According to Peter Lester Reich, historians assume that Church-State tensions pervaded all of Mexico during the 1930s and that President Lázaro Cárdenas deserves the credit for finally easing these tensions. Reich counters that eye-catching conflicts were insignificant compared to the sub-rosa creation of a Church-State “modus vivendi.” He demonstrates that cool-headed statesmen were not the sole architects of accommodation, but that clerics deserve at least as much credit. Together, government and Church created a system in which anticlerical legislation was ignored or evaded, “extremists” were suppressed, and both institutions benefited from mutual ideological support.

Reich’s argument is convincing and prodigiously documented, often utilizing heretofore unexplored sources. Reich begins by tracing the history of Church-State collaboration in Mexico. He then develops a three-stage chronology involving the 1929 “arreglo” ending the Cristero War, the subsequent resurgence of tensions around such issues as numerical restrictions on clergy and “socialist education,” and the creation of a full-blown modus vivendi between 1935 and 1942. He then examines the process in particular subregions, arguing that the same processes of compromise were at work everywhere. Finally, he briefly considers the role of the lay organization Acción Católica.

While the book makes a genuinely valuable contribution to the literature on Church-State relations in Mexico, I have a few reservations. The title is badly misleading. If Reich is correct in his analysis—and I believe he is—then there is nothing even remotely “revolutionary” about this story. Moreover, the book concentrates almost exclusively on the decade of the 1930s when the modus vivendi took shape, and only very briefly considers the years after 1942.

I find myself wondering, also, if Reich does not bash a few straw men. His characterization of the views of other historians is suspiciously pat. According to Reich, historians, extrapolating from limited knowledge of anticlericalism in the south, have concluded that religious conflict “uniformly pervaded the entire nation” (p. 114) during the 1930s. Have historians of the topic really been so ham fisted? This would be surprising, since the recent proliferation of regional analyses has made any suggestion of national homogeneity immediately suspect.

Reich’s matter-of-fact approach to his topic leads him to overlook some intriguing questions. He appears to see the Church as merely a juridical institution rather than as a complex community of believers. He does not ponder the motivations of either radical anticlerical or proclerical elements, and even comes perilously close to denying that such elements existed at all. By the same token, some features of the traditional view would have been well worth exploring. For instance, what precisely was Cárdenas’s role in easing Church-State tensions? The Mexican president remains a decidedly shadowy figure in this account.

Finally, one cannot help but wonder what precisely Reich makes of all this. He eschews explicit value judgments, leaving the reader to wonder if the Church-State modus vivendi was a good or bad thing. To me, this is a story of two unresponsive institutions closing ranks to suppress popular demands. That Reich takes a different view is at least suggested by the quickness with which he brands anyone who presumed to question the Church-State accommodation as an “extremist,” thus implicitly endorsing the judgment of his protagonists. The “extremist” category includes everyone from violent Cristeros of the 1920s to a priest who questioned the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. The Church claims to speak for morality, and to some extent it must be considered in moral terms. Reich, in this well-researched and persuasively argued monograph, admits no moral dimension.