For God and Liberty : Catholicism and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1790-1861

For God and Liberty centers the Catholic Church''s contributions to the Age of Revolution, particularly to the rise of democratic political forms in the early republics of the nineteenth century in Latin America. It breaks with secular narratives of the nineteenth century to argue that the major political fault lines in Latin America corresponded to fault lines within the Church, while also grappling with the religious origins of the civil wars in Mexico and Central America.

The Age of Revolution has traditionally been understood as an era of secularization, giving the transition from monarchy to independent republics through democratic movements a genealogy that assumes hostility to Catholicism. By centering the story on Spanish and Latin American actors, Pamela Voekel argues that at the heart of this nineteenth-century transformation in Spanish America was a transatlantic Catholic civil war. Voekel demonstrates Reform Catholicism''s significance to the thought and action of the rebel literati who led decolonization efforts in Mexico and Central America, showing how each side of this religious divide operated from within a self-conscious intercontinental network of like-minded Catholics. For its central protagonists, the era''s crisis of sovereignty provided a political stage for a religious struggle. Drawing on ecclesiastical archives, pamphlets, sermons, and tracts, For God and Liberty reveals how the violent struggles of decolonization and the period before and after Independence are more legible in light of the fault lines within the Church.