The Changing Church in Mexico and Its Challenge to the State

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, Mexican history has encompassed many social conflicts that range from local rebellions to full-scale revolutions. Church-state relations have been closely related to, and affected by, these conflicts. The struggle between church and state led to the War of the Reform (1858) and to the Cristero Rebellion (1926). Both of these armed conflicts were resolved through an improvised and cumulative process that eventually did as much to obscure the causes of conflict as to remedy them. After independence, the liberals initiated the first phase of conflict, a conflict eventually extended into the twentieth century by various advocates of a strong, secular state. The conflict began as a resistance to the efforts to reform the church and to give the state a neutral orientation and subsequently escalated into a divisive cultural war. Conservative politicians and religious leaders took up the liberal challenge with a doctrine justifying a specific political order at almost any price, thereby involving the church and the state in a mutually destructive and increasingly bitter struggle.