In For Christ and country, the historian Robert Weis examines the history of a new generation of young, middle-class and urban Catholic militants who came to regard violence as a legitimate, necessary and redemptive means to fight against an ‘impious’ and ‘tyrannical’ state. Original, well-researched and presented in a fresh and beautifully-written narrative, Weis's work makes an essential contribution to the historiography of Mexican Catholicism during the post-revolutionary period, as well as to the study of religion and religious violence more broadly. While literature on the Cristero War (1926–9) and on Catholics’ responses to the anticlerical and iconoclast polices of the post-revolutionary state has developed into a rich, nuanced and regionally differentiated field, there are few if any of these works that deal with urban and violent forms of religious militancy as thoroughly as Weis does. Moving beyond the reasons behind Catholics’ involvement in the Cristero uprising, Weis explores the ideological, political and cultural dimensions that gave sense and meaning to young militants’ recourse to violent and terrorising practices. For these young, inexperienced and imprudent young Catholics, violence was not just a practical instrument that would allow them to get rid of the moral dangers posed by the government. Instead, violence had a cleansing quality that would help them overcome the pusillanimous, frivolous and conformist character that, they believed, had taken over several Catholic believers. In their view, post-revolutionary elites’ partial concessions in regards to religious freedom had debilitated Catholics’ temperament and made them more complicit with a political order that threatened to debase the nation's civilisational and moral stands. Contrary to official portrayals of Catholics as being unequivocally manipulated by the ideas and discourses of the Church's hierarchy, Weis shows the ways in which these devoted Catholics, including the young Leon Torál who killed Álvaro Obregón, interpreted the meanings of martyrdom and sacrifice according to their own political goals and interests. Going against the government's characterisations of these youngsters as mere religious fanatics, Weis also demonstrates that these Catholic militants were wilful political actors who sought to bring the kingdom of Christ to Mexico and to restore the nation's Catholic foundations. Weis is at his best when he discusses how the religious militancy of these young Catholics intertwined with gendered, racialised and class constructs. These militants considered those who opposed the use of violence as effeminate, weak and lacking virility. More so, these middle-class and privileged Catholics juxtaposed their respectability to the backwardness of ‘beastly government officials’ who they described as nahuas, Aztecs and ‘brutish savages’. The latter is an interesting twist given the prevalence of a government discourse that, during the 1920s and well into the 1930s, described the actions of Catholics as an expression of the backwardness and ignorance of rural and indigenous communities. For Christ and country is an essential book for those who seek to understand the symbolic and ideological repertoire that allows the faithful to violate the ‘sanctity’ of life precisely in the name of the sacred. By examining the weight of religion in its own terms, Weis is able to render religious violence legible and to interpret it, as he argues, in ‘terms they [the protagonists of this story] would recognize’.