Citizens and Believers: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Jalisco, 1900–1930 by Robert Curley (review)

On June 14, 1926, President Plutarco Elías Calles issued a law that fixed a limit on the number of priests in Mexico, ordered the deportation of foreign priests, and decreed the closure of Church schools and convents. In response to these anticlerical reforms, the Mexican episcopacy met, organized, and decided swiftly to suspend public worship and rally popular support behind an economic boycott of the government. Armed uprisings soon broke out against the state across central-western Mexico, rapidly swelling to great numbers and spreading like wildfire. The Cristero Rebellion, as it came to be known, lasted well over three years and claimed the lives of nearly 90,000 people. The recent historiography on this subject has shifted from grand narratives to a consideration of the local factors that conditioned its outcome, to investigations of identities within the religious rebellion. Missing from many of these analyses, however, are serious attempts at historicizing and reconstructing the complex relationship between religious practice and the public sphere in a conservative region where Catholics generally followed the orthodox liturgical practices endorsed by the institutional Church—as opposed to the more syncretic with strong indigenous strains.

In Citizens and Believers, Robert Curley tells the little-known story of how a popular Catholic political movement in the state of Jalisco “shaped debates over citizenship and the revolutionary project, and constituted itself as an essential actor and interlocutor” during and after the Mexican Revolution (6). The book is an exploration of the tension between citizen and believer—that is, the limits of each and how they are entangled within the larger process of state formation. Curley asks how the fall of the old Porfirian state and the subsequent civil war “changed the political system, as well as the actors who competed in it” (3). For Catholics in Jalisco, this political aperture had profound long-term consequences and led to the emergence of what Curley calls a distinctly modern political Catholicism, characterized by an incorporation and dependence on mass politics. “In order to understand their political practice,” writes Curley, “I have chosen to look outside the generally drawn boundaries of the Mexican Revolution, in order to catch a glimpse of how the great social upheaval of 1910 changed Catholicism” (262). Specifically, he considers the constantly changing terms of secularity, interactions among the clergy and laity, and how religion informed practices that ordered and gave reason to lives within and beyond the sacred. In doing so, the book argues that religiosity was central to the making and unfolding of the Mexican Revolution.

The book is organized chronologically, with the first chapter serving as an introduction. The focus of the next three chapters includes debates on social Catholicism in late-Porfirian Mexico, the emergence of a Catholic lay organization, Operarios Guadalupanos (OG), and the rise and fall of the Partido Católico Nacional (PCN). In Jalisco, the founding of the PCN translated into dozens of electoral victories in municipal, state, and federal elections, and represented “a possible example of what political reform looked like at the margins of social revolution” (75–76). In chapters 5 and 6, Curley writes an excellent synthesis of the Mexican Revolution in Jalisco and emphasizes the multiple battles that revolutionary governments encountered as they attempted to curtail the Church’s power in the region. An example, among many, included the widespread protest on the part of Catholics to Decree 1913/1927 (which regulated the number of priests that could officiate in Jalisco). Chapter 7 presents a composite picture of Catholic unions from 1919 to 1926 and shows how they created their own safety nets, wrapped up in a combination of material and spiritual relations (192).

The last two chapters introduce us to two figures who significantly and differentially shaped religious practice and the public sphere in Jalisco. In chapter 8, the reader learns how José Guadalupe Zuno, as governor of Jalisco (1923–26), engaged in anticlerical efforts (such as the...