This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For decades after the Cristero War ended, the version of its history that prevailed in Mexico was the one the victorious revolutionary state told about itself. In that account the Cristeros were dupes of a reactionary Catholic hierarchy and a conservative landowning class, manipulated into resisting the progressive secular reforms the 1917 constitution represented; popular participation in the war was read as a symptom of manipulation and backwardness rather than as a conviction worth taking seriously on its own terms.
The French historian Jean Meyer overturned that account. Traveling to Mexico in 1962 to research the war for his doctoral dissertation, he spent years working through Mexican federal and church archives and collecting firsthand testimony no earlier study had assembled at that scale. His resulting study, published in the early 1970s and in English translation in 1976 as The Cristero Rebellion, documented in granular local detail that the uprising had drawn genuine, widespread support from ordinary rural Catholics defending their parish life and religious practice, organized from the ground up rather than directed from above by bishops or landowners the state's own account had blamed.
Meyer did not deny the Church hierarchy and conservative interests had their own stakes in the conflict; he argued those stakes could not explain the depth of ordinary peasant participation the archival record actually showed. Later scholarship has built on, rather than displaced, his account, and it remains the field's standard reference precisely because it took the rebels' own religious motivation seriously rather than as something requiring a more respectable cause underneath it.