Irreligion in Mexico refers to atheism, deism, religious skepticism, secularism, and secular humanism in Mexican society, which was a confessional state after independence from Imperial Spain. The first political constitution of the Mexican United States, enacted in 1824, stipulated that Roman Catholicism was the national religion in perpetuity, and prohibited any other religion. [1] Since 1857, however, by law, Mexico has had no official religion; [2] as such, anti-clerical laws meant to promote a secular society, contained in the 1857 Constitution of Mexico and in the 1917 Constitution of Mexico, limited the participation in civil life of Roman Catholic organizations and allowed government intervention in religious participation in politics.
In 1992, the Mexican constitution was amended to eliminate the restrictions and granted legal status to religious organizations, limited property rights, voting rights to ministers, and allowed a greater number of priests in Mexico. [3] Nonetheless, the principles of the separation of church and state remain; members of religious orders (priests, nuns, ministers, et al.) cannot hold elected office, the federal government cannot subsidize any religious organization, and religious orders, and their officers, cannot teach in the public school system.
Historically, the Roman Catholic Church dominated the religious, political, and cultural landscapes of the nation; yet, the Catholic News Agency said that there exists a great secular community of atheists, intellectuals and irreligious people, [4] [5] reaching 10% according to recent polls by religious agencies. [6]
According to the 2020 census, 8% of the population is nonreligious. [7] [8]
![]() | This section possibly contains synthesis of material which does not verifiably mention or relate to the main topic.(November 2020) |
Since the Spanish Conquest (1519–21), the Roman Catholic Church has held prominent social and political positions concerning the moral education of Mexicans –the ways that virtues and morals are to be socially implemented –and thus contributed to the Mexican cultural identity. Such cultural immanence was confirmed in the nation's first political constitution, which formally established Catholicism as the state religion while prohibiting all others. Article 3 of the 1824 Constitution of Mexico established that:
The Religion of the Mexican Nation, is, and will be perpetually, the Roman Catholic Apostolic. The Nation will protect it by wise and just laws, and prohibit the exercise of any other whatever". (Article 3 of the Federal Constitution of the Mexican United States, 1824) [1]
For most of Mexico's 300 years as the Imperial Spanish colony of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (1519–1821), the Roman Catholic Church was an active political actor in colonial politics. In the early period of the Mexican nation, the vast wealth and great political influence of the Church spurred a powerful anti-clerical movement, which found political expression in the Liberal Party. By the middle of the 19th century, there were reforms limiting the political power of the Mexican Catholic Church. In response, the Church supported seditious Conservative rebels to overthrow the anti-clerical Liberal government of President Benito Juárez and welcomed the anti-Juárez French intervention in Mexico (1861), which established the military occupation of Mexico by the Second French Empire, under Emperor Napoleon III. [10]
About the Mexican perspective of the actions of the Roman Catholic Church, the Mexican Labour Party activist Robert Haberman said:
By the year 1854, The Church gained possession of about two-thirds of all the lands of Mexico, almost every bank, and every large business. The rest of the country was mortgaged to the Church. Then came the revolution of 1854, led by Benito Juárez. It culminated in the Constitution of 1857, which secularised the schools and confiscated Church property. All the churches were nationalised, many of them were turned into schools, hospitals, and orphan asylums. Civil marriages were obligatory. Pope Pius IX immediately issued a mandate against the Constitution, and called upon all Catholics of Mexico to disobey it. Ever since then, the clergy has been fighting to regain its lost temporal power and wealth. (The Necessity of Atheism, p. 154) [11]
At the turn of the 19th century, the collaboration of the Mexican Catholic Church with the Porfiriato , the 35-year dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz, earned the Mexican clergy the ideological enmity of the revolutionary victors of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20); thus, the Mexican Constitution of 1917 legislated severe social, political, economic and cultural restrictions upon the Catholic Church in the Republic of Mexico. Historically, the 1917 Mexican Constitution was the first political constitution to explicitly legislate the social and civil rights of the people and served as constitutional model for the Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Russian Constitution of 1918. [12] [13] [14] [15] Nevertheless, like the Spanish Constitution of 1931, it has been characterized as being hostile to religion. [16]
The Constitution of 1917 prohibited the Catholic clergy from working as teachers and as instructors in public and private schools; established State control over the internal matters of the Mexican Catholic Church; nationalized all Church property; proscribed religious orders; forbade the presence in Mexico of foreign-born priests; granted each state of the Mexican republic the power to limit the number of, and to eliminate, priests in its territory; disenfranchised priests of the right to vote and to hold elected office; banned Catholic organizations that advocated public policy; forbade religious publications from editorial commentary about public policy; prohibited the clergy from wearing clerical garb in public; and voided the right to trial of any Mexican citizen who violated anti-clerical laws. [17] [18]
During the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), the national rancour provoked by the history of the Catholic Church's mistreatment of Mexicans was aggravated by the collaboration of the Mexican High Clergy with the pro–U.S. dictatorship (1913–14) of General Victoriano Huerta, "The Usurper" of the Mexican Presidency; thus, anti-clerical laws were integral to the Mexican Constitution of 1917, in order to establish a secular society. [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] In the 1920s, the enforcement of the Constitutional anti-clerical laws by the Mexican Federal Government provoked the Cristero Rebellion (1926–29), the clerically abetted armed revolt of Catholic peasants known as "The Christers" (Los cristeros). The social and political tensions between the Catholic Church and the Mexican State lessened after 1940, but the constitutional restrictions remained the law of the land, although their enforcement became progressively lax. The government established diplomatic relations with the Holy See during the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) and the Government lifted almost all restrictions on the Catholic Church in 1992. That year, the government ratified its informal policy of not enforcing most legal controls on religious groups by, among other things, granting religious groups legal status, conceding them limited property rights, and lifting restrictions on the number of priests in the country. However, the law continues to mandate strict restrictions on the church and bars the clergy from holding public office, advocating partisan political views, supporting political candidates, or opposing the laws or institutions of the state. The Church's ability to own and operate mass media is also limited. Indeed, after the creation of the Constitution, the Catholic Church has been acutely hostile towards the Mexican government. As Laura Randall in his book Changing Structure of Mexico points out, most of the conflicts between citizens and religious leaders lie in the Church's overwhelming lack of understanding of the role of the state's laicism. "The inability of the Mexican Catholic Episcopate to understand the modern world translates into a distorted conception of the secular world and the lay state. Evidently, perceiving the state as anti-religious (or rather, anti-clerical) is the result of 19th-century struggles that imbued the state with anti-religious and anti-clerical tinges in Latin American countries, much to the Catholic Church's chagrin. Defining laicist education as a 'secular religion' that is also 'imposed and intolerant' is the clearest evidence of episcopal intransigence." [24]
From 1940 to 1960, about 70% of Mexican Catholics attended church weekly while in 1982, only 54% partook of Mass once a week or more, and 21% claimed monthly attendance. Recent surveys have shown that only around 3% of Catholics attend church daily; however, 47% percent of them attend church services weekly [25] and, according to INEGI, the number of atheists grows annually by 5.2% while the number of Catholics grows by 1.7%. [5] [26]
Rank | Federal Entity | % Irreligious | Irreligious Population(2010) |
---|---|---|---|
1 | ![]() | 13% | 177,331 |
2 | ![]() | 12% | 580,690 |
3 | ![]() | 12% | 95,035 |
4 | ![]() | 10% | 315,144 |
5 | ![]() | 9% | 212,222 |
6 | ![]() | 7% | 253,972 |
7 | ![]() | 7% | 194,619 |
8 | ![]() | 7% | 219,940 |
9 | ![]() | 7% | 174,281 |
10 | ![]() | 6% | 495,641 |
11 | ![]() | 6% | 108,563 |
12 | ![]() | 6% | 40,034 |
13 | ![]() | 6% | 151,311 |
14 | ![]() | 5% | 484,083 |
- | ![]() | 5% | 5,262,546 |
15 | ![]() | 5% | 93,358 |
16 | ![]() | 4% | 169,566 |
17 | ![]() | 4% | 192,259 |
18 | ![]() | 4% | 58,089 |
19 | ![]() | 3% | 37,005 |
20 | ![]() | 3% | 486,795 |
21 | ![]() | 3% | 20,708 |
22 | ![]() | 3% | 100,246 |
23 | ![]() | 2% | 62,953 |
24 | ![]() | 2% | 58,469 |
25 | ![]() | 2% | 38,047 |
26 | ![]() | 2% | 21,235 |
27 | ![]() | 2% | 83,297 |
28 | ![]() | 2% | 104,271 |
29 | ![]() | 2% | 124,345 |
30 | ![]() | 1% | 76,052 |
31 | ![]() | 1% | 14,928 |
32 | ![]() | 1% | 18,057 |
Secularism is the principle of seeking to conduct human affairs based on naturalistic considerations, uninvolved with religion.
The Mexican Catholic Church, or Catholic Church in Mexico, is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope, his Curia in Rome and the national Mexican Episcopal Conference. According to the Mexican census, Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion in Mexico, practiced by 77.7% of the population in 2020. A Statistica survey suggests this number could be lower, suggesting Catholics could make up only 72% of the nation.
Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to separate the church from public and political life.
The current Constitution of Mexico, formally the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, was drafted in Santiago de Querétaro, in the State of Querétaro, Mexico, by a constituent convention during the Mexican Revolution. It was approved by the Constituent Congress on 5 February 1917, and was later amended several times. It is the successor to the Constitution of 1857, and earlier Mexican constitutions. "The Constitution of 1917 is the legal triumph of the Mexican Revolution. To some it is the revolution."
State atheism or atheist state is the incorporation of hard atheism or non-theism into political regimes. It is considered the opposite of theocracy and may also refer to large-scale secularization attempts by governments. To some extent, it is a religion-state relationship that is usually ideologically linked to irreligion and the promotion of irreligion or atheism. State atheism may refer to a government's promotion of anti-clericalism, which opposes religious institutional power and influence in all aspects of public and political life, including the involvement of religion in the everyday life of the citizen. In some instances, religious symbols and public practices that were once held by religions were replaced with secularized versions of them. State atheism in these cases is considered as not being politically neutral toward religion, and therefore it is often considered non-secular.
The Cristero War, also known as the Cristero Rebellion or La Cristiada, was a widespread struggle in central and western Mexico from 3 August 1926 to 21 June 1929 in response to the implementation of secularist and anticlerical articles of the 1917 Constitution. The rebellion was instigated as a response to an executive decree by Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles to strictly enforce Article 130 of the Constitution, a decision known as the Calles Law. Calles sought to limit the power of the Catholic Church in Mexico, its affiliated organizations and to suppress popular religiosity.
José Ramón Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, also known as Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ was a Mexican Jesuit priest executed under the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles on the false charges of bombing and attempted assassination of former Mexican President Álvaro Obregón.
The aim of a number of separate policies conducted by various governments of France during the French Revolution ranged from the appropriation by the government of the great landed estates and the large amounts of money held by the Catholic Church to the termination of Christian religious practice and of the religion itself. There has been much scholarly debate over whether the movement was popularly motivated or motivated by a small group of revolutionary radicals. These policies, which ended with the Concordat of 1801, formed the basis of the later and less radical laïcité policies.
Antireligion is opposition to religion or traditional religious beliefs and practices. It involves opposition to organized religion, religious practices or religious institutions. The term antireligion has also been used to describe opposition to specific forms of supernatural worship or practice, whether organized or not. The Soviet Union adopted the political ideology of Marxism–Leninism and by extension the policy of state atheism which opposed the growth of religions.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union (1917–1991), there were periods when Soviet authorities suppressed and persecuted various forms of Christianity to different extents depending on state interests. Soviet Marxist-Leninist policy consistently advocated the control, suppression, and ultimately, the elimination of religious beliefs, and it actively encouraged the propagation of Marxist-Leninist atheism in the Soviet Union. However, most religions were never officially outlawed.
After the October Revolution, there was a movement within the Soviet Union to unite all of the people of the world under communist rule known as world communism. Communism as interpreted by Vladimir Lenin and his successors in the Soviet government included the abolition of religion and to this effect the Soviet government launched a long-running unofficial campaign to eliminate religion from society. Since some of these Slavic states tied their ethnic heritage to their ethnic churches, both the peoples and their churches were targeted by the Soviets.
The Calles Law, or Law for Reforming the Penal Code, was a statute enacted in Mexico in 1926, under the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles, to enforce restrictions against the Catholic Church in Article 130 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917. Article 130 declared that the church and state are to remain separate. To that end, it required all "churches and religious groupings" to register with the state and placed restrictions on priests and ministers of all religions. Priests and ministers were prohibited from holding public office, canvassing on behalf of political parties or candidates, or inheriting property from persons other than close blood relatives. President Calles applied existing laws regarding the separation of church and state throughout Mexico and added his own legislation.
The modern history of anticlericalism has often been characterized by deep conflicts between the government and the Catholic Church, sometimes including outright persecution of Catholics in Mexico.
Anacleto González Flores was a Mexican Catholic layman and lawyer who was tortured and executed during the persecution of the Catholic Church under Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles.
The history of the Catholic Church in Mexico dates from the period of the Spanish conquest (1519–21) and has continued as an institution in Mexico into the twenty-first century. Catholicism is one of many major legacies from the Spanish colonial era, the others include Spanish as the nation's language, the Civil Code and Spanish colonial architecture. The Catholic Church was a privileged institution until the mid nineteenth century. It was the sole permissible church in the colonial era and into the early Mexican Republic, following independence in 1821. Following independence, it involved itself directly in politics, including in matters that did not specifically involve the Church.
The USSR anti-religious campaign of 1928–1941 was a new phase of anti-religious campaign in the Soviet Union following the anti-religious campaign of 1921–1928. The campaign began in 1929, with the drafting of new legislation that severely prohibited religious activities and called for an education process on religion in order to further disseminate atheism and materialist philosophy. This had been preceded in 1928 at the fifteenth Party congress, where Joseph Stalin criticized the party for failure to produce more active and persuasive anti-religious propaganda. This new phase coincided with the beginning of the mass collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization of the few remaining private enterprises.
The Catholic Church in Latin America began with the Spanish colonization of the Americas and continues up to the present day.
The question of whether Freemasonry is anticlerical is the subject of debate. The Catholic Church has long been an outspoken critic of Freemasonry, and some scholars have often accused the fraternity of anticlericalism. The Catholic Church forbids its members to join any Masonic society under pain of interdiction. Freemasons usually take a diametrically opposite view, stating that there is nothing in Freemasonry that is in any way contrary to Catholicism or any other religious faith.
Irreligion in France has a long history and a large demographic constitution, with the advancement of atheism and the deprecation of theistic religion dating back as far as the French Revolution. In 2015, according to estimates, at least 29% of the country's population identifies as atheists and 63% identifies as non-religious.
Anti-Christian sentiment, also referred to as Christophobia or Christianophobia, constitutes the fear of, hatred of, discrimination, and/or prejudice against Christians, the Christian religion, and/or its practices.
huerta high clergy.
urrutia .
cristero rape teachers.