This punchy volume provides a welcome narrative of the Reforma’s political, religious, and military aspects. There is a need for such a book in English. Since the 1970s, there has been a fixation with economic questions (expropriations of Church wealth) and a surge of 1990s microhistories focusing on popular, usually indigenous, politics. There is a dearth of political and cultural history and national synthesis. The Reforma, everyone agrees, was fundamental to Mexico – yet, paradoxically, we know more about the cargo and crew than the Odyssey.

Gilbert’s corrective is valuable; even specialists will be surprised at how much missing foreground he paints in his discussion of the period’s high politics, pamphlet polemics, parish affrays, and battles. The book has six substantive chapters, book-ended by a survey and concluding chapters. Chapter 2 addresses the Ayutla Revolution and introduces the liberal puros who hijacked it: nervous and rickety “Santos” Degollado of Michoacán; poet Guillermo Prieto; ex-seminarian Cruz-Aedo, branding the pope as Antichrist. The puros, Mexico’s Puritans, were something out of Deuteronomy. Chapter 3 presents their ultramontane antagonists, their thoughts followed through the pages of La Cruz; and, briefly, the moderate Catholic liberal Juan Bautista Morales, who hoped liberalism would honor, not offend, God. Chapter 4 tracks the presidency of Ignacio Comonfort, another moderate (imprisoned in “mystical upbringing,” Prieto mocked, 74). His term became mired in theological vitriol and parish tumults, as in Zacapoaxtla (Puebla). At one point (early 1856), it was still possible for the archbishop of Mexico to bless regimental colors, though the publication of the Lerdo Law and the expulsion of the bishop of Puebla, that June, were black omens. Gilbert adroitly shows the demoralizing effects that liberal lawfare – sending streets through convent gardens, and criminalizing religious vows – could have on the faithful.

Chapter 5 covers the constituent congress, where Veracruz puro José María Mata likened the coming Reform to Christ’s scourging of moneylenders in the Temple; outside, conservatives called for the preservation of Catholic exclusivity in pro of national unity. According to Gilbert, conservatives’ obsession with thwarting religious toleration, mooted in draft article 15, was self-defeating because it diverted attention from bigger threats. Chapter 6 explores the juring crisis of 1857: the legal and canonical pressures (dismissal, ex-communication) that were brought to bear on government employees to compel them to swear/refuse a loyalty oath to the Constitution. The ideological ferment is explored through discussion of José Bernardo Couto, “the Mexican Montalembert” (140), thus known because he wanted a free Church in a lay state; and the Michoacán jurist, José Manuel Toribio Alvires (141–143), who denounced Mexico’s bishops for creating the imaginary “sin” (oath-taking) and applying spiritual sanctions to juring Catholics and priests who absolved them. One feels the political and metaphysical stakes rising and wishes for more analysis of this kind. The scene is set for the excellent chapter 7, covering the 1858–1860 Reform War, with its tit-for-tat executions (begun by liberals), formal battles, looting of church plate, and martyrdoms (Father Ortega y García, ringleader of Zacapoaxtla’s commotion, had his eyes put out and was drawn and quartered in a Veracruz village). Had U.S. warships not illegally lifted the blockade of juarista Veracruz, Gilbert concludes, history might have been different; conservative generals like Miramón, “the young Macabee” (172), might have won.

Gilbert spins an exciting, colorful, detailed narrative. Who knew liberals were identified by iconoclastic pin-badges shaped as “little hatchets of gold” (154)? The deft prosopographical sketch of Mexican liberals – a party of lawyers, theological dilettantes, and ambitious soldiers – impresses. Above all, Gilbert vividly captures the Reforma’s sectarian destructiveness, showing how puros devoured Catholic liberals and conservatives alike before unleashing a “scorched earth” policy against the defeated Church (179). Rarely does the Reform – that lawbook revolution celebrated in official Mexican history – palpitate so viciously as this lived alter ego, a politicized, blood-soaked “Reformation” (1). There was something to conservative claims of liberal philistinism and apostasy, likewise to liberal charges of ultramontane bullheadedness, though Gilbert is occasionally led too far by his polemical pamphlet sources.

For all the book’s strengths, I have some reservations. First, the question of periodization. When did the Reforma end? Many historians now view the Restored Republic (1867–1876) as part of a generational Reforma. In this context, Gilbert’s temporal frame is the very narrowest possible, calipered by the Juárez law (abolishing ecclesiastical immunities) and the declaration of religious tolerance (December 1860). Much could have changed after that. Arguably, Mexico was ungovernable until Juárez accommodated the bishops (1867) or the Religioneros’ demise c. 1876. If one can be agnostic on this score, the book’s title, it seems to me, is disingenuous if dramatic. The reformers beheaded an officially Catholic Mexico: a Catholic state. Yet in doing so they invigorated a separatist, bureaucratically reorganized, ultramontane Catholicism—a fortress Church that was not really hegemonic until the Revolution. In that sense, the Reforma in real ways marked the beginning of modern Catholic Mexico, not the end. Roberto di Steffano makes a similar argument, mutatis mutandis, for liberal Argentina, and I find it strange that this kind of outcome is not considered here, especially in a book concerned with consequences.

The book’s Achilles’ heel: it presents a “culture war” thesis, then flattens its cultural phenomena. The Reforma is defined as a struggle between “opposing political-religious visions,” traditionalist versus revolutionary (3); henceforth, as a contest between ultramontane (Rome-centric) Catholicism and liberal anticlericalism, portrayed as surrogate religion (31). It is a pity that the religious origins of this anticlericalism—hence its dogmatic self-righteousness? – are not really unearthed. Taproots such as Jansenism, Gallicanism, and Spanish regalism are dispatched in a sentence (18, 31, 138). Liberal Catholicism is barely discussed, except for asides that individual reformers were practicing Catholics. Likewise, the juarista Church is crammed into a paragraph and misinterpreted, as so often, within a U.S. Protestant teleology (186). Thus, the connection between faith and liberalism is not as clear as it might be. Religious things – Church, sacrament, priest, law – were surely weaponized on both sides. If their divergent meanings are not fleshed out, the one-eyed fervor Gilbert describes so well is harder to understand.