Liberal reformer Nicolás Pizarro Suárez's 1861 Catecismo político constitucional (Mexico City), an official school textbook published in the midst of raging church-state conflict, counseled its young readers that “if your country's tyrant threatens you with cruel torments for not obeying his laws, resist, let him see you smile; this is what the first, real Christians practiced as they marched to their martyrdom” (as cited on 97). His pointed advice illustrates Pamela Voekel's thesis in her essay on the establishment of a government-protected, schismatic Catholic Church in the wake of the passage of Mexico's 1857 Constitution and anti-clerical Reform Laws: the liberal-conservative antagonism that erupted in Mexico was not solely a polarized conflict between irreligious secular liberals and conservative defenders of the faith. Rather, their disagreements encompassed liberal assertions that their program entailed authentic religious reform and conservative countercharges of liberal heresy. Like the other nine essays that comprise this volume, Voekel's contribution deftly demonstrates the book's purpose of showing that “religion, in addition to theology and dogma, is also a deeply personal and quotidian affair” (11) that shaped the history of modern Mexico far more profoundly than standard histories have delineated.

Religious Culture in Modern Mexico complements Martin Nesvig's other recent edited volume, Local Religion in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), together providing the most comprehensive overview of current research on religion in Mexico. Influences from Europe like insights from the Enlightenment, the ideals of the French Revolution, and Vatican pronouncements are expounded in several essays, in each instance with balanced analysis of how Mexicans critically engaged and adapted these foreign imports to suit their own purposes. The most impressive element of the collection is the authors' consistent engagement of the interrelated dimensions of political and social contexts, institutional elements of religion, and everyday religious practices and beliefs. Matthew O'Hara, for example, tells the fascinating tale of how parishioners and their pastor in the parish of San Matías Ixtacalco responded to the official abolition of the caste system and the label “Indian” in civil law after Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821. Somewhat ironically, the strongest proponents of retaining the low-caste designation were “Indian” parishioners themselves, who as constitutionally full and equal citizens of the Mexican Republic faced higher fees for sacraments and stricter consanguinity regulations for marriage than they did under the tiered ecclesial system of New Spain. Mark Overmyer-Velázquez explores how the relations between Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, his friend and business associate Oaxaca archbishop Eulogio Gillow, and workers in his archdiocese shaped labor relations in the wake of Pope Leo XIII's promulgation of the 1891 labor encyclical Rerum Novarum. His study illustrates the collaboration and compromise that marked church-state relations during Díaz's long reign (1876–1911).

Four essays deal with the liberal-conservative clash of the mid-nineteenth century and its aftermath, providing a multifaceted analysis of various ways religion was implicated in this tumultuous era. Complementing Voekel's contribution is Alejandro Cortazar's probing exploration of novelists espousing the liberal cause, novelists who imprinted their view of the Mexican nation on popular consciousness through their depictions of village priests as heroic champions for the cause of their people's freedom and equality. Cortazar's exploration of novels written between the 1850s and the 1880s traces the development of this literary motif and reveals the liberal writers' definitive victory in defining the slain insurgent Father Miguel Hidalgo as the father of Mexican independence over against the conservative promotion of the Republic's first head of state, Emperor Agustín de Iturbide. Daniela Traffano and Silvia Marina Arrom examine the shifting contours of lay religious organizations as Catholic leaders responded to new laws that restricted the church's presence in the public arena, the former treating confraternities and Catholic societies among indigenous community leaders in Oaxaca and the latter the contribution of elite Catholic laywomen who spearheaded the social and spiritual outreach group the Ladies of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. From their 1863 re-establishment in Mexico City after the War of the Reform (1857–60), the Ladies of Charity spread across Mexico and became one of the largest, if not the largest, national female organizations of their era as they played a leading role in Catholic resurgence during the rule of Porfirio Díaz.

The twentieth century is the era that the volume could address more comprehensively. Jason Dormady presents the sole essay in the collection that extensively examines a Protestant group and historical events occurring after 1940: the rise and decline of the Old Colony Mennonites in direct correlation with government directives on their place within the national economy. Edward Wright-Rios and Paul J. Vanderwood treat local religious phenomena, the former an insightful exploration of women's power in clerical culture illuminated in a Marian vision in 1920s Oaxaca and the latter a précis of the author's acclaimed book on Juan Soldado, who in 1938 was executed for rape and murder in Tijuana and subsequently became a popular saint. Adrian Bantjes's essay on the historiography of religion and the Mexican Revolution, particularly the significant and still expanding studies of the Cristero Rebellion (1926–29) written since Jean Meyer's influential 1973 work La Cristiada (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno), provides a broad overview of religion in the era in modern Mexico that previous works have examined most extensively. Missing from these individually fine contributions is the analysis of groundbreaking topics found elsewhere in the volume such as lay Catholic organizations, labor organizing, and religion in fiction writing, as well as treatment of the second half of the twentieth century. The lacunae are understandable given the range of studies already available on religion during the epoch of the Mexican Revolution and the relatively limited number that treat the decades following it. Religious Culture in Modern Mexico's final contribution is to illuminate areas such as these that are still in need of future research.