Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico’s Religionero Rebellion by Brian A. Stauffer (review)

Between 1873 and 1877, a radical religious rebellion tore through Mexico’s Catholic heartland in response to the “draconian” secularization project of liberal president Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. Though largely overlooked, the Religionero rebellion appears in history as a typical nineteenth-century conflict between Church and state. However, as Brain Stauffer makes clear in this meticulous study, appearances can be deceiving. In this case, they obscure a grassroots movement of sometimes bewildering complexity. Stauffer acknowledges that in the broadest terms the Religionero rebellion was a form of self-defense against liberal secularization; nevertheless, not all Catholics took up arms or supported armed rebellion. Mapping out who did draws us to the intersection of high ecclesiastical politics and Michoacán’s myriad local religious cultures.

Stauffer argues that the shape of Religionero mobilization in Michoacán was determined primarily by conflict within the Church, rather than liberal reforms (though the two were not always so clearly disentangled). Specifically, in rural Michoacán competing Catholic restoration projects came into conflict, and this clash between elite Ultramontane piety and popular Baroque religiosity created the conditions for armed rebellion. The newly founded diocese of Zamora represented the ascendance of Ultramontane piety, with its deference to hierarchy and emphasis on individual introspection, as an antidote to the “religious indifference” that accompanied secular civil society. In rural communities, Ultramontane restoration projects clashed with idiosyncratic religious practices, bound loosely by a Baroque spiritual ethos. Highly syncretic, reflecting the indigenous and Afro-mestizo character of the countryside, Baroque religiosity in Michoacán was collective, public, and lavishly performative—a near-opposite of Ultramontane austerity. Often aimed at prohibiting public devotional practices, Ultramontane “modernization” projects trapped many communities between liberal legislation and “new forms of officially sanctioned piety that relegated their cultic traditions to the sidelines” (99).

Stauffer’s analysis shatters monolithic interpretations of the Catholic Church and its response to the liberal challenge, revealing a movement that was uncoordinated, heterogeneous, and “stubbornly provincialist.” Despite its ideological inconsistency (and a fragmentary archival trail) Stauffer extracts some hard-won conclusions, using three regional case studies to construct a sort of spiritual-cultural topography of Michoacán. A few discernible patterns emerge. In areas with both a strong Ultramontane clergy and entrenched local religious cultures, Catholic reforms were interpreted as an all-out attack on local religious traditions, amplifying the deleterious effects of the liberal reforms. Here rural people took up arms against both the secularizing state and the Romanizing Church. Without a strong Ultramontane impulse, the potentially deleterious impact of liberal reform was thrown into sharper relief and the rural poor in these areas took up arms more clearly against the state. In other areas, material concerns subsumed spiritual concerns and the poor mobilized to defend their economic resources. The disparate nature of the movement not only defies easy historical categorization, but also limited its impact among contemporaries.

Although the Religioneros ultimately failed militarily, they were incorporated into Porfirio Díaz’s Plan de Tuxtepec and temporarily integrated into his transitional government. In the process, Catholics found a place in the public sphere free from censure. Stauffer argues that Díaz’s handling of the religioneros paved the way for his rapprochement with the Catholic Church, one of the key pillars of his dictatorship. However, juxtaposing liberal and conservative interests, and aligning with rebels only to eliminate or co-opt them after achieving stability, were typical of Díaz’s two-handed politics and hardly novel to the Religioneros case. That said, the bigger conclusion here—that the state’s reconciliation with the Church derailed its secularization project and thereby constituted a “win” for Catholic rebels—is more convincing and valuable.

This is a carefully conceived and diligently researched book, and it is an achievement in archival investigation. By backgrounding material concerns and focusing on the many Catholicisms of Mexico’s spiritual center, Stauffer brings much-needed nuance to...