Addison De Witt (1998) has suggested that if Northern Ireland presents a case of religious fanaticism dominating politics, Mexico presents one of politics dominating religious fanaticism. MexicoÆs popular culture is Roman Catholic, but its politics and its state are largely secular, with vast majorities demonstrating both immense respect for the Catholic Church and firm opposition to the political involvement of religious leaders or symbols (Mexican Protestants & politics, 2001). In the past ten years or so, despite MexicoÆs expressed desires to keep church and state separate, the two institutions have become more and more inextricably tied together in MexicoÆs traditional or indigenous communities. Recently, with the election of Vicente Fox as MexicoÆs first non-Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) president in more than 70 years, a degree of ôquasi-officialö approval for Roman Catholic policies and concerns has begun to emerge in Mexico (Mexican Protestants & politics, 2001). While it would be incorrect to argue that the secularization of Mexican politics and economics is about to end, it is true that during the past ten years, religious institutions in Mexico have begun to express their views and act more publicly with respect to the critical issues of poverty, inequality, globalization, and economic development.
In the early 1990s, Arthur Jones (1993) asserted that Roman Catholic officials in Mexico were reluctant to protest economic inequality and poverty because of the prominence of the PRI that was beginning to move away from its anti-clerical past as a means of keeping the Church quiet about government corruption and poverty. In Mexico, as the 1990s unfolded and globalization began to become an important indicator of economic shifts, the gap between the rich and the poor accelerated rapidly. Jones (1993) claims that with 90 percent of the Mexican population nominally identified as Catholic, enormous discrepa...