Brian A. Stauffer, Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico's Religionero Rebellion (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2019).

In Victory on Earth or in Heaven, Brian Stauffer examines the history of the forgotten Religionero rebellion in 1873-76—a diverse, often contradictory popular uprising triggered by Mexico’s radical nineteenth-century secularization project and its policies. Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada’s administration aimed to fully enforce the Laws of Reform and consolidate the Reforma project led by Juárez before him: complete separation of Church and state, civil marriage and burial practices, prohibition of public worship, limited Church’s ability to own and administer property. But it backfired. The last straw was the mandatory oath of fidelity to the Constitution of 1857 by all public employees. The conflict—or better: the series of conflicts—escalated in Michoacán up to the point where local governments became paralyzed, regional commerce stalled, and the Lerdo administration was politically exposed. The Religionero movement did not rest until a more moderate coalition hinted towards relaxing some of these anticlerical measures: the Tuxtepec Revolution in 1876, led by Porfirio Díaz, would fulfill that promise.

Victory on Earth or in Heaven traces the rebellion’s military history and its ideological, social, and political configurations. Stauffer draws on military records, state-level correspondence, local Church records and correspondence, and documents related to the division of communal lands to capture both the movement’s political relevance and the complex religious topography of nineteenth-century Michoacán. These sources and the book’s conceptual approach—somewhere between “culturalist” and materialist perspectives—allow Stauffer to dismantle the idea of a monolith Catholic Church and work towards a diverse, fragmented tapestry of local conflicting practices, beliefs, and political goals. The book builds upon recent historiographical trends that aim to offer a more accurate portrait of religious landscapes: heterogeneous, dynamic, and ever-changing. But Stauffer goes further: he argues that the internal conflicts and changes of this mosaic shaped Religionero violence and their strategies. Armed rebellion became more attractive to the already marginalized baroque Catholics, whose collective religiosity was clearly threatened by the Laws of Reforma. Ultramontane Catholics, who privileged individuals and interiorized piety over public worship, adopted a less violent approach and came to informal arrangements with civil authorities. 

The book’s central claim is that the Religionero movement meant more than another episode in the violent history of Michoacán. Stauffer argues that the rebellion shaped the course of Mexico’s history: it depleted federal resources, drove local governments to a halt, and inflicted serious political damage to Lerdo as the conflict wore on. Despite its failure, it paved the way for a more moderate challenger, a strongman willing to compromise with the regime’s discontents and remain in the chair: the rise and making of Porfirio Díaz. 

The rebellion shaped don Porfirio’s style—and therefore the country’s—for a while. What started as indigenous village riots in 1873 became something larger, but not that much. It may have tipped the scales towards the derailment of the liberal coalition in the federal government, and yet remained a local, elusive popular movement.