Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John C. Pinheiro
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A good read, and very informative. Pinheiro shows the important role that religion (Protestant/Catholic) played in the Mexican-American War. A lot of careful detail here recording how Americans of all political stripes thought religiously in the first half of the 19th century. He shows that despite many marked differences, anti-Catholicism was a unifying strand. And it could not be ignored that the war was between a Protestant power and a Catholic power, and so there you go. My one criticism of the book is that while he shows in copious detail what Americans thought about Mexico and their religion, he gives very little information that would indicate whether these assessments were right or wrong. The way he writes, if an American soldier wrote home saying that the culture was primitive and backward, and the religion was idolatrous and superstitious, I wanted to know, “Well . . . was it?” With that information missing, the implication is that the Protestant Americans were in the grip of primal denominational bigotries writ large — but I think more was going on than that.
It was a factor in the Texas War for Independence as well. Nac had the earliest Baptist church, and I think the earliest Methodist and Presbyterian churches, but was also a center of Catholicism for this portion of the state for a lot of years.