons against the liberal reforms, and parishioners rallied against liberals. During this period, the liberal government approved anticlerical laws, the Ley Lerdo and Ley Juárez, and incorporated them into the Constitution of 1857. Ultimately the strongest voice among the liberals were the puros, who refused to compromise with the Church, in contrast to the moderados, who sought reform. Ultramontanists, as well as Pope Pius IX, repudiated the Mexican constitution. This exacerbated the polarization, Gilbert argues, and caused a Catholic “culture war” (7), which, after the election of Benito Juárez to the presidency, erupted into an actual war between 1858 and 1860.

The wars of Reform unfolded dramatically: horrified Catholics experienced the destruction of monasteries, churches, and other religious buildings; the confiscation and defilement of religious images and statuary; the enactment of laws against religious communities and the wearing of religious garb; the cancelation of outdoor religious processions and celebrations; and violent battles, many centered in Guadalajara and the colonial heartland, that had terrible outcomes for civilians. Conservative Catholics, many from the countryside, rose up in revolt against the liberals. The conflict even included the formation of a Mexican apostolic church, “an independent ‘Church of Mexico’ without ties to Rome” (186). That nearly all these events would be repeated sixty years later during the Cristero War calls into question Gilbert’s confident claim, echoed in his title, that after the Reform “the nation … was no longer Catholic in any meaningful way” (188). By retreating into episodic history, Gilbert overlooks crucial later developments: not only the war of French intervention (1861–67), which briefly installed the conservative-backed Catholic emperor Maximilian, but also the enduring patterns of Catholic resistance and reform that followed. While Gilbert offers a useful framework for the Catholic culture war and a vivid narration of Mexico’s descent into polarization and extreme violence, the persistence of Catholic resistance makes it difficult to wholly accept his conclusions.

Mexican Catholic women were among the most important sources of continued resistance to liberal and anticlerical reforms. Margaret Chowning, in her comprehensive and detailed Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940, convincingly demonstrates that female Catholic activism was central to the Catholic Church’s survival in the face of persistent post-independence anticlericalism. As Chowning puts it, “the church has strength because of the people who trust it and actively support it” (250). Through exhaustive archival research into the history of urban Catholic women’s lay organizations, Chowning uncovers a narrative of Mexican Catholicism in which women, despite their subordinate role in the Church and society, found agency—and indeed, power—through their membership in Catholic associations.

Chowning’s study focuses on women’s roles in cofradías and other lay Catholic associations from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century. She demonstrates that women gained both spiritual and material benefits through these organizations, which offered essential religious and social services, including masses, funerals, prayers, and support for survivors. Following independence, women became essential to a Catholic revival. Chowning highlights women’s leadership in new associations such as Escuelas de Señoras and Velas Perpetuas, demonstrating that, over time, Mexican Catholic women’s associations became “inherently political” (9). Increasingly, women’s organizations directly confronted Mexican liberalism and anticlericalism, beginning in the 1840s, particularly through petition campaigns that opposed religious tolerance and other types of perceived threats to Catholicism. Eventually, “Catholic women and the associations to which they belonged became pillars of anti-liberal and anti-revolutionary movements in Mexico” (10). Women’s political activism would only intensify throughout the third quarter of the nineteenth century, as the number of “vibrant, satisfying, numerous, and well-established” (145) women’s Catholic lay associations during this period increased, and allowed women to channel their defense of the Catholic Church against the liberal state. This defense culminated in the 1874–75 petition campaign against the Ley Orgánica, which reinforced the religious prohibitions of the Reform Laws.

Under Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), the government declined to enforce the anticlerical clauses in the constitution, and church–state tensions subsided. Chowning argues that women continued to dominate lay groups and Catholic Workers’ Circles throughout this period, even in the face of clerical efforts to encourage male leadership. During the Porfiriato, these women spearheaded a “Catholic political project” that prioritized religious education, supported the Catholic press, and maintained the public visibility of the faith. By the turn of the century, Catholic women had been vocal political participants for over a century; as Chowning points out, their political activism was not simply “something that grew out of openings for women provided by the Revolution itself” (15). When the revolution erupted, Catholic women had long been primed to resist it.

The catastrophic decade of revolution (1910–20) saw a sharp resurgence in religious conflict, and the battles over the role of religion would continue to shape Mexican politics throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century. Anti-Catholicism in the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1940, edited by Jürgen Buchenau and David S. Dalton, examines the wide variety of anti-Catholic and anticlerical movements between 1913 and 1940. By the twentieth century, new leftist ideologies—Marxism and Communism, in particular—offered both fresh challenges to Mexican Catholicism and fuel to anticlerical movements. The authors thus provide a broad definition of anti-Catholicism as “all beliefs and measures opposed to the worldview, doctrine, and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, its clergy, and its faithful.” This concept stands in contrast to anticlericalism, which “opposes religious authority in political or social matters and particularly focuses on the clergy” (2).

Buchenau and Dalton, like the other authors discussed here, situate anti-Catholicism in movements since independence, and describe a policy of mutual toleration under Díaz. Following Díaz’s departure in 1911, revolutionary leader Francisco Madero initially attracted Catholic support, even permitting the rise of the National Catholic Party (PCN). Madero’s insistence on keeping Juárez’s anticlerical laws eventually alienated the hierarchy, who pivoted to support the so-called usurper Victoriano Huerta—a strategic realignment echoing the Church’s earlier backing of Santa Anna on the eve of the Reform. Then, as before, the hierarchy’s intervention on the wrong side of politics polarized the conflict even further. New revolutionary factions led by Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, and Pancho Villa turned against the Church, and as a result, the Mexican Revolution became anti-Catholic.

The first wave of revolutionary anticlericalism took place between 1914 and 1917. Just as during the Reform wars, churches were torched, holy objects were destroyed, and clergy were tortured, killed, and expelled. The Constitution of 1917, the Revolution’s definitive governing document, was radically anticlerical. Building upon the restrictions of the 1857 constitution, it enforced an even more stark separation of church and state: it stripped religious organizations of legal status, banned religious education in schools, and denounced religious vows. Furthermore, it curtailed the civil liberties of the clergy, denying them citizenship rights and threatening foreign priests with expulsion, while granting the state power to regulate religious practice and restrict worship to designated properties. Despite all these restrictions, the anti-Catholic movement contained its own religious logic. As Buchenau and Dalton argue, “irreligious Mexicans … built their ideological world within the imagery and language of a predominantly Catholic culture” (8). Again, it must be remembered that most of the leaders of anti-Catholic movements during the Revolution were themselves Catholics—if not practicing, at least baptized.

The rest of the volume proceeds through a series of highly interesting and rich case studies that examine the diversity of revolutionary anti-Catholicism. Buchenau’s chapter suggests that Plutarco Elías Calles’s motivations for the repression of Catholicism were more political than religious. Sarah Osten’s chapter examines the role of famously anticlerical Tabasco governor Tomás Garrido Canabal and argues that his anticlericalism was the centerpiece of a broader socialist movement. Dalton’s chapter is dedicated to analyzing the anthropologist Manuel Gamio, who argued for a strict separation of church and state while also deploying religious vocabulary and imagery. Elissa Raskin examines influential feminists who allied with “anarchist, socialist, and communist currents” (99), while Gretchen Pierce’s chapter explores anticlericalism and campaigns against alcoholism. Pierce argues that revolutionary leaders believed that alcohol’s effects overlapped with “fanaticism” (135) and that both ills needed to be eliminated together. Ben Fallaw examines how garridistas invoked science, and in particular germ theory, to justify harsh measures against the Catholic Church and consolidate revolutionary state formation. Héctor Jaimes analyzes the transition from religious themes to communist themes in the Mexican muralist movement. Finally, Rebecca Jansen examines anti-Catholicism within Mennonite and Mormon communities, as well as the privileges they received from the revolutionary state. The book also features a thoughtful and provocative afterword by Matthew Butler, who argues that anti-Catholicism did not disappear after 1940 but continued into the present, particularly in the context of the transnational drug wars that revitalized Mexican anti-Catholicism. He also reminds readers that anti-Catholicism was complex: sometimes the reformers truly sought “a future without God” (239); but occasionally they got caught up in faddish ideas of their day: “Catholics were being mocked for their irrationality and treated like lepers by people who believed in ectoplasm” (249). Yet, as Butler concludes, many revolutionary anticlericals, like their liberal predecessors before them, were not fully anti-Catholic. Rather, they were Catholics who sought religious reform.

One such person was José Joaquín Jacinto de la Soledad Pérez Budar, the patriarch of the frequently derided Mexican Catholic Apostolic Church (ICAM). The story of Pérez and the ICAM is the subject of Butler’s beautifully written book, Mexico’s Spiritual Reconquest: Indigenous Catholics and Father Pérez’s Revolutionary Church. Butler draws on extensive new archival research to convincingly demonstrate that the ICAM, long ignored or dismissed as unimportant by historians of modern Mexico, was far more pervasive, long-lasting, and significant than previously acknowledged. His study carefully catalogues the surprising extent of the Apostolic Church: it had followers in 300 parishes in south-central Mexico, as well as in the southern US borderlands. He estimates that, at its peak, Pérez’s movement had 200,000 adherents (5).

The book offers a window onto the fascinating life of Pérez and his schismatic movement. Hailing from Oaxaca’s Mixteca Baja, he first pursued a military career and later became a priest with a church in Juxtlahuaca, his hometown. He had a rebellious and anti-institutional streak, running afoul of authorities for his political activities, and later for performing unlicensed masses, baptisms, and marriages. He eventually became a liberal priest in Iztapalapa, protesting against the Romanizing tendencies of the Church under Díaz. His rebelliousness caught the attention of revolutionary reformers and labor leaders, who convinced him that he might be “a new Hidalgo … [who could break] Rome’s chains” (26). In 1925, Pérez participated in the notorious takeover of the church of La Soledad parish in Mexico City, where he declared himself patriarch of the new apostolic movement, and was subsequently attacked by a crowd of Catholics, including irate Catholic women. Pérez was immediately excommunicated by Rome, and the government closed La Soledad twenty-five days later. Nevertheless, “ICAM slowly began to pollinate outside the cities” (37), and campesino Catholics began requesting to open branches of the schismatic church.

Butler’s book demonstrates not only how ICAM became a remarkably popular and largely indigenous church, but also how it helped indigenous people leverage “state power for political purposes” (5) Importantly, Butler explains, ICAM offered its largely indigenous followers something real and enticing: a critique of perceived corruption, particularly the hoarding of wealth within the Catholic Church, and respect for local patterns of devotion, including the adoration of saints. As a result, “ICAM was a church not just of powerful, cynical men but of Nahuas, Totonacos, Tepehuas, Cuicatecos, Zapotecos, Mames, agraristas, and campesinos” (101). Like the sanjuanistas, liberals, and anticlerical revolutionaries before them, the founders of ICAM were themselves Catholic. Instead of eradicating religious devotion, the Apostolic Church offered Mexicans “a Catholic alternative” (41). The fact that it was anticlerical, but not anti-Catholic, offers one explanation for why ICAM was not only so geographically extensive, but also its remarkable persistence (albeit in fragmented form) into the 1970s.

During the turbulent decades of the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican Catholics would continue to navigate their relationship with modernity and the nation-state, but now in a much more complex, technologically interconnected, and globalized world. In Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico, Jaime Pensado examines Mexican Catholic activism, tracing how Catholics, especially young Catholics, debated capitalism, colonialism, authoritarianism, and Marxism in the “incipient language of the Cold War” (54) while trying to forge a path toward a more just world. The book places Catholic actors at the center of the era’s political and cultural upheavals, arguing that Mexican Catholics actively shaped debates over youth culture, and social change. In doing so, Pensado argues, Mexican Catholics stepped into modernity without abandoning religion. “It is crucial to see the church as a heterogeneous institution,” he states, “not as inherently irreconcilable with modernity … but rather as a crucial player in the secularization of a nation” (3).

The book traces how Catholic activists, intellectuals, priests, filmmakers, journalists, and even militants engaged with modernity through competing notions of “love” and “liberation.” The first two chapters explore the ways that young Catholic Mexicans grappled with a rapidly changing world through both culture and student activism, recovering the lives and histories of lesser known figures such as Emma Ziegler, president of the Juventud Católica Femenina Mexicana, whose involvement with the League of Mexican Decency helped shape Catholic responses to film culture. The third, fourth and fifth chapters examine Catholic reformism, youth activism, and the church–state relationship within the Cold War framework, especially around the 1968 student movement and concurrent violent state repression. The final four chapters explore debates over Marxism and Catholicism, the radicalization of leftist Catholics and some Jesuits, and divisions within the liberationist movement. Pensado traces divergent responses to la onda (the counterculture), including the emergence of “Beat Mass” and radical hippie priests, and the cultural and sexual challenges posed by youth rebellion. Finally, he examines progressive Catholic students’ engagement with cinema and the New Left, debates over sexual liberation and feminism as reflected in film and literature, and ultraconservative Catholic reactions marked by anticommunism and competing interpretations of the Cristero legacy. Throughout the book, Pensado explores how Catholics sought to navigate a path between authoritarian conservatism and Marxist revolution as the culture changed rapidly around them. Ultimately, he argues, Catholicism was central to divergent responses: political radicalization for some, cultural experimentation for others, and an eventual sense of despair and disillusionment on the Catholic Left “that brought an end to the utopian aspirations of the Sixties [and] was also evident in the enablement of the Far Right” (264).

Throughout Love and Despair, Pensado situates Mexican Catholicism within transnational networks spanning France, Italy, Spain, and Germany. In doing so, he demonstrates the global dimensions of religious and cultural change. This approach echoes Voekel’s transnational strategy in For God and Liberty, and serves as a reminder that, despite the national focus of the majority of the books discussed above, Catholicism is a global institution and Catholic history must be understood beyond national frameworks. The dramatic, two-century-long history of religious conflict in Mexico played out in this context, and continuously attracted the attention and alarm of Catholics across Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

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Taken together, these six books, along with a rich literature produced in Spanish by Mexican historians, and with which all of these authors are in dialogue, compel us to reconsider both the geographic and the temporal boundaries that have long structured the historiography of Mexican religious conflict. Rather than treating the Reforma, the Revolution, the Cristero War, or the cultural upheavals of the 1960s as discrete ruptures, these works collectively demonstrate that Mexicans participated in an ongoing and evolving struggle over the role of Catholicism in the modern nation-state. Across two centuries, Catholics fought external enemies and ideologies. Yet more importantly, they fought one another. Liberal anticlericals, indigenous reformers, lay female organizers, ultramontanists, revolutionary nationalists, and progressive youth activists all claimed Catholic legitimacy and sought to reform the Mexican Church and Catholic practice, according to their own visions for society. Conflagrations that appeared at the time to spell the defeat of the Church did not extinguish Catholic devotion, nor did they ever fully remove the institutional church from a position of cultural and political influence. The longue durée perspective advanced by these works thus reframes Mexican history as an ongoing Catholic culture war in which Catholics fought each other, and secularization was never achieved at the national level.

Today, that culture war continues. Conservative Catholics in Mexico routinely invoke the Cristero War as they fight against the forces they see as threats to their faith: the external menaces of “wokeness,” leftism, and, perhaps equally importantly, the internal danger of progressive Catholics who might undermine the Church from within. In articles, websites, and speeches, Mexico’s conservatives—now joined by right-wing Catholics in the United States, Europe, and Latin America—repeat the battle cry of the Cristeros, ¡Viva Cristo Rey!, and reproduce images of Cristero martyrs, such as the Jesuit priest Miguel Pro and the young flagbearer José Luis Sánchez del Río.Footnote ³ Meanwhile, popular religious devotions continue, sometimes to the dismay of the institutional church. In the academy, a thriving community of scholars on both sides of the border, including several with forthcoming books, continue to investigate the many dimensions of Catholic faith, political action, and resistance in Mexico. In light of the upcoming centenario cristero, this efflorescence of Catholic scholarship will surely continue. Historians should avoid making predictions, but nevertheless it is reasonable to guess that Catholic disputes about modernity will continue to burn on, ever mutating in form, in present-day Mexico and well into the future. Scholars of Mexican Catholicism will have much to consider.