Jason Dormady . Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican Revolution, 1940–1968 . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2011. Pp. x, 206. $28.95.

Abstract

his book offers concise, valuable insights into religion in priísta Mexico. Jason Dormady's central, convincing thesis is that restorationist religions—those premised on the recuperation of primordial religious purity—served as effective mediating structures linking state and society. This articulation, Dormady argues, was achieved by a combination of Israelite (even indigenista) theologizing, which provided a spiritual bridge to revolutionary nationalism, and by degrees of legal exceptionalism, through which local states multiplied the corporatist arrangements that classical liberalism disdained. Religious groups sacralized official ideology; they also negotiated informal recognition, such that they could own property and continue illegal religious practices. In sum, what Dormady suggestively calls “informal religious corporatism” (p. 5) allowed ecclesial bodies to regulate the stress of urbanization, state formation, and capitalism. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), meanwhile, appears in benign historiographical light as a defender of non‐Catholic liberty. Indeed, the author stresses a subtle ideological affinity between the regime and churches that performed model patriotism (pp. 20, 29) rather than any crude state instrumentalization of religion.