See For Greater Glory
By David J. Theroux • Monday June 4, 2012 5:34 PM PDT • 23 Comments
Of special interest to all freedom lovers is the sweeping, new, epic, independent film directed by Dean Wright, written by Michael Love and starring Andy Garcia, For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada, that has just been released in theaters across the U.S. This story is one with particular interest to Garcia, the Academy Award-nominated, Havana-born actor, director, and producer, who has produced two major films depicting the terror and oppression of communist rule in Cuba (For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story and The Lost City). For his brilliant and courageous work in defending liberty, the Independent Institute presented him with its Alexis de Tocquevile Award at A Gala for Liberty in 2008. (Here are the presentations by Senior Fellow Alvaro Vargas Llosa and Andy Garcia at the event.)
Headlining a superb cast in For Greater Glory that includes Eva Longoria, Peter O’Toole,
Santiago Cabrera, Eduardo Verástegui, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Rubén Blades, Oscar Isaac, and Bruce Greenwood, Garcia portrays Enrique Gorostieta Velarde, the retired army general who from 1927 to 1929 transformed an unorganized, minimally armed, indigenous insurgency into The Cristeros, a powerful, country-wide rebellion against the government of Mexico that had embarked on a campaign to rid the country of Christianity (Law for Reforming the Penal Code) beginning with the persecution of Catholics and ban of public religious practice (including all worship ceremonies, baptisms, weddings and funerals). Priests and religious sisters were denied the right to vote, fined for wearing religious attire, and imprisoned for exercising the right to free speech. When widespread peaceful protest, petitioning of the government, and an economic boycott resulted in 1926, the militant Marxist (i.e., atheist) Mexican president Plutarco Elías Calles denounced the dissent as treasonous and responded brutally with repression, torture, hangings, firing squads, and mass murder by federal troops. In 1927 the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty recruited Gorostieta to lead the Cristeros against the government forces of Calles, who incidentally was publicly supported in the U.S. by the Ku Klux Klan.
This conflict is actually rooted in the imposed secularization of the Mexican Reforma (1855-1861) which in turn led to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the subsequent Mexican Constitution of 1917 and sought to impose a secular, socialist state over the entire country, at the same time the Bolsheviks were doing so in Russia. In imposing a system of compulsory government education, this Constitution reads, “Education services should be secular, and, therefore, free of any religious orientation. . . . The educational services shall be based on scientific progress and shall fight against ignorance, ignorances’s effects, servitudes, fanaticism, and prejudice.”
In my article “Secular Theocracy,” I note how in the modern world secularism has hypocritically been the driving force for intolerance and the creation of nation states, collectivism/statism on a gigantic scale and massive and invasive wars, and the Mexican government is Exhibit A. As Wikipedia correctly notes, to this day and in keeping with its own “secular theocracy”:
The Mexican constitution prohibits outdoor worship, which is only allowed in exceptional circumstances, generally requiring governmental permission. Religious organizations are not permitted to own print or electronic media outlets, governmental permission is required to broadcast religious ceremonies, and ministers are prohibited from being political candidates or holding public office.
And as part of this secular censorship, propaganda, and repression of religious freedom, there is virtually no mention of the Cristero War in the history books, films, and other media of Mexico, the U.S. or elsewhere. Indeed, both most Mexicans and Americans have been utterly unaware of this story in which between 90,000 and 200,000 people were killed (out of only a population of 15 million), and only now with the film with Andy Garcia are they able to learn vital lessons of their own history with more than obvious relevance for us all today. In this regard, the solution to the problem of church-state power is to de-socialize and privatize the public square, not seek to “take it over” and erect yet another theocracy.
UPDATE (6/20/12):
One aspect of the full story that unfortunately does not get presented in the film is that after the U.S. brokered a flawed peace agreement in 1929, during the following five years and as a secular theocracy the Mexican government broke the agreement by hunting down all of the surviving Cristeros leaders after they were disarmed and massacred them.
Tags: American History, Christianity, Civil Society, Constitution, Culture, Defense, Education, Entertainment, Imperialism, Latin America, Liberty, Mexico, Military, Morality, Nationalism, Peace, Personal Liberty, Presidential Power, Religion, Socialism, Terrorism, The State, Torture, Totalitarianism, Video, War 
I saw the movie yesterday (6-3) and the only thing I didn’t like was I had to sit through 20 minutes of previews for coming attractions, all of which appeared inane.
I knew something about this before seeing the movie, but not a lot.
An article that gives very good background to events leading up to the era can be found here: http://cssronline.org/CSSR/Current/Articles%20-%20Gilbert.pdf
Chris Sullivan | Jun 4, 2012 | Reply
David Theroux sure has a way with words — painting perfect portraits in prose of not just what makes this film an instant cinematic classic but the backstory which makes “For Greater Glory” so hauntingly and chillingly relevant as an object lesson for all freedom-loving people today.
Mark Charger | Jun 6, 2012 | Reply
Just saw this movie last weekend. Definitely worth seeing. And surprise surprise! Virtually every review from every left-leaning movie critic (which makes up the majority of Hollywood) gives it an F.
It’s that good!
DW | Jun 6, 2012 | Reply
Terrific article, thanks for posting it.
Pat O'Connell | Jun 7, 2012 | Reply
The movie was an amazing work of art. It punctuates what is occurring today in the U.S. as the federal government and leftist liberals (who now control most media outlets) want to completely neutralize faith. The fact that this rebellion was removed from history books both in Mexico and U.S. has to be scary. This movie is a wake-up call.
Fred Vaught | Jun 10, 2012 | Reply
What on earth does a movie about clerical reactionaries struggling to preserve their privileged position have to do with freedom? The reviewer needs to read up on the history of the Church in Mexico before making a further fool of himself.
Jon | Jun 12, 2012 | Reply
Jon, Perhaps you should review the history yourself, and I am sorry that as a “progressive” you are confirming my basic point in your siding with both Marxists and the Ku Klux Klan who supported the repression by the government elites of Mexico through torture, confiscation of private property, hangings, firing squads, and mass murder. Again, please see my article, “Secular Theocracy: The Foundations and Folly of Modern Tyranny.” And on the authoritarianism and warfarism of the “secular project,” please see The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, by William T. Cavanaugh (Oxford University Press).
As I also note in my blog posting, what is further instructive in this story is that the account of the Cristero War was wiped clean by the government and secular apologists from the history textbooks and virtually all other media of Mexico (and the U.S.) to cover up the bloodbath and oppression that was implemented in the name of “progress.”
David Theroux | Jun 12, 2012 | Reply
Guilt by association is the best you got? Well of course it is. The Church in Mexico, like the Church in Spain and France and elsewhere, was a wealthy, privileged institution that relied on the state to maintain its ill-gotten gains and superstition to keep the peasants in line. This is the same institution that supported the Fascists in Spain and throughout Europe, and the Cristero was of a kind with the Vendee- peasants duped by superstition into fighting to maintain the privileges of their masters.
Jon | Jun 12, 2012 | Reply
Jon, Perhaps you should re-examine what your own views actually mean in practice, given who else is supporting them.
As I have clearly noted, the answer to an established church is not to “take it over” and erect another theocracy, including a secular one, but to end it through de-socialization. However, Calles’s aim, as with the Bolsheviks and later the Spanish communists in the late 1930s (“Republicans” who were not just supporters of Stalin, but who Stalin actively supported) was to impose a totalitarian system including the banning of religion and inflicting the death penalty on anyone who did not obey. Indeed, the Spanish “Republicans” murdered thousands for no other reason than they were Christian. As you well note, Franco was a similar despot! Once again, the choice between dictatorships is to oppose both.
In addition, the Spanish Civil War occurred from 1936 to 1939, ten years after the indigenous Cristeros War (1926-1929) that had nothing to do with it. Your further derisive comments on the native peoples who rose up against the secular Mexican state underscores your leftist authoritarian convictions.
Furthermore, your belief in the “Enlightenment project” myth that Christianity (and Catholicism in particular) breeds tyranny and that people who are Christian (“duped by superstition” as in Marx’s incoherent concept of “false consciousness”) fight “to maintain the privileges of their masters” does not hold up to the evidence. First of all, the Christeros were fighting for liberty and against “their masters” in the state, not for a church-state alliance. But more directly, as numerous scholars have shown, it was Christianity that broke with the worldwide cycles of tyranny by asserting natural rights for all people, regardless of race, gender, age, infirmity, etc. In this regard, it was only Christianity that created the movements against slavery, infanticide, invasive war, and tyrannies of all sorts. Moreover, Christianity fostered the development of science, free markets, natural law, the rule of law, and universal human rights. Please see the following sample references that refute the “Enlightenment project” myth promulgated in the deeply flawed work of such secular proponents as Edmund Gibbons, John William Draper, and Andrew Dickson White:
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, by Rodney Stark
For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery, by Rodney Stark
How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Faith and Liberty: The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics, by Alejandro Chafuen
And perhaps the following will further clarify the matter here. How do your views and those of the mass-murdering Calles, who you support, differ from the following?
“Nothing Outside the State”
“Nothing Outside the State: Part II”
David Theroux | Jun 12, 2012 | Reply
I look forward to seeing this film. I actually read a biography of Plutarco Calles. He was a typical strongman who skirted around the Presidential term limits by installing puppets into power until Lazaro Cardenas sent him into exile until the last years of his life. A film that people need to see.
Efrem K. Sepulveda | Jun 12, 2012 | Reply
“the Cristero was of a kind with the Vendee- peasants duped by superstition into fighting to maintain the privileges of their masters.”
Jon, what exactly are you saying here? That the Cristero and the Vendee were both groups of ignorant subhumans that deserved to be massacred for their lack of gratitude towards their “liberators” who obviously know better than they themselves how they should conduct their lives and consciences?
amom | Jun 12, 2012 | Reply
“..the militant Marxist (i.e., atheist) Mexican..”
What?
“That is to say atheist”? Seriously?
You equate a lack of belief in some imaginary friend as Marxism?
That’s disgusting. Really quite disgusting.
Bigs | Jun 13, 2012 | Reply
Sorry, I had relatives who lived in Mexico and led the Libertarian movement there at the time. Garcia is probably another Latin fascist giving a gullible US public his whitewash.
Though I agree it was a bad bargain, the fact is the Mexican Catholics were an out-of-control, criminal organization that murdered Libertarian activists and was burning people at the stake as late as 1918.
That a Libertarian thinker should support this ‘rebellion’ by the faith gangsters who raped, tortured and killed libertarians is amazing. The Catholic Church still denounces Libertarians, and to say it or any religion led the reforms libertarians fought for through the ages when faith ran the show is fantastic. Looks like they’re now hiring ‘libertarians’ to bore from within.
juan | Jun 13, 2012 | Reply
Bigs, Read the record for yourself. Rooted in the “Enlightenment project”‘s secular myth and based on the atheist tenets of Marxism, the Mexican government pursued a secular policy to ban all religious practice in Mexico and when the people peacefully resisted, the uber-atheist Calles launched a bloodbath purge, killed anyone who would not comply, and massacred thousands of others.
I would call that “disgusting. Really quite disgusting.”
David Theroux | Jun 13, 2012 | Reply
juan, Perhaps you would benefit from examining some of the references that I have provided in my comment above that refute your anti-Christian beliefs. Incidentally, the Vatican did not support the Cristeros who were on their own, as is noted in the film. In fact, the Cristeros fought against the Mexican state itself and Gorostieta (played by Garcia) was seeking to create a society based on absolute rights to individual liberty. Furthermore, Garcia, as I have also noted, has consistently fought against oppression, including in his native Cuba, despite being attacked by bigots and assorted leftist authoritarians who apologize for Castro and Che.
As for the Catholic Church, your analysis is simplistic and erroneous. The sociologist Rodney Stark has historically traced the conflict between the “Church of Piety” and the “Church of Power” within Catholic institutions in numerous books including his brilliant volume, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton University Press). It was Catholic friars who went to Mexico and were killed for opposing the Conquistadors who enslaved and raped the natives, and it was certain “Church of Piety” popes who flatly fought against such oppression. As the libertarian historian Leonard Liggio notes in “The Heritage of the Spanish Scholastics”:
Incidentally, Lord Acton called Thomas Aquinas “the first Whig” (i.e., first classical liberal) because of his exposition of natural law and natural rights to liberty, and the classical liberals Bastiat, Tocqueville, Say, Constant, Dunoyer, etc., were all Catholic. In contrast, the socialist/syndicalist (and non-libertarian) Emiliano Zapata Salazar turned on and fought against Francisco Madero in the Mexican Revolution, after Madero had organized the successful movement to overthrow the despot Portirio Diaz. The Zapatista’s “Reforma, Libertad Ley y Justicia” (Plan of Ayala) was a series of convoluted demands declaring Madero a traitor and calling for nationwide land collectivism which wherever implemented did not restore the private land rights stolen under Diaz to the peasantry but vested control into the state apparatus. And the fact that Zapata is officially proclaimed as a great hero in Mexico while the record of Gorostieta and the Cristeros has been completely scrubbed from government-approved textbooks should be a clue to who was for liberty and who was not.
David Theroux | Jun 13, 2012 | Reply
Ralph Raico who incidentally is not a believer has written about the role of the Catholic Church in planting the seeds of liberty in Western Civilization. Other historians have noted that the West is a culmination of the influence of three cities: Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. Faith and Reason define the Western mind.
The Catholic Church is 2000 years old. Of course, it’s going to have its share of scandals. For centuries it shared political power and privileges. Hence, all the corruption. But that certainly didn’t justify the brutal suppression of religious freedom by the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, or the secular Marxists in Mexico.
Mr. Theroux is correct. The solution isn’t to seize power. The solution is to deny power to any organization.
Andy Garcia’s The Lost City was a beautiful movie and it didn’t pull any punches in how it portrayed the corrupt Batista regime.
Tim | Jun 13, 2012 | Reply
I’m well aware, David, of the highly amusing and desperate attempt of superstitious libertarians to shoehorn their imaginary friend into the liberty movement and to expunge the monstrous history of the Christian Church and Catholicism in particular. But the history just doesn’t back you up, I’m afraid. The Church no longer imposes taxes or regulates individual lives, either itself or through state agents, not out of any Christian magnanimity but through the constant struggle of nonbelievers to drive the Church back. The Church is now a voluntary association only because it has been forced to become so, and for it and its defenders to try to piggyback on the legacy of those who struggled to drive it back is frankly disgusting.
I feel no urge to answer your flailing guilt by association arguments, and it matters not what the Cristeros thought they were fighting for, no more than it matters what individual troops in Iraq and Afghanistan think they are fighting for. What matters is the real effect their success would have had- and it would have been the reinstitutionalization of the Catholic Church and the defense of the Church’s ill-gotten gains- surely you understand that not a square inch of the Church’s property in Mexico was legitimately obtained, yes?
Mankind will not truly be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Jon | Jun 14, 2012 | Reply
Jon, We are apparently disturbing your comfort zone, prompting your patronizing comments, but I should note that Christianity began and grew during the first three centuries as a strictly private, voluntary movement, spreading across the entire Mediterranean region, and far before Constantine. Rodney Stark shows in his Pulitzer-Prize Finalist book The Rise of Christianity that especially contrary to the pagan world the Christian movement championed women’s rights, opposed infanticide and aided the poor and sick on a mass scale.
Your support for the mass murdering Calles is in keeping with the authoritarianism of the secular theocracy that you unfortunately champion and the “Enlightenment” myth that forms the basis for your atheological religious worldview. You have continued to ignore the references that I have provided that show that the ideas of universal rights to liberty sprang from Christianity and nowhere else. I have refuted your claims, including the preposterous propaganda that “not a square inch of the Church’s property in Mexico was legitimately obtained.” Yet, you have provided no evidence to the contrary. Only name-calling. (Incidentally and despite your attempt to equate the two, the Cristeros was an indigenous movement without any state backing, while the U.S.’s interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan have been the opposite.)
And for the record, the quote you paraphrase (in a gender-neutral way) from the materialist Denis Diderot, fails to note that Diderot’s atheism led him to become a determinist, proto-positivist and opponent of the concepts of free will and progress. In other words, his own views were self-contradictory and based on them, he logically could not believe in liberty of any kind because he believed that his every thought was determined and that no standard of objective morality existed. But as the philosopher Alvin Plantinga has shown, to believe or infer anything is to tautologically recognize the existence of free will (“mind before matter”). Hence and based on his own atheist/materialist views, Diderot’s quote and anything else he ever claimed are utterly hypocritical, which of course is the profound and unresolvable dilemma for all naturalists/atheists who believe that humankind is merely “matter in motion.” As a result, it is no accident that in the modern world, the incoherence and amorality of atheism has formed the basis for ideologies that have inflicted mass murder and tyranny on an unprecedented scale. And today, you continue to support the secular theocracy, pretending that somehow “the end justifies the means,” even though every means is an end in itself and whatever standard is used to judge any end also applies to every means.
In any event, here are further references that I hope you will consider:
“How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and the Success of the West,” by Rodney Stark (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton, by Ralph Raico
“Does Religion Cause Violence: Behind the common question lies a morass of unclear thinking,” William T. Cavanaugh (Harvard Divinity Bulletin)
“Religious Violence: Myth or Global Reality?” video of presentation by William T. Cavanaugh (Butler University)
David Theroux | Jun 14, 2012 | Reply
Jon, Judging from your comments, I would wager to say you are a young man. You draw a very crude picture of a complex history. Sure the Church has its share of sins but they pale in comparison to those of the State.
The Church also gave us hospitals, charity, the university as well as the notion of universal human dignity.
The values you invoke to condemn the Church are values the Church itself has done much to make part of our culture. In fact, they are so common, you and many others take them for granted.
How does the fact that Church was corrupt justify the violent suppression of religious expression?
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were no such Bible thumpers.
Tim | Jun 14, 2012 | Reply