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Karen Racine, Pamela Voekel. For God and Liberty: Catholicism and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1790–1861. , The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 374–375, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae503
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Extract
The genre of the book review may be notable for its use of superlatives, but in this case, it is no exaggeration to say that Pamela Voekel’s deeply researched, highly original study is one of the most important books in the field to appear this decade. She documents the impact of the schism inside the Catholic Church between Jansenist-inflected reform movements and ultramontane reactionaries and shows how it entirely permeated the Spanish American independence era and shaped its legacy political culture. Voekel’s For God and Liberty: Catholicism and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1790–1861 effectively upends two generations of historiography on the nature of the civil strife that rent asunder the newly independent Latin American states during the 1810s–1830s. Focusing primarily on the experiences of Central America and the four states emerging out of the former Viceroyalty of New Granada—Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panamá—Voekel argues that “[at] the heart of the Age or Revolutions in Spanish America was a Catholic civil war . . . The traditional narrative of the transition from monarchy to independent republicanism as a process of secularization misses completely the warring factions in the church who vied to define humanity’s relation to God and, therefore, the proper order of temporal authority” (1). It’s the sort of forehead-slappingly obvious truth that, after reading the book, one wonders why no one has noticed it before. Generations whose research focused on the formation of the nation-state, or the buildup of economic resentments, or the appeal of Enlightenment political philosophy and constitution-writing have generally ignored or underestimated the ongoing relevance of religion and have tended to see the church as a monolithic entity. Voekel brilliantly resurrects the players and doctrinal positions to show how “[t]his was not a battle between modernizers and traditionalists, but between religious innovators” (251) as the Reform Catholic tradition of people like the abolitionists Abbé Grégoire and various Jansenists prompted an equally intense countermovement among ultramontane factions eager to shore up absolutist monarchies and papal authority.
