>>63941968
Another anon mentioned it, but the church had a lot of power and it was not neutral. There was also some element of tit-for-tat violence and retaliation that escalated because both sides were killing people on the other side. There were full-scale battles going on before the civil war, and a conservative government came to power, rolled back reforms and cracked down the left (throwing people in prison and also a bloody battle with striking miners involving artillery and air attacks). Then the left won the elections and came back into power, there was a right-wing coup, and then it exploded and the anarchists went ham on the churches. The most ferocious anti-clerical violence actually came from the anarchists who playing a significant role in the civil war.

>>63943314
An interesting thing about that -- when the communists were purging the POUM and he was fleeing for his life, he played up being a middle-class Englishman to avoid drawing suspicion as he evaded the police. During the peak of the revolution, the bourgeois types tried to dress and look more working class, but once the communists put the brakes on it, you wanted to look more bourgeois. A thing which challenges stereotypes about this thing.