The Cristero movement is an essential part of the Mexican Revolution. When in 1926 relations between Church and state, old enemies and old partners, eventually broke down, when the churches closed and the liturgy was suspended, Rome, Washington and Mexico, without ever losing their heads, embarked upon a long game of chess. These years were crucial, because they saw the setting up of the contemporary political system. The state established its omnipotence, supported by a bureaucratic apparatus and a strong privileged class. Just at the moment when the state thought that it was finally supreme, at the moment at which it decided to take control of the Church, the Cristero movement arose, a spontaneous mass movement, particularly of peasants, unique in its spread, its duration, and its popular character. For obvious reasons, the existing literature has both denied its reality and slandered it.

Between 1926 and 1929, thousands of Mexicans fought and died in an attempt to overthrow the government of their country. They were the Cristeros, so called because of their battle cry, ¡Viva Cristo Rey!—Long Live Christ the King! The Cristero rebellion and the church-state conflict remain one of the most controversial subjects in Mexican history, and much of the writing on it is emotional polemic. David C. Bailey, basing his study on the most important published and unpublished sources available, strikes a balance between objective reporting and analysis. This book depicts a national calamity in which sincere people followed their convictions to often tragic ends. The Cristero rebellion climaxed a century of animosity between the Catholic church and the Mexican state, and this background is briefly summarized here. With the coming of the 1910 revolution the hostility intensified. The revolutionists sought to impose severe limitations on the Church, and Catholic anti-revolutionary militancy grew apace. When the government in 1926 decreed strict enforcement of anticlerical legislation, matters reached a crisis. Church authorities suspended public worship throughout Mexico, and Catholics in various parts of the country rose up in arms. There followed almost three years of indecisive guerrilla warfare marked by brutal excesses on both sides. Bailey describes the armed struggle in broad outline but concentrates on the political and diplomatic maneuvering that ultimately decided the issue. A de facto settlement was brought about in 1929, based on the government’s pledge to allow the Church to perform its spiritual offices under its own internal discipline. The pact was arranged mainly through the intercession of U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow. His role in the conflict, as well as that of other Americans who decisively influenced the course of events, receives detailed attention in the study. The position of the Vatican during the conflict and its role in the settlement are also examined in detail. With the 1929 settlement the clergy returned to the churches, whereupon the Cristeros lost public support and the rebellion collapsed. The spirit of the settlement soon evaporated, more strife followed, and only after another decade did permanent religious peace come to Mexico.

Dr Butler provides a new interpretation of the cristero war (1926-29) which divided Mexico's peasantry into rival camps loyal to the Catholic Church (cristero) or the Revolution (agrarista). This book puts religion at the heart of our understanding of the revolt by showing how peasant allegiances often resulted from genuinely popular cultural and religious antagonisms. It challenges the assumption that Mexican peasants in the 1920s shared religious outlooks and that their behaviour was mainly driven by political and material factors. Focusing on the state of Michoacán in western-central Mexico, the volume seeks to integrate both cultural and structural lines of inquiry. First charting the uneven character of Michoacán's historical formation in the late colonial period and the nineteenth century, Dr Butler shows how the emergence of distinct agrarian regimes and political cultures was later associated with varying popular responses to post-revolutionary state formation in the areas of educational and agrarian reform. At the same time, it is argued that these structural trends were accompanied by increasingly clear divergences in popular religious cultures, including lay attitudes to the clergy, patterns of religious devotion and deviancy, levels of sacramental participation, and commitment to militant 'social' Catholicism. As peasants in different communities developed distinct parish identities, so the institutional conflict between Church and state acquired diverse meanings and provoked violently contradictory popular responses. Thus the fires of revolt burned all the more fiercely because they inflamed a countryside which - then as now - was deeply divided in matters of faith as well as politics. Based on oral testimonies and careful searches of dozens of ecclesiastical and state archives, this study makes an important contribution to the religious history of the Mexican Revolution.

The book investigates the formation of the Cristero diaspora, a network of Mexican emigrants, exiles, and refugees across the United States who supported a Mexican Catholic uprising during the late 1920s. These emigrants had a profound and enduring impact on Mexican American community formation, political affiliations, and religious devotion.

The Cristero movement is an essential part of the Mexican Revolution. When in 1926 relations between Church and state, old enemies and old partners, eventually broke down, when the churches closed and the liturgy was suspended, Rome, Washington and Mexico, without ever losing their heads, embarked upon a long game of chess. These years were crucial, because they saw the setting up of the contemporary political system. The state established its omnipotence, supported by a bureaucratic apparatus and a strong privileged class. Just at the moment when the state thought that it was finally supreme, at the moment at which it decided to take control of the Church, the Cristero movement arose, a spontaneous mass movement, particularly of peasants, unique in its spread, its duration, and its popular character. For obvious reasons, the existing literature has both denied its reality and slandered it.

Waged between 1926 and 1929, The Cristero War (also known as The Cristero Rebellion or La Cristiada) resulted from a religious insurrectionary movement, which formed in protest of the Mexican Revolution's anticlerical constitution of 1917. It was arguably the most violent and divisive episode in Mexican history between the 1910 Revolution itself and the ongoing 'Narco Wars'. Filling in major gaps in our understanding of the conflict, Mark Lawrence explores both combatant and civilian experiences in the centre-west Mexican state of Zacatecas and its borderlands. Lawrence shows that, despite the centrality of this key region, it has received little scholarly attention compared with other states, such as Jalisco or Michoacán, which saw similar levels of conflict. In providing a greater understanding of Zacatecas during The Cristero War, Lawrence not only works to even out a major historiographical bias, but he also sheds greater light on the contours of religious conflict and political dissent in early 20th-century Mexican history. In particular, he illustrates how the dynamics of local politics had fundamentally affected the way that a broader movement was embraced (and rejected) at a sub-national level. As such, he offers all historians, irrespective of geographic or temporal specialization, a reminder not to make sweeping assumptions about the everyday nature of compliance and resistance at the local level.

The Cristero movement is an essential part of the Mexican Revolution. When in 1926 relations between Church and state, old enemies and old partners, eventually broke down, when the churches closed and the liturgy was suspended, Rome, Washington and Mexico, without ever losing their heads, embarked upon a long game of chess. These years were crucial, because they saw the setting up of the contemporary political system. The state established its omnipotence, supported by a bureaucratic apparatus and a strong privileged class. Just at the moment when the state thought that it was finally supreme, at the moment at which it decided to take control of the Church, the Cristero movement arose, a spontaneous mass movement, particularly of peasants, unique in its spread, its duration, and its popular character. For obvious reasons, the existing literature has both denied its reality and slandered it.