Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (review)

Beautifully written, with a clever turn of phrase just often enough to surprise and delight the reader, Alone Before God travels the road from the public worship of baroque Catholicism to the individual meditation and supplication of an austere, reformed, enlightened search for grace and salvation. The Age of Reason and its influence on religion in Catholic countries, especially New Spain, is the backdrop against which the author examines a particular problem, that of burials, their meaning and ceremonial symbolism for different sectors of society. This structure allows the author to examine in eight chapters, in great depth and with profound knowledge of the subject, the drastic modification of religious thought during a period of about one hundred years.

Perhaps the first striking feature of the book is the author's extremely rare ability to be conversant both with Protestant reformation and counterreformation Catholic theology. She understands the major concepts that kept philosophers and writers by their burning candles far into the night. Voekel follows the ways modern individualism evolved, how it was affected by economics, how corporate privileges were threatened and eventually defeated by it, and how David Brading's statement that "interior piety possessed the capacity to transform larger spiritual and social arrangements" influenced the new reality. In a departure even more radical than Brading's, Voekel throws down the white glove in her introduction declaring that, ". . . pre- and post-Independence reformers were not engaged in secularisation but something more akin to a religious war" (p. 9). She is not referring to the Reform war (1857-1860), as it is beyond the temporal scope of her book, but rather to those years immediately surrounding separation from Spain. I am still not sure what to make of that affirmation, having always believed that gradual secularisation was a definite characteristic of the period. It certainly is food for thought. (Her ideas on the subject contrast starkly with those of a book published by the UNAM last year whose main argument concerns the secularisation of higher education and the society which supports it: Ríos Zúñiga, De la educación de la colonia a la república. El Colegio de San Luis Gonzaga y el Instituto Literario de Zacatecas [2002].)

As the reader of Alone Before God progresses through the text, filled with the results of careful and detailed research, an unsettling suspicion begins to arise, which although perhaps unjustified, needs to be expressed in a review of this nature. It is almost as though the book does not refer to New Spain or to Mexico. At first sight, this is an absurd remark, but many of the interpretations of sermons, decrees, and changes in customs seem not to ring true. A few examples will suffice. "The new piety . . . splinter[ed] society into atomized male individuals who felt they owed their social position to their hard work, restraint, and self control, their interiorization of morality" (p. 6). Paeans to restraint and self-control hardly abound in examples of daily life at that time. "That some among the popular classes eagerly embraced the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation..." (p. 13): I assume from the context here, perhaps incorrectly, that the author is referring to New Spain, yet there was never the slightest threat of Protestantism. To say "thousands of clergy regularly escorted the dead to church" (p. 8) is surely an exaggeration. The essence of Voekel's understanding about religion and modern Mexico can be found in this key sentence: "Although health concerns loomed large in Mexico, my research revealed a more fundamentally religious conflict that centered on reformers' desire to lead everyone down the right road to God by creating suburban burial sites far from the superfluous mediating presence of saints' images, clergy and communicants" (p. 15). The idea of Mexican Catholicism weaned from its baroque elements, converted into a...