At first glance, Brian Stauffer's Victory on Earth or in Heaven might seem to be a small book. It analyzes a relatively unknown religious rebellion in rural Michoacán, Mexico, that sprang to life in 1873 and was over by mid-1875 without ever having threatened a major city or expanded much beyond the half dozen or so locales in Michoacán where it started. Though the rebellion was known as a “Cristero” or, as Stauffer prefers, “Religionero” war, church leaders disavowed it and most priests did not support it. Its leaders’ attempts to join forces across the region with other outbreaks of rebellion were half-hearted and ineffectual. There does not seem to be a book's worth of material on the Religioneros. However, no one will continue to see this as a small book once they have read it. This is a wonderful example of how talented historians can start with an incident or a speech or a crime—something apparently quite minor—and probe its context, investigate the circumstances that produced it, and build out from it to help the reader see this small event as something very important indeed.

Victory on Earth begins by telling us what is known, primarily in a military sense, about the rebellion at the regional level. The most important fact is that there was religious rebellion all over rural Michoacán, but it never coalesced into a single rebellion. The “why” will occupy the rest of the book; here the fun begins. Chapter 2 revolves around an insight that Stauffer must have gained early on in his research: that is, that the rebellion(s) took place in both the archbishopric of Morelia and the bishopric of Zamora, which were led by reformist clergy who understood religious reform in very different ways and encouraged the priests in their jurisdictions to follow distinct paths when “reforming” and “modernizing” religious life in their parishes. Does this divergence mean that priests’ actions to constrain and shape local religious culture was not a factor in promoting the rebellion, since there was rebellion in two such different contexts? Were there material considerations that explain more? After all, the rebellions took shape roughly in the time frame during which liberal legislation requiring the privatization of communal lands was beginning to be enforced, hypothetically creating agrarian pressures that might have manifested as resentment of both the land policies and the anticlericalism of the liberal president, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada (1872–1876). The only way to determine the balance between changes in religious culture mandated by the hierarchy, division of community lands mandated by the state, and local religious politics and political factionalism was to explore the localized rebellions in great—really, quite incredible—depth. Stauffer painstakingly analyzed the records of land distribution, 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.