This valuable, if occasionally disparate, collection brings together many young, and some established, historians, notably Silvia Arrom and Paul Vanderwood. The generic title deserves a caveat, however, as this is really a book about Mexican Catholicisms, not religion per se. In fact, only Jason Dormady's account of the Mennonites' arrival in 1920s Chihuahua, deals with Protestant forms of religious expression. Still, the book is no less welcome for its Catholic (more than catholic) biases, given the insights it provides and the diversity of settings, constituencies and perspectives – urban, rural, gendered and indigenous – that it incorporates. Though pitched as a study of ‘modern’ Mexico, the book has most to say about nineteenth-century religion (explored in six out of ten substantive essays). Only three empirical studies – and Adrian Bantjes's illuminating historiographical essay – deal with the revolution; and only one (Dormady again) takes us near the present.

These caveats aside, the collection coheres around two broad themes which are set out in a rather concise introduction: the dialectical affinity between religion and politics in Mexico (what Martin Nesvig here describes as ‘the intersection of the political with the religious’ p. 5); and the myriad dynamics of local religion. This combined localised/dialectical approach is, nonetheless, cumulatively effective in terms of decoupling a grand, linear view of secularisation, on the one hand, and processes of political and economic modernisation, on the other. The essays here show that the impact of modernisation in the religious sphere has not been disenchantment but the constant evolution and diversification of religious identities and practices.

Matthew O'Hara's useful essay, for example, explores the intricacies of secularisation from a legal/canonical perspective and shows how ecclesiastical categories of ‘Indianness’ survived the colony, contradicting ideas of universal republican citizenship. Additionally, it shows how indigenous Catholics exploited this two-speed codification to press for exceptionalist gains in the religious sphere, such as reduced sacramental tariffs. The paternalistic assumptions that clergy made about Indian Christians were, therefore, both politically infantilising and economically advantageous. In substantiating this conclusion, O'Hara has struck gold by unearthing the memoirs of the parish priest, Espinosa de los Monteros. His remarkable source gives O'Hara's culturalist approach an unusually grounded quality, and affords convincing insights into how Catholics negotiated ways between Church and state in the 1830s in the archdiocese of Mexico (to be precise, in Ixtacalco).

Also in a legalistic vein, Jason Dormady qualifies the putative secularism of recent revolutionary regimes. His chapter shows how the Mennonites' successful establishment in Mexico depended on an unconstitutional, even sectarian, modus viviendi (or ‘Privilegium’) with the obregonista authorities. In fact, while Sonoran revolutionaries persecuted Bajío Catholics for resisting constitutional religious dictates, they overlooked the same laws in order to favour a dissident sect whose values in other ways chimed with their own. The tragedy of this dependency, for the Mennonites, is that the recent collapse of the revolutionary state deprived them of the buttress on which they had come to depend, while other groups proved more adept at demanding their religious rights within Mexico's widening public sphere.

Several chapters, indeed, address the evolving sociopolitical participation of lay actors. Daniela Traffano, for instance, describes the trajectory of indigenous religious practice in nineteenth-century Oaxaca. She argues that liberal disarticulation of the religious corps known as cofradías prompted a defensive individualisation of religious roles in the mayordomía system; and that confrères' communitarian concerns re-emerged in ‘modern’ Catholic associations. Such innovations, Traffano contends, were responsible for the ‘transmission and aggregation’ (p. 45) of community religious values. This analysis is persuasively dynamic, especially in accounting for the shift from confraternities to mayordomías: however, the linkages with later associations – seemingly modelled on European Catholicism and targeted at an urban constituency – are rather less clear-cut, as Traffano recognises.

Silvia Arrom, meanwhile, offers an interesting analysis of a key lay sisterhood: the Ladies of Charity. These damas, firmly established by 1863, are first reclaimed as important historical actors with a significant regional base. Yet Arrom also has insights into the ‘feminisation’ of nineteenth-century Mexican Catholicism, which she attributes to various ‘structural factors’ (p. 69) before spiritual motives, namely, the Church's decision to recruit women activists; women's preferred combination of religious activism with marriage (which made the damas more attractive than the convent); and the acquisition of social capital. A structural emphasis also pervades Mark Overmeyer-Velázquez's study of social Catholicism in Oaxaca. He argues that local conduits of social Catholicism, such as the Círculo Católico de Obreros de Oaxaca were inseparable from the Porfirian state and its developmentalist work ethic, as symbolised in the ties between Porfirio Díaz and Archbishop Eulogio Gillow. As such, the church (in Oaxaca at least) was less an obstacle to, than an active agent of, the economic modernisation of the pax porfiriana.

Valuable as these analyses are, they stop short of considering the devotional mainsprings, as opposed to the social meanings or temporal extensions, of Mexican Catholicism. This, as Adrian Bantjes argues in his lively survey, is a key challenge for future researchers; and several contributors do incorporate manifestly religious variables into their narratives. Pamela Voekel, for instance, contributes a fascinating revisionist analysis of Reforma-era liberals' religious beliefs. Her liberals are a godly vanguard whose desire to wage war on a Babylonian papacy led them to found a semi-reformed, constitutional Church. If some were ecclesiological reformers – Catholic patriots wedded to a simple model of primitive churchmanship – then some were apparently theological (crypto-Protestant?) rebels committed to an unmediated relationship between Mexicans and God. While this experimental church gained some support from liberal troops and patriotic curas, Voekel shows, it failed in the teeth of serious popular opposition, much of it articulated by women Catholics.

Edward Wright-Rios, meanwhile, studies a fascinating Marian apparition in 1920s highland Oaxaca. This avatar first appeared to an indigenous child seer in a grotto: yet the cult was soon endorsed by Matilde Narváez, a ladina churchmouse, schoolteacher, and, finally, freelance interpreter of spiritual happenings. Her decision to support the apparitions in defiance of the parish clergy leads Wright-Rios to question the view that the church was an institutional ‘default option’ (p. 181) for women's social energies. Rather, he adds a genuinely spiritual element to secular-feminist readings of women's religious activism: Narváez saw herself not only as an agent of social rechristianisation but as an autonomous bearer of the sacred. Paul Vanderwood, finally, reconstructs the barest fragments of evidence – newspaper articles, folklore, devotees' testimonies – to recreate the story of Juan Soldado, a revolutionary trooper sanctified by Tijuana Catholics in the wake of his brutal public execution in 1938 (for confessing to the rape and murder of a little girl).

In their different ways and from different methodological vantage points, then, these essays help us to understand the ways in which religion has been a constant and significant feature of modernisation in Mexico, not merely an antagonist. Religious Culture in Modern Mexico can therefore be recommended to advanced students of nineteenth and twentieth-century Mexico, and of Latin American religions.