Benjamin Cowan's Moral Majorities Across the Americas is an important and timely examination of the complex web of political and religious forces responsible for the rise of the Christian Right in the Americas. In the past two decades, scholars and journalists have noted the ever-expanding power of conservative evangelicals, especially Pentecostals, in the political life of Brazil, their influence reaching its apex in the 2018 election and subsequent presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Moral Majorities Across the Americas gives a much-needed historical treatment of the Brazilian religious Right, which Cowan argues was not just composed of Brazilian Pentecostals, but rather formed part of a broader coalition that united “strange bedfellows: Brazilians, North Americans, Catholics, Protestants, secular conservatives, neo-medieval fantasists, authoritarian opportunists, and others” (2). In doing so, Cowan sheds new light on not only the history of Pentecostalism but also the history of the Catholic Church, the Brazilian dictatorship, mainline Protestant denominations, and the New Right. Cowan argues that only by understanding the variegated nature of the religious Right can scholars and journalists understand the contemporary political situation in Brazil and the United States.

Cowan's book begins by analyzing the history of modern conservative Catholicism in Brazil, showing how a small group of Brazilian bishops, along with the conservative Catholic organization Brazilian Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), were influential proponents of a radical traditionalist Catholicism that resisted progressive reforms both during and after the Second Vatican Council. The historiography of the Brazilian Catholic Church in the latter half of the twentieth century, especially as it relates to Vatican II and the Brazilian dictatorship, has focused heavily on the actions of progressive bishops such as Dom Hélder Câmara and the liberationist Catholicism that they championed. Cowan's work thus complicates the portrayal of Brazilian Catholicism as solely a force of progressivism—while he does not argue that traditionalists such as Dom Geraldo Proença Sigaud and Dom Antônio de Castro Mayer were more powerful or influential than progressives like Dom Hélder, he convincingly demonstrates that they had an outsized impact on the global traditionalist movement and laid the foundation for the emergence of the Catholic Right that we see today.

Cowan then turns his attention to Protestants, arguing that the rise of the evangelical Right in Brazil was facilitated by the relationship between conservative Protestants and the military dictatorship. With the emergence of liberation theology in the 1960s and the Brazilian Catholic Church's increasing institutional opposition to the dictatorship, the authoritarian state was eager to make alliances with new religious groups. Cowan shows that many conservative evangelicals became political and spiritual partners of the dictatorship, united by not only their anticommunism and opposition to liberation theology, but also by their commitment to promoting a reactionary moralism that opposed modern ideas regarding gender and sexuality. They were also united in their opposition to ecumenism and progressive Protestants, so much so that state security agents deemed progressive Protestant ecumenical organizations such as the World Council of Churches as representing subversive threats to the state. The author demonstrates how the security forces of the dictatorship marked progressive Protestant leaders and groups for surveillance and repression. These conditions made it difficult for Protestant progressives to gain influence within their own churches and within the broader Protestant community in the region. The forces united against them were simply too powerful, both during and after the dictatorship. Cowan argues that the alliance forged between conservative evangelicals, traditionalist Catholics, and the military regime set the stage for the Christian Right's rise to prominence in the post-dictatorship years.

One of the most revelatory elements of Cowan's work is his analysis of what he calls “antiecumenist ecumenism,” or “cooperative antiecumenism,” in which he tackles a seeming paradox: how was it that conservative Pentecostals, fundamentalist Protestants, and traditionalist Catholics, all of whom expressed intense opposition to ecumenical movements, were able to cooperate with each other to such an extent that they formed an ecumenical movement of their own? Cowan's argument is novel in that he does not merely state that conservatives of different denominations put aside their differences, or downplayed their opposition to ecumenism, in order to cooperate with each other when their political interests coincided. Rather, he argues that antiecumenism remained a central motivating force of conservative religious actors, and, in many cases, it was one of the primary factors propelling the creation of conservative ecumenical organizations. This “counterintuitive willingness to cooperate in the name of defeating cooperative efforts” allowed the most unlikely groups of religious actors to create a complicated web of alliances and movements (179). Cowan meticulously reconstructs the process by which these links were forged, showing how antiecumenical activism lay at the foundation of both domestic and transnational conservative organizing.

Moral Majorities Across the Americas is a fascinating book that challenges scholars of religion and evangelicalism, particularly those working in and on the United States, to broaden the geographical bounds of their narratives and analyze the transnational forces at play in the rise of the Christian Right. It is a must-read for historians of Latin American religion, the Brazilian military dictatorship, US conservatism, the New Right, and the Cold War. And of course, as the 2022 Brazilian presidential election nears, this book will be essential for anyone wanting to understand the power of the Christian Right in contemporary Brazilian politics.