For Christ and Country

There are few historical events like a presidential assassination to attract readers and carry a narrative. Such is the case for Robert Weis's new book, For Christ and Country, a focused, carefully crafted examination of urban Catholic militancy in twentieth-century Mexico couched as the contextual backdrop of José de León Toral's murder of Álvaro Obregón on July 17, 1928. Employing clear, nimble prose, Weis succeeds admirably in sketching the deeper processes, social dynamics, and triggering events that inspired an unremarkable, decidedly churchy young man who could barely handle a firearm to shoot the revolution's reigning strongman and embrace certain death.For Christ and Country is, in many ways, exemplary: by embracing brevity and restraint, it makes a crucial facet of a rather complex period quickly accessible and understandable. Weis does not attempt to explain the entire church-state conflict that roiled Mexico. Instead, he carefully traces the history of mostly middle-class, fervently nationalist firebrands and their mobilization against the Mexican Revolution in terms that participants would understand. Fortuitously, the book starts and ends with León Toral. We know that the guileless church mouse kills the caudillo, but Weis hooks us with his promise to explain how such an implausible act made sense to the perpetrator. Furthermore, the assassin's writings, self-consciously produced to shape the narrative around his certain execution, and the detailed testimony he provided to authorities make this a particularly rich portrait of the militant mindset.In this reviewer's opinion, we need direct, clear, and succinct books like this. For those of us who study religion and religious movements in Mexico, understanding the nation's conflict-ridden history without a nuanced understanding of Catholicism remains impossible. And yet, it can seem that some of our colleagues, engaged in the reading triage we all deploy in some fashion, attempt to do so. Some of this is related to the strongly secular culture of the academy. In other words, many scholars have to master a deep gag reflex when digesting deep, detailed scholarly examinations of the nation's deeply pious social actors.This began to change thanks to Jean Meyer's pathbreaking scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, which respectfully and seriously analyzed the Cristero Revolt (also known as the Cristiada) of the 1920s and 1930s. The resultant historiography that sprang up in response to Meyer's conclusions endures. Indeed, this unsuccessful popular uprising represents perhaps the most widely engaged topic related to religion in modern Mexico among Latin Americanists. Scholars now argue that violent resistance to the revolutionary government was multicausal, partly religious, economic, ideological, and social. Less attention has been focused on urban Catholic resistance, which, although connected to the peasant insurgency, evolved independently and never embraced widescale armed rebellion. Of the studies that do address urban militancy, few match Weis's brisk, occasionally gripping quest to reconstruct León Toral's world.For Christ and Country employs a simple and clear structure: four chapters lead us through a history of Catholic organizing against state-led streams of anticlerical reform and the various stages of recalibration as new generations of devout activists critiqued the methods and accomplishments of their predecessors, and then two final chapters follow León Toral's gradual transformation into an assassin for the Kingdom of Christ and his storied trial. One of the important conclusions offered by Weis is that militants of León Toral's generation had become so thoroughly disillusioned with the coordination of protests and boycotts by their elder coreligionists because, although powerful, such actions failed to overthrow the regime or halt its anticlerical policies. As a result, the younger generation embraced sloppy, half-baked schemes meant to stir broader sympathy and miraculous intervention through dramatic violent acts. As Weis points out, haphazard planning while courting martyrdom was, in fact, seen as a deliberate demonstration of faith. León Toral, as Weis shows, truly believed that God led him to Obregón and guided his hand. He contentedly faced interrogation, prosecution, and the firing squad feeling that he had done his part in the divine plan.There is perhaps one missed opportunity in For Christ and Country. Weis does not address the cultural impact of the assassination or this stream of Catholic activism in subsequent years. For example, Vicente Leñero's dramatization of the prosecution of Madre Conchita (the murder's alleged mastermind, according to the state) and León Toral from the trial transcript anchored the advent of documentary theater in Mexico during the 1970s. Exploring this work and its reception would have provided an interesting coda to this book's analysis of Catholic militancy. Of course, this would have dented the disciplined brevity that I have lauded above. In any case, For Christ and Country is a very useful, important, and engaging contribution to the historiography

Art · Literature · Militant · Mindset · Narrative · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Catholicism and Religious Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies