This book could not be more timely. It is no wonder that historian Benjamin Cowan spends the first pages of the introduction attempting to make sense of the contradictory policies and scandalous remarks staged by the so-called New Right in both Brazil and the United States in the past few years. The purpose of Moral Majorities across the Americas is precisely to expose ‘How did we get here?’ (p. 6). Cowan is out to tell the history of religious conservatism in Brazil, following Brazilian Christian conservatives in the second half of the twentieth century as they gestated, both domestically and transnationally, an assortment of anti-modern aspirations that would help outline current New Right ideologies. The book explores how today's conservatism has been shaped, giving due credit to Brazilian religious figures in building alliances and acting in close affinity with transnational actors, particularly with the US religious Right.

The book is also a history of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964−85). The regime's implicit and explicit support of religious conservatives empowered and politicised the latter, who became essential in developing conservative ideology in Brazil, and, as part of transnational networks, in influencing the rise of the Christian Right in the West. The ‘moral majorities’ in the title refers, specifically, to Brazilian Protestants who, encouraged by government agents, understood their role in society as that of ‘moral guardians’ in a crusade against a perceived ‘imminent moral calamity’ (p. 65). More broadly, Cowan is affirming that moral majorities englobed multi-denominational Christian conservatives – both Protestants and Catholics – that shared a ‘common platform of grievances’ (p. 19) that included an overabundance of ‘anti’ sentiments: anti-modernism, anti-ecumenism, anti-communism, anti-statism, anti-egalitarianism, anti-rationalism and anti-secularisation. Cowan, thus, is historicising the formation of the core values of contemporary Christian conservatism in a way that neatly defines the twenty-first-century Right. The common ‘antis’ Cowan finds throughout the extensively collected sources serve to unite trans-denominational and transnational conservatives. This is extremely useful to any scholar of right-wing history and politics who seeks a checklist to identify and define the New Right.

In Chapter 1, Cowan discusses the role of Brazilian Catholics in defending religious traditionalism in Brazil and beyond during the Second Vatican Council (1962−5), assisted by the state's security and diplomatic apparatuses. The author recreates the intellectual history of key bishops as they developed ways to preserve traditional Catholicism against forces attempting to implement reforms that would ‘doom the world to modern secularisation, the Church to irrelevance, and society to socialist materialism’ (p. 35). In Chapter 2, the book depicts the path that evangelical Protestants took, at the onset of the military regime, from wishing to refrain from worldly matters towards political ascendance and power within post-dictatorship Brazilian politics. Chapter 3 unveils the emergence of a religious conservative coalition that would respond not only to a perceived moral panic in society, but also to a religious panic over a burgeoning progressive Protestantism that, internationally, held ideals of liberation theology and ecumenism. Understood by the Brazilian state as representatives of ‘socialism in the guise of religion’ (p. 121), progressive Protestants (and Catholics) would constantly see their efforts frustrated by the moral alliance forged between conservative evangelicals and state surveillance agents. In Chapter 4, Cowan goes beyond borders to explore Brazilian Christian conservatives consuming religious extremism from US mega-evangelists, as well as acting abroad in rightist and religious organisations created specifically for the purpose of ‘constructing a transnational New Right’ (p. 144). Finally, Chapter 5 could be read as the book's conclusion, albeit it adds rich new information. Here, Cowan brings back the Brazilian and US Catholics and Protestants from previous chapters to lay out the core principles that ultimately bond together these fervently anti-ecumenical priests and pastors, and to reinforce the particular ways Brazilian government agents, from security to diplomatic forces, aided the rise of Christian conservatism.

This book follows the lessons learned from Cowan's previous work, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), in which the scholar rewrote the history of the Brazilian military regime under the lens of a conservative moral panic over perceived immoral, modern gender and sexuality norms. With a similar poetic prose, Moral Majorities across the Americas respects the same understanding: moral panic was the motive for Catholic and Protestant politicisation, which resonated with the government agents we learned about in Securing Sex. However, going further forward in time, the panic-ridden rhetoric of this book's actors includes the new identity-based movements of the late twentieth century. As Brazil re-democratised and progressive Christians embraced social justice, moral panic would now move to anxieties over changes to existing gender, sexual and racial distinctions and hierarchies.

In fact, Moral Majorities feels like a companion to Securing Sex, providing a deeper exploration into activists involved in the history laid out previously. It is hard to imagine reading this book without the historical interpretations that Cowan has presented before. The book is not for the uninitiated, as it presumes a familiarity with Cowan's works, Brazilian history and religious history more broadly. At first, the reader has to scramble for further historical contextualisation to connect some of the information the author presents – it sometimes lacks a more defined historical placement. The most obvious audience for Moral Majorities is certainly scholars of Brazil. However, the book also assumes an underlying understanding of US history and politics, often using comparisons to the United States to help the reader grasp the magnitude of a Brazilian phenomenon. In other words, the book's audience is mostly US-based and/or US-centred academics. Furthermore, because the book is structured thematically rather than chronologically, some information feels repetitive across chapters, but, in some ways, this helps to advance Cowan's argumentation on the development of the religious Right.

In the end, Cowan's purpose is to shed light on conservative activists that academics have largely ignored, but that conservatives themselves have long acknowledged and held as heroes for their causes. The book is a cry to scholars to pay greater attention to conservative movements and activists so that phenomena such as the emergence of a New Right is seen and debated as anything but ‘new’. For Cowan, our collective shock in the face of this emergence is the fault of our own academic neglect about the history of conservative religious activism and its wide-reaching transnational articulations.