Secularization or Reformation? The Religious Origins of Civil Marriage in Mexico

Traditionally, historians of Mexico have taken for granted that the Law on Civil Marriage (1859) was part of a larger liberal project aimed at the secularization of Mexican society. According to this narrative, civil marriage’s main purpose consisted in excluding the clergy from a key aspect of social life, thus enhancing individual freedom and state authority at the same time. This narrative is problematic not only because it seems to leave aside some “conservative” aspects of the Civil Marriage Law (e.g. the lack of divorce provisions), but also because it ignores the liberals’ own ideas about the ultimate purposes of marriage and their lack of fulfillment under ecclesiastical control. Indeed, why were Mexican liberals so emphatic about getting people married in the first place? Drawing on the insights of Brad S. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, this paper argues that Mexico’s 1859 Law on Civil Marriage was the last moment of a long debate about the clergy’s incapacity to bring into being the Christian moral order envisioned by the Council of Trent. It argues, in other words, that civil marriage intended first and foremost to reform Mexican society within an essentially religious framework, and only as an unintended consequence did it contribute to the secularization of social life. To support this argument, the paper reviews liberal ideas on the relationship between marriage, the family and civic morality, as developed in academic treatises, pamphlets, and journalistic pieces published between 1830 and 1859. These sources clearly show that, for Mexican liberals, one of the main causes of social disorder in early republican Mexico was the clergy’s abusive administration of the sacrament of marriage, which had resulted in a dramatic decrease of married couples and the ensuing proliferation of illegitimate children.