This article looks at the response to government anticlericalism in the diocese of Huajuapam de León, Oaxaca. In particular it examines how the dynamic relationship between bishop, priests and parishioners established during the early twentieth century produced a religious culture, which wove itself into the cultural, ethnic, political and economic identities of the indigenous Mixtecs. This religious culture proved key to resistance to post-revolutionary anticlericalism and socialist education in the 1930s and led to the failure of the state project.