Mexico fought a civil war, known as The War of Reform, between 1857 and 1861, over a question that still haunts modern democracies: Who should hold the ultimate power — democratically elected representatives accountable to the people or religious institutions claiming moral authority over public life?

The War of Reform pitted those wanting to modernise Mexico through secularisation, against conservatives hell-bent on preserving the Roman Catholic Church’s entrenched privileges.

The church’s resistance was material; it sought to preserve legal immunities for clergy; its vast landholdings and financial power; control over education and therefore public thought; authority over civil registries of births, marriages and deaths; dominance of public religious expression; and entrenched tax exemptions and revenue privileges.

At stake was controlled law, land, public institutions and the people’s daily lives and deaths. 

When the war ended in 1861, the reformists had somehow prevailed despite the church’s seemingly unassailable power, wealth and privilege. The church has made one serious strategic blunder: underestimating democratic people power.

After Mexico won independence, Benito Juárez’ reforms nationalised church property (excluding houses of worship), entrenched civil marriage, established secular education and, most significantly, enforced the separation of church and state. 

The message was clear: public authority must not be subordinated to ecclesiastical power. But the church retained one clear advantage: it learned the lessons of the Reform Wars when many secular states did not.

Today, debates framed as “religious freedom” in Australia, such as around same-sex marriage, abortion rights and protecting paedophiles by the sanctity of the confessional, often concern not private........

© Green Left Weekly