In recent years, an impressive effort has been made to supersede established interpretations of religious conflict in revolutionary Mexico that dismissed religious motivations as superstructural derivatives of “true” socio-economic and political factors. This has been accomplished by— pardon the cliché—“bringing religion back in” to the study of the Mexican Revolution. Yet while our post-secular understanding of Mexican religions and their impact has been vastly enhanced, the same cannot be said of revolutionary anticlericalism and irreligiosity, which have similarly been dismissed as mere tools in the hands of a cynical, Machiavellian revolutionary leadership intent on mystifying a credulous people.

Two days before Easter 1916, a teacher in the Mérida ferrocarrilleros’ school demolished a pine statue of Saint Joseph with an axe to show “it was simply a monkey on a stick (un tucho de palo)”; students then hacked up smaller icons before approving parents. During the Cristiada, General Eulogio Ortíz ate consecrated hosts with carnitas de puerco in a public market in Zacatecas. Constitutionalist military proconsuls in 1914-15, leftist regional caudillos of the 1920s, and federal educators and some provincial strongmen during the Maximato (1931-35) all believed anticlericalism would build a new nation; these three waves of attacks against the Catholic clergy proved to be decisive moments in revolutionary state formation. At no point, however, did revolutionaries agree on either means or ends. Radicals favored the destruction of the Church (if not organized religion entirely). Their reliance on iconoclasm—literal as well as metaphorical—also distinguished them. Some iconoclastic radicals hoped their attacks would help create a humanistic, post-Christian belief system. More moderate anticlericals advocated less destructive and more persuasive measures, including using education and the law to weaken and/or reform Catholicism. Some moderates promoted alternative creeds; others hoped to remake the Catholic Church in Mexico. Certainly iconoclasts and reformers did collaborate at times, but they also clashed, as in the rancorous debates over the “religious question” at the Querétaro Constitutional Convention and again when anticlerical Reds and moderate Whites battled during the early 1930s.

The anticlerical attacks of radical nineteenth-century liberals provoked the Church and aided the rise of confessional politics from continental Europe to revolutionary Mexico. In the European case, Stathis Kalyvas has recently proposed that such anticlerical liberalism was often moved by two distinctive motives, one narrow and political, the other broad and institutional. These motives can be associated with the concepts of tactic and strategy as laid out by Michel de Certeau. Working from both conceptual pairings, we can characterize anticlericalism sometimes as a political tactic, responding to conjunctural circumstances, and other times as an institutional strategy, plotting out a terrain and a path on which to forge present and future power relationships. This sort of conceptualization, I believe, is also well-suited to analyses of revolutionary Mexico. Nonetheless, for the distinction between “political-tactical” and “institutional-strategic” to be helpful, historians also need to place anticlericalism within the confusing logic of destruction and reconstruction inherent to Mexico's revolutionary process.

As the recent clashes in Mexico City's metropolitan cathedral show, it is not just clericalism that is making an apparent comeback in post-priísta Mexico: clericalism's faithful alter ego, anticlericalism—provoked to violence when clanking church bells disturbed a political rally in the zócalo in November 2007—is also stirring anew. This dialectical affinity between rival ideological traditions goes back a long way, as historic clashes over church bells—auditory symbols of institutional jurisdiction and influence—remind us: and yet, as Alan Knight points out, neither the terrain, nor the terms, of the dispute between clericalism/anticlericalism have been mapped out with enough clarity by Mexicanist historians. The 1910-40 revolution, for instance, is associated with various anticlericalisms— be it the protestant variety studied by Jean-Pierre Bastian; the constitutionalists' liberal clerophobia, irrupting circa 1914; masonic, spiritist, or popular anticlericalisms; or the “socialist” god-burning of the 1930s which climaxed in the iconoclasm studied by Adrian Bantjes. This trajectory— from priest-baiting to dechristianization within a generation—makes it tempting to posit an irreligious revolution, whose anticlericalism was a precursory form of mature godlessness. Some revolutionaries, like Tomás Garrido Canabal in Tabasco, encouraged such a conflation by using anticlerical restrictions—especially state licensing of priests, enshrined in constitutional Article 130—in a vindictive and secularizing way: squeezing the clergy so hard that priests were eradicated, not just rubber-stamped by the state. Such figures clearly hoped that persecuting priests would fatally mine belief: the day would come, Adalberto Tejeda hoped in 1926, when religion would expire and churches become places of recreation for apostate Indians. The Roman Catholic clergy, meanwhile, was fond of denouncing anticlericals as deicides, if not devils, and reinforced its own position by encouraging the association of anticlericalism with anti-Catholicism in the minds of the faithful.

On 16 April 1938, the school teacher of the Mixtec village of San Andrés Dinicuiti reported that the Easter week procession had taken place, despite government regulations prohibiting public displays of worship. During the event, the faithful had marched through the streets shouting “Long live religion, death to bad government, death to the state governor, death to the president of the republic.” When they arrived at the local school, they yelled “Death to the masons, long live religion” before denigrating the teacher's parentage. During the 1920s and 1930s, devout Catholic peasants throughout Mexico repeatedly denounced the presumed link between government, school teachers, anticlericalism, and the masons. The popular condemnation obviously emanated in part from the ecclesiastical hierarchy's frequent anti-masonic pronouncements. The Apostolic Delegate's charge that masons were “the cause of our persecution and almost all our national misfortunes” was reiterated in countless bulletins, manifestos, and pastoral letters throughout the country. In 1934, the Bishop of Huajuapam de León, which controlled the parish of San Andrés Dinicuiti, reminded local priests that they were to refuse to accept masons and members of the government party as godparents for baptisms, confirmations, or marriages. A year later, Mexican Catholic Action argued that government policies of socialist education and agrarismo were the “impious work of anti-Christian masons.” However, despite this popular cross-class conviction, there is little historical work on the actual role of the masons in modern Mexico. By examining the archives of the Grand Lodge of Oaxaca, this article posits that Masonic lodges were key to the process of post-revolutionary state formation. As the state sought to assert control over a divided country, freemasonry's anticlericalism not only offered a model for cultural practice, masons also formed a vanguard of willing political emissaries. However, the institution's influence should not be overstressed. It was often curtailed by internecine disputes, political infighting, and an essentially conservative leadership.

In a contribution made some time ago, I stressed the diversity of factors which came together in the anticlerical constitutional articles and paragraphs that were approved during the Constituent Congress at Querétaro of 1916-17. The first of these factors—I argued—was the not unreasonable belief held by many Mexican revolutionaries that the Catholic Church had collaborated with the government of the military usurper, Victoriano Huerta, in 1913-14. In this regard, the political participation of the National Catholic Party had also been decisive in influencing anticlerical opinion.