Preaching Loyalty: Mass Media, Religion, and the Political Discourse in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Mexico

This paper focuses on the Jesuit and especially Franciscan sermons written, preached, and (some) published throughout the eighteenth century and the years following the war for Mexican independence. This was a turbulent period which began with the Spanish crown’s reforms that intended to weaken the political and socioeconomic power of the Catholic Church, and ended with the crown’s political defeat in New Spain. As the major mass media of the time, preaching shaped religious beliefs and instilled loyalty and virtue in Spanish colonial society. Recognizing their influence, clerics used all venues–including pulpits, streets, plazas, hospitals, and jails–to deliver their messages to their parishioners and audiences. Preachers’ popularity reached such a level that civil authorities, including the King, faced the dilemma of wanting to decrease ecclesiastical influence while simultaneously needing priestly support of the Ancient Regime.

This study of sermons shows how Catholic preachers took part in the contemporary political and social debates in Europe and the Americas. Sermons show how preachers perceived Republican ideas from France and the United States as a threat and how they sought to eradicate social and political upheaval by teaching the social benefits of enlightened despotism for New Spain’s society. Sermons from the 1810s however expose the radicalization of ecclesiastical ideas that ultimately contributed to the decomposition of the Hispanic monarchy, Mexican independence, and the early Mexican Republic. As in current media, preachers took sides in the political debates of their times and used fear and guilt to combine spiritual salvation with their political agendas. Preachers resorted to a plethora of terrorizing devices, which one scholar has defined as a “macabre pedagogy,” to instigate not only confession and the remorse that led to salvation, but also political and social submission to their causes.