Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico

Matthew Butler is Lecturer in Latin American Studies, Queen's University Belfast.

"Together, these thirteen essays and Matthew Butler's introduction make an outstanding contribution to the study of twentieth-century Mexico and the politics of religion during the tumultuous 1910-1940 period. This book amounts to the first far-reaching entry into the history of church and religion in Mexico then that goes beyond the Cristero Rebellion and a teleological, top-level narrative of nation-building and 'defanaticization.' The roots and many branches of anti-clericalism are at the center of the book, and the perspectives are novel, often based on skillful use of hitherto untapped civil and ecclesiastical archives. Especially valuable is the attention to the southern states of Oaxaca, Campeche, Chiapas, and Tabasco, and to counterpoints of beliefs and practices, laws and their implementation, church and state, centers and peripheries, leaders and their constituencies, priests/politicians/teachers/lay catechists, Catholics/Protestants/Spiritists/ atheists in ways that break through familiar ways of thinking about tradition and modernity. The result is a more complex, synoptic understanding of a deeply contested history of religion and religious institutions in Mexico's public life." - William B. Taylor, Muriel McKevitt Sonne Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

• Introduction: A Revolution in Spirit? Mexico, 1910-40 - Matthew Butler * PART I: REVOLUTIONARY RELIGIONS? * The Mentality and Modus Operandi of Revolutionary Anticlericalism - Alan Knight * The Regional Dynamics of Anticlericalism and Defanaticization in Revolutionary Mexico - Adrian A. Bantjes * Protestants, Freemasons, and Spiritists: Non-Catholic Religious Sociabilities and Mexico's Revolutionary Movement, 1910-20 - Jean-Pierre Bastian * Ethereal Allies: Spiritism and the Revolutionary Struggle in Hidalgo - Keith Brewster & Claire Brewster * "Anti-Priests" versus Catholic-Socialists in 1930s Campeche: Federal Teachers, Revolutionary Communes, and Anticlericalism - Ben Fallaw * Revolutionary and Not-So-Revolutionary Negotiations in Catholic Annulment, Bigamy, and Divorce Trials: The Archdiocese of Mexico, 1929-40 - Kristina A. Boylan * PART II: CATHOLICISM REVOLUTIONIZED? * Mexico's "Ritual Constant": Religion and Liberty from Colony to Post-Revolution - Fernando Cervantes * "The First Encounter": Catholic Politics in Revolutionary Jalisco, 1917-19 - Robert Curley * Trouble Afoot?: Pilgrimage in Cristero Mexico City - Matthew Butler * "El Indio Gabriel": New Religious Perspectives among the Indigenous in Garrido Canabal's Tabasco (1927-30) - Massimo De Giuseppe * Religious Conflict and Catholic Resistance in 1930s Oaxaca - Jean Meyer * A Revolution in Local Catholicism?: Oaxaca, 1928-34 - Edward Wright-Rios * "The Priest's Party": Local Catholicism and Panismo in Huajuapam de León - Benjamin Smith