Moral Majorities Across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right by Benjamin A. Cowan (review)

Reviewed by: Moral Majorities Across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right by Benjamin A. Cowan Jordan Brasher Benjamin A. Cowan Moral Majorities Across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. x + 294 pp. Illustrations, bibliographic references, index. 95 hardcover (ISBN 978-1-4696-6206-0) ; 29. 95 paperback (ISBN 978-1-4696-6207-7) ; 24. 99 e-book (ISBN 978-1-4696-6208-4). The political resurgence of the religious right in the past decade has led to increased demand for scholarly accounts of its historical origins and development. However, social and historical analyses of the politics of right-wing religious control are often limited to regional or national boundaries. In Moral Majorities Across the Americas, the author attempts to "historicize the New Right as a transnational phenomenon with deep roots in Brazil" (p. 2), thus moving beyond the bounded understanding of right-wing religious movements as contained within nation-states. Although we do not arrive at the beginning of the truly transnational analysis until more than halfway through the book, Moral Majorities invites students of religion, politics, globalization, and colonialism in Latin America to consider right-wing Christian groups as part of a complex global network of activism and evangelism integral to the development and resonance of today's globalized New Right. In the first chapter, Benjamin Cowan focuses on the religious agenda and activism of Brazilian Catholic "traditionalists" of the 1960s, who prioritized Cold War-era "anticommunism, moralism, anti-ecumenism, hierarchalism" and held a "woebegone affinity for the supernatural in the face of perceived secularism" (p. 59). The chapter provides a rich and interesting description of the priests, persons, and organizations that led this traditionalist movement. Yet for those unfamiliar with the specific social and historical contexts discussed, the recitation of names and institutions may prove confusing at times. In the second chapter, Cowan chronicles the emergence of the conservative Protestant counterpart to the traditionalists, whose opposition to ecumenism, social justice, democratization, and progressive Catholicism drove them into a twisted marriage with the "military-authoritarian agenda" (p. 96) of the dictatorship era. Cowan shows how conservative "crentes" (a sometimes-pejorative word for Protestant "believers" in Portuguese) shared a certain moral panic about the breakdown of the nuclear family and pervasive lewd End Page 192 sexuality that came to shape the politics of Brazilian evangelical Christianity in the following generations. The third chapter provides an intriguing contrast to the rise of conservative evangelicalism by focusing on Protestant progressives who fought for social, economic, and racial justice as well as ecumenism, before suffering intense state repression and political violence by the military regime. The various political forces that sometimes fractured and other times coalesced around shared political goals during this era of "antiecumenist ecumenism" (p. 131) is both fascinating drama and important historical and social context for the rise of right-wing religious fervor in Brazil. Thefinal two chapters articulate the author's transnational analysis of the religious right. While Chapter4homes in on connections between Brazilian and U. S. activists, evangelists, and other influential right-wing ministers, Chapter 5 describes the factors that bound the U. S. and Brazilian religious right together—private property, hierarchy, and nationalism, and a rejection of religious pluralism, modernism, secularization, and communism. These last two chapters are likely the most interesting for geographers because they chronicle the mobilization of bodies, ideas, institutions, activism, evangelism, and resources for the deployment of a "cantankerous" (p. 165) religious (trans) nationalism between the U. S. and Brazil. One drawback of the book is that the author uses several terms throughout that are not defined, and which therefore make for difficult reading at times. For example, terms like "anti-liberalism" versus "neoliberalism, " "neo-medieval fantasists, " "neoconservatism, " and "right" versus "left" are used without clear definition; the reader is left to assume the author's intended use and meaning. Additionally, readers without more than surface-level knowledge of twentieth century Brazilian history may struggle to make sense of the key figures whose lives and legacies are detailed in this book. For these reasons, this book is much. . .