Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

Abstract

tion, asking: when exactly did it happen in the places where there was also rebellion? How disruptive was it in any given subregion? Who won and who lost? He was able to virtually dismiss agrarian pressures as logical causes for two of his three case studies. (For the third case study, agrarian pressures played a little larger role, but not in a way that seems to have influenced rebels.) Stauffer then combed the ecclesiastical records, especially correspondence, in both Morelia and Zamora for insight into the nature of religious politics and the inroads made by modernizing priests in the parishes where the rebellions broke out. The degree of difficulty of this research is very high, but the results are compelling and convincing. Although the importance of protecting religious practices and local culture (local saints, etc.) from those who wanted to reform or eliminate them (which could have been a modernizing priest, or a representative of the state) was by no means a solitary or simple factor in explaining rebellion in all three case studies, it does seem to have been the most important one. And yet the dominant impression we gain from the three case studies is that things were very, very complicated and contingent: local politics was important, and religious politics even more so, in all three cases, in mostly unpredictable ways. This is material, then, that will greatly interest students of peasant rebellion in a time of “modernization” (of land tenure, of religious practices, of a whole lot of other things as well), but it will not provide a pat answer or set of singular causes. It is how the various factors combined locally that was determinant. Stauffer’s major contribution here is to insist on the great importance of religion. In this sense, the book will be a valuable addition to the library of any readers of this journal as well as to students of rebellion in general. The other major contribution of the book has to do somewhat more narrowly with Mexican historiography, though it, too, has broader implications. The final chapter concerns the role that the rebellion played in attracting the attention of the future dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who, Stauffer convincingly demonstrates, sought alliances and support among the Religioneros. Here Stauffer is able to point to a policy of “conciliation” with the church in Mexico during the thirty-five year Díaz dictatorship and offer a new explanation of where it came from. (Previous historiography had attributed it to overtures made by some bishops to the regime.) Stauffer sees Díaz’s experience with the Religioneros as shaping this policy. The beyond-Mexico implication of this interpretation links to the rest of the book: religion matters, and shrewd politicians understand this, even if historians have not always done so.