Culture Wars in the Trenches: Secular Education versus Catholic Education in the Archbishopric of Mexico in 1885

“Culture Wars in the Trenches:  Secular Education vs. Catholic Education in the Archbishopric of Mexico in 1885”

Education was a key battleground in the contest over the supremacy of Catholic vs. secular values that defined the 19th-century "culture wars" in Mexico. In 1867, Liberals in power forbade the teaching of religion in public schools. The church reacted with outrage and a national debate ensued.  We know a fair amount about this debate at the national level, but we do not know whether the same tensions that animated national discourses around education were felt and acted upon locally.  This paper asks how parish priests, teachers, and municipal presidents— local counterparts to national-level intellectuals and officials—thought and behaved.  It analyzes 111 responses submitted by parish priests to a questionnaire circulated by the archbishop in 1885, inquiring about numbers of schools and the state of Catholic education in their parishes. The archbishop probably meant for priests to report on Catholic schools, but since in the rural areas there were relatively few of these, almost all of them reported on municipal schools too. The result is a snapshot of how priests evaluated the threat to Catholic education from the municipal schools. It finds a broad range of perceptions, from priests who feared for their own lives if they tried to get the municipal schools to teach doctrine, to priests who worked with municipal authorities to be sure that doctrine was taught.  But it also finds that most priests downplayed the culture wars, because they were able to fashion alliances with municipal teachers.  With these alliances in place, the significant increase in the number of schools after 1867 meant that all but the students in the most rabidly anti-Catholic schools were exposed to Christian doctrine more effectively after the supposedly de-Catholicizing reforms than before.