Reviewed by: Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico's Religionero Rebellion by Brian A. Stauffer Julian F. Dodson Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico's Religionero Rebellion. By Brian A. Stauffer. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2019. Pp. 392. $75.00. ISBN: 9780826361271.) Brian A. Stauffer's masterfully written and researched monograph treats one of the lesser-known or understood religious conflicts of the nineteenth century—Mexico's Religionero Rebellion, 1873–1877. One of the more significant contributions that Stauffer makes (one of a list certainly far too long to include in this brief review) is that the Religionero Rebellion established, or made possible, the mending of the relationship between Church and state that came with the liberal and anticlerical governments of Benito Juarez and Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. Church-state détente, as Stauffer asserts, provided the lasting stability of the Mexican state over the course of the Porfiriato, "allowing for both the consolidation of the Porfirian state and the institutional renaissance of the Catholic Church" (p. 2). More precisely, Stauffer argues that Porfirio Díaz's rise to power depended on his capacity to negotiate with a rising Catholic conservatism typified by the Religioneros in Michoacán. There is welcomed nuance in the analysis of the institutional history of the Church in the period of rapid political and social change between Independence and the Religionero Rebellion. "Catholic restorationism," as Stauffer terms it, involved a series of internal Church reforms that reinforced the Church's alignment with the Vatican and the prerogatives of the Pope, but also often bowed to the liberal and secular state. This restorationism divided rural parishioners in their support of the Church and shaped the regional character of the Religionero Rebellion itself. In his analysis, Stauffer makes clear that the rebellion often spilled over the neat boundaries of Church-state conflict. With sources ranging from local newspapers and military reports to the personal correspondence of Porfirio Díaz and his supporters in the state of Michoacán, the details of the rebellion, its context, and the federal military response are incredibly well researched. As Stauffer points out, however, motivations of those involved in popular movements are notoriously difficult to identify. In order to approach the problem of motivations, Stauffer employs a rich combination of parish records, correspondence between rural priests and urban counterparts, and records pertaining to the division of indigenous lands in the years leading up to the rebellion that allow the author to identify convincingly the impacts of the liberal-era reparto on local Religionero mobilization. It is his attention to the local-level dynamics, as well as his grasp on the push and pull between popular faith and major reforms within the nineteenth-century Church that makes Stauffer's research of particular import to the field of nineteenth-century Mexican history. Unlike previous works on the topic, which tended to paint participants as the unwitting dupes of the clergy, driven on by the admonitions of the priest and the landlord, and the Church itself as predatory, monolithic, and unflinchingly anti-modern, Stauffer provides an important view of the rebellion from the local level and a much more nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of factors that motivated the belligerents in the rebellion. The more nuanced understanding of a Church in transition and internally divided regarding its relationship with liberalism and the state is a much-needed [End Page 231] revision to the extant historiography on the nineteenth-century Church. Stauffer's research and methodologies are of value not only to the scholar of the late nineteenth-century Mexican Church, but certainly also the historian of popular religious and agrarian conflict of the postrevolutionary period. Victory on Earth or in Heaven is refreshingly clearly written, well-researched, and a much-needed addition to the literature on religious conflict in nineteenth-century Mexico. Julian F. Dodson Washington State University Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press