In his new book, Benjamin Cowan challenges historians to continue developing transnational, multilingual histories via his demonstration of an ambitious thesis. According to Cowan, the resurgence of the religious Right ‘derives from a history of conservative activism that united strange bedfellows: Brazilians, North Americans, Catholics, Protestants, secular conservatives, neo-medieval fantasists, authoritarian opportunists, and others’ (p. 2). Cowan offers a close study of Brazil-US religious networks and analyses a broad array of sources in Portuguese and English. He shows that conservatives across borders, languages and cultures constructed together cross-denominational networks that opened spaces for the New Right in general – and empowered religious legitimations of conservative politics that more recently culminated in US Trumpism and Brazilian Bolsonarism. For Cowan, the US-supported dictatorship in Brazil (1964–85) and the simultaneous consolidation of Evangelical political organisation in the US provided a crucial immediate context for the development, strengthening and expansion of a transnational religious Right – whose power is felt today in the US, Brazil and beyond.

Although Moral majorities across the Americas focuses more prominently on the second half of the twentieth century, it also considers important antecedents to the Brazilian dictatorship that moved conservatives of different religious stripes towards the formation of a powerful transnational network. The role played by Brazil in the development of global traditionalist Catholicism, for example, provided an important set of transnational resources and relationships for the Brazilian Catholic arm of the religious Right. Evangelicals, however, benefited the most from the Brazilian dictatorship years – which they generally supported enthusiastically. The Brazilian military regime intentionally partnered with Evangelicals, turning away from traditional allegiances with Brazilian Catholics, during the time when US Evangelicals were simultaneously strengthening their explicitly political interventions and lionising their shifting moralities for political purposes.

Cowan narrates these dynamics while demonstrating how groups that otherwise competed in the religious market united, at the same time, around broader commonalities and projects. Such commonalities, in turn, were eventually ‘collectively enshrined’ transnationally and consolidated via political articulations and projects. Generally speaking, this transnational religious Right united around the following characteristics: ‘veneration of private property, hierarchy, nationalism and traditional culture; and rejection of ethnic and religious pluralism, global liberal humanitarianism and cooperation, modernism (whether in theology or popular or moral culture), secularisation and “communism” (generally associated with any interventionist state or welfare-oriented state)’ (p. 15). Behind the organisation of the transnational Religious Right that would eventually empower Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro was, for Cowan, a right-wing, pan-Christian narrative that equated Christian identity (individual and communal) – and consequentially the preservation of ‘good societies’ – to an aggressive resistance against socially progressive ideas, projects and organisations. The ‘uncommon bedfellows’ whose story Cowan tells were also driven by a sense of heroic-like embattlement against a set of perceived shared enemies that drew them together. In turn, as these once-disparate conservative groups drew closer together, they ‘agreed on a common agenda that we can now recognise as the platform of a religious Right that transcends nation-states and denominations’ (p. 235).

Although Cowan's choice to focus on the second half of the twentieth century kept him from paying closer attention to the role of Protestant missions from the US in shaping Latin American Evangelicalism, he demonstrates his thesis successfully. A broader periodisation, however, would show that the close overlaps between Latin American Protestantism and theopolitical dispositions that would come to characterise post-war US Evangelicalism more broadly was a constant reality. Generally speaking, since the sustainable phase of Protestant missions from the English-speaking world arrived in Brazil in the nineteenth century, the more conservative elements of US Protestantism were the most powerful in shaping Brazilian Protestantism. Brazilian denominational periodicals, consequently, were often flooded with what could otherwise be described as conservative perspectives on quintessentially American Protestant quarrels, such as defences of Prohibition, invested interpretations of the Scopes Trial, praise for southern idols memorialised by Lost Cause mythologies and criticisms of several progressive elements within US Protestantism. Yet, Cowan is correct in pointing out that it is in the years of the Brazilian dictatorship that the power of Brazilian Evangelicals emerged to unprecedented levels – and it did so partially as a result of the pro-dictatorship initiatives of Brazilian Evangelicals and the strengthening of conservative, US-Brazil theopolitical coalitions.

In addition to narrating a crucial history of the Religious Right that helps us to understand better the transnational roots of contemporary conservatisms, Cowan's work offers a sharp methodological challenge to the field of religious history. The study of religious phenomena by US-based scholars, despite its expansion in the last few decades, remains dominated by approaches that centre around the nation-state as a predominant locus of religious practice and belief. Limiting scholarly methodologies to nation-state borders and monolingual dynamics, however, often keeps scholars from uncovering connections that prove to be central to the development of well-rounded investigations of religious networks and practices. Moral majorities across the Americas demonstrates, as such, not only the transnational creation of the Religious Right but also – and perhaps as importantly – that scholars must intentionally enrich their analysis of religious dynamics by bringing transnational, cross-cultural and multilingual lenses to their projects. Cowan's book should be read because it does show that the Religious Right was created by coalitions involving US and Brazilian conservatives; it should also be read because it models a transnational methodology towards which historians must continue to move.