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Liberators for Colonial Anáhuac: A Rumination on North American Civil Religions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Randi Jones Walker
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Extract

Behold here the motives of that mysterious likeness which give merit to a comparison with Jesus in the work the Supreme Author confided to [Hidalgo]: to save the American people, the continent of Anáhuac!

So spoke Padre Antonio Jose Martinez in 1832 in praise of Miguel Hidalgo on the tenth anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Mexico. That same year, Francis Gray extolled George Washington, the hero of another independence movement. Washington was the “Special instrument of divine providence for working out our political salvation, the cloud by day and pillar of fire by night which led us out of bondage.” Two new North American nations attempted to create a national identity and a useable mythology, side by side, if independent of each other. In this essay, I present a North American view of what could loosely be called civil religion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 183 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1999

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References

Notes

I would like to thank several colleagues for important conversations that shaped this essay in ways they may or may not recognize: Archie Smith, Jr., Mary Donovan Turner, Eldon Ernst, and Thomas Buckley.

1. Anáhuac is the Aztec term for North America. I am aware that a Euro-American appropriation of a Native American term can be problematic. I am using the term to emphasize the vantage point outside of Boston.

2. Martinez, Antonio Jose, “Panegyric in Praise of Padre Miguel Hidalgo, 1832,” in New Mexican Spanish Religious Oratory, 1800-1900, ed. Steele, Thomas J., S.J. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 73.Google Scholar

3. Gray, Francis C., Ovation delivered before the Legislature of Massachusetts at their request, on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Washington (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1832), 7.Google Scholar

4. There is not room in this essay for an exacting discussion of the term “civil religion” and how it is employed by historians. I use the term to refer to religious motifs, Symbols, and forms that work to explain or justify political and civic practices and ideologies related to national identity and purpose. The term has been around since Rousseau. Robert Bellah's use of it in his 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America” (contained in Richey and Jones cited below) touched off an exploration of its usefulness as a category for understanding certain aspects of public religious life in the United States. For a full understanding of the wealth of meaning of the term, the reader is referred to Richey, Russell E. and Jones, Donald G., eds., American Civil Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)Google Scholar, and Hammond, Phillip E., Porterfield, Amanda, Moseley, James G., and Sarna, Jonathan D., “Forum: American Civil Religion Revisited,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 4, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Martinez's panegyric is printed in Spanish and translated into English by Thomas Steele in the above cited work New Mexican Spanish Religious Oratory, 1800-1900. At least four manuscript versions of it exist, all in the William Gillett Ritch Collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The text I used most is Santiago Valdez, 1877, “Biografía del Padre Antonio Jose Martinez,” Huntington Manuscript RI 2210, 167-83. Two other Spanish versions, with somewhat more ornate language, are found in RI 2209 A and B, shorter versions of the same biography An imperfect English translation of the biography contains the panegyric as well, RI 2211, vol. 1, 94-116. The first fifty pages of the English biography are in the handwriting of Samuel Ellison, territorial librarian in the 1880's, and contain good translations. The rest are in another handwriting that I have not been able to identify and contain many mistakes and what appear to be paraphrases. I used Gray's panegyric in published form from a microfiche copy of the original in the Library of Congress.

6. Barriero, Antonio, “Ojeada Sobre Nuevo Mexico,” in Three New Mexico Chronicles, tr. H. Carroll, Bailey and Haggard, J. Villasana (Albuquerque: Quivira Society, 1942), 263–318.Google Scholar

7. Barreiro estimates the population of New Mexico to be forty-three thousand people in 1827. There were seventeen priests, four serving the Hispanic towns, all the rest in the Pueblo missions. Santa Fe, with five thousand people, had no resident priest. Barreiro, “Ojeada,” 88.

8. See de Aragon, Ray John, “Padre Antonio Jose Martinez: The Man and the Myth,” in Mares, E. A. and others, Padre Martinez: New Perspectives from Taos (Taos, N. Mex.: Millicent Rogers Museum, 1988), 137.Google Scholar

9. See Chávez, Thomas E., Manuel Alvarez, 1794-1856: A Southwestern Biography (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1990), 3.Google Scholar

10. See Steele, , ed., New Mexican Spanish Religious Oratory, 54.Google Scholar

11. An engaging account of this struggle in the context of the mythologization of George Washington can be found in Boorstin, Daniel, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 349-50.Google Scholar

12. There are numerous studies of Padre Antonio José Martínez. The earliest is Santiago Valdez, “Biografía del Padre Antonio José Martínez,” in the William Gillett Ritch Collection at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, manuscripts RI 2210, RI 2209, and RI 2211. Published biographies include Chavez, Fray Angelico, But Time and Chance: The Story of Padre Martinez of Taos, 1793-1867 (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Sunstone Press, 1981)Google Scholar; de Aragon, Ray John, Padre Martinez and Bishop Lamy (Las Vegas, N. Mex.: Pan-American Publishing Company, 1978)Google Scholar; and Sanchez, Pedro, Memorias sobre la vida del presbüero Don Antonio Jose Martinez (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Lightning Tree, 1978)Google Scholar, with a translation by Ray John de Aragon. Lecompte, Janet, Rebellion in Río Arriba, 1837 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985)Google Scholar, includes considerable analysis of Padre Martinez's role in the Community at that time. Mares, Earnest Anthony, I Returned and Saw under the Sun: Padre Martinez of Taos, a Play (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)Google Scholar, dramatizes Martinez's life.

13. See Castillas, Jose Gutiérrez, S. J., Historia de la Iglesia en México (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1974), 220-21.Google Scholar

14. Aragon, “The Man and the Myth,” 136.

15. Gray, Oration, 7.

16. Melgaros, “A Solicitud de la Ciudad de Santa Fe, Capital del Nuevo Mexico …,” Gaceta Imperial de Mexico 2 (21 Marzo 1822): 90, my translation. This celebration is discussed in Lansing Bartlett Bloom, “New Mexico under Mexican Administration, 1821-1846,” Old Santa Fe 1 (October 1913): 142. Augustín de Iturbide was one of the heroes in the Mexican independence struggle. I am grateful for the assistance of Professor Jose Irrizary of Pacific School of Religion in the translation of some archaic words.

17. Melgaros, “A Solicitud,” 91, my translation.

18. Daily Evening Transcript (Boston, Massachusetts), February 21, 1832, and February 23, 1832.

19. Gray, , Oration, 78–80.Google Scholar The text of the hymn can be found below.

20. Daily Evening Transcript, February 23,1832.

21. Hammond, Porterfield, Moseley, and Sarna, “Forum: American Civil Religion Revisited,” 18, 2. This forum presents a variety of ways of addressing what is often called civil religion. The authors have varying degrees of discomfort with the term. Together, they provide some useful lenses through which to view the rhetoric of Gray and Martinez. Hammond, in particular, discusses the conceptual problems entailed in the use of the term “civil religion” and concludes that he prefers the idea of legitimating myth.

22. Valdez, “Biografia,” 169-70, my translation.

23. Gray, , Oration, 7.Google Scholar

24. Albanese, Catherine, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 144-45.Google Scholar

25. Gray, , Oration, 40.Google Scholar

26. Martínez's analogy of the national hero and Jesus Christ can also be found in the New England milieu of Francis Gray. Will Herberg cites a Memorial Day orator as saying, “No character except the Carpenter of Nazareth has ever been honored the way Washington and Lincoln have been in New England.… It will not escape notice, I hope, that Washington and Lincoln are here raised to superhuman level, as true Saints of America's civil religion. They are equipped with the qualities and virtues that, in traditional Christianity, are attributed to Jesus alone—freedom from sin, for example.” Will Her-berg, “America's Civil Religion: What It Is and Whence It Comes,” in American Civil Religion, ed. Richey and Jones, 82. In the eyes of some scholars in this volume, this Virtual equation of the hero with Christ borders on idolatry.

27. Bonino, J. Míguez, La je en busca de eficacia: una interpretación de la reflexión teológica latinoamericana de liberación (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1977), 25 Google Scholar, translation mine.

28. Many works in religious studies touch on this symbol. James Frazier discusses it throughout in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1951).

29. Schlesinger, Arthur M., “The Liberty Tree: A Genealogy,” New England Quarterly 25 (December 1952): 435-58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Thomas Paine's writings served as a vehicle for many political ideas and Symbols to move from the American to the French struggles for independence.

30. Hamill, Hugh M. Jr., The Hidalgo Revolt: Prelude to Mexican Independence (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966), 9.Google Scholar Hamill cites a complaint by Ramón Pécarez to the Office of the Inquisition. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Ramo de Inquisitión, tome 1352, no. 2, leaf 7. During the early years of the Mexican independence struggle, Spain was ruled by a relative of Napoleon's, effectively part of the French empire.

31. Valdez, “Biografia,” 174,169, my translation.

32. Gray, , Oration, 6, 72.Google Scholar

33. Ibid., 77.

34. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers, discusses this issue at length. Martin Marty characterizes this kind of civil religion as one of national self-transcendence. “It does not see people, left to themselves, automatically given to self-worship. But either references to deity disappear entirely or ‘God’ is drained of earlier cognitive imports and may appear terminologically only out of habitual reference.” Marty, Martin, “Two Kinds of Civil Religion,” in American Civil Religion, ed. Richey, and Jones, , 144.Google Scholar

35. A helpful discussion of this Yankee culture, especially as it traveled west with American society, is found in Wright's, Louis B. Culture on the Moving Frontier (New York: Harper and Row, 1955).Google Scholar McLoughlin, William G., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar, discusses some of the connected patterns of American life as the New England religious culture made itself felt in shaping secular society.

36. The symbolic transformation Gray and Martinez used is like that process described by Pieder Botha and Johannes Vorster in their introduction to Porter, Stanley E. and Ulbricht, Thomas H., eds., Rhetoric, Scripture and Theology: Essays from the 1994 Pretoria Conference (Sheffeld: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 17.Google Scholar “Where truth is seen as socially constructed and ‘what is real or factual’ dependent on the socio-symbolic interaction of human beings, the Status of rhetoric would be enhanced to that of a generating force.” This oration and its rhetoric is shaping the audience's sense of reality.

37. Martínez, Antonio José, “Fourth of July 1860 Sermon,” in New Mexican Spanish Religious Oratory, 1800-1900, ed. Steele, , 80–87.Google Scholar

38. It is not clear whether Martinez intended to resign, but Bishop Lamy understood that he had. Martínez resisted the transference of duties to the new priest, continuing to perform functions he was no longer authorized to perform.

Thomas J. Steele, S. J., attributes the enmity of French and American business people in Taos to Martinez's “attempt to keep them from stealing the Taos Pueblo Indians' and Hispano vecinos' land.” Thomas J. Steele, S. J., “The View from the Rectory,” in Padre Martinez: New Perspectives from Taos, by Mares and others, 97, n. 22.

39. Martínez, “Fourth of July Sermon,” 87.