Theresa Keeley has written a book that is well-researched, timely, and provocative. In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns, Keeley analyzes the conservative forces within religion and U.S. politics as they shaped human rights policy in Central America in the 1980s and beyond. Focused on the intra-Catholic schism after Vatican II, Keeley challenges the narrative by some scholars who have stressed the role of evangelical Protestantism in formulating the Latin American policy of the Reagan administration. Keeley provides a narrative that delineates the bitter debates between U.S. and Central American Catholics, in a post–Vatican II world, and how this friction coalesced with U.S. foreign policy within the Reagan administration. Although there had been Catholics in the Carter administration, Catholic representation expanded during the Reagan administration and their key leadership roles would influence foreign policy, particularly in Latin America. Keeley quotes a journalist from the National Catholic Reporter writing in the early 1980s: “A list of Reagan's advisors and cabinet members reads like the honor roll of a Catholic high school” (112).

Besides the large numbers of Catholics already in Latin America, in 1961, Pope John XXIII urged religious congregations and societies to pledge 10 percent of their personnel to Latin America. In The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History (Turlock, CA: Orbis, 1998), scholar Angelyn Dries writes that by the early 1960s, “Maryknoll already had 25 percent of its members working in eight countries in Central and South America” (181). Other, women's congregations took the challenge very seriously, increasing the number of Catholic sister missioners and training the nuns in the necessary language skills, as well as in religious concepts and strategies of Liberation Theology promoted after Vatican II. Urged by the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, local U.S. parishes advocated for and supported missioners to Latin America and provided lay missioners and monies to support Catholic religious congregations in this cause.

To focus her analysis, Keeley trains her lens on El Salvador and Nicaragua as the “hot spots” for communist insurgence within Latin America. Originally willing puppets and CIA informants, by the 1970s, Catholic sisters had embraced the modernization of religious life brought about by the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II: 1962–1965). Through the lens of Liberation Theology, which advocated education, justice, and examining the root systemic causes of poverty, Catholic sisters became social justice advocates who supported human rights and challenged a U.S. policy that increasingly spurned democratically elected leaders, choosing to support violent, repressive dictators and “freedom fighters,” who used the fear of communism to gain needed support from Washington. Swayed by evangelical conservatism, backlash against Vatican II, and the growing influence of conservative Catholics in the Reagan administration, the fervent anticommunism policy makers created a contrived reality that supported their policies and undermined the social justice and humanitarian activities of Catholic sisters missioned in Latin America.

Gender is at the root of Keeley's argument, as the author focuses on Catholic nuns, particularly the Maryknoll Congregation who missioned in large numbers in Central America. Ironically, to minimize and undermine their identity as religious women, U.S. policy makers attacked these sisters in paternalist terms. They were not really nuns, but “misguided women” who were duped by communists. The 1980 rape and murders of four churchwomen (two Maryknoll sisters, one Maryknoll lay missioner, and one Ursuline sister) provided the backdrop to create a fiction that the sisters were gun-runners, who did not look like nuns (they dressed like the local population) and certainly did not act like nuns without their medieval habits and cloister. Keeley writes, “Reagan officials characterized the women as political activists and gun runners who died in a shootout, contrary to the evidence” (2). At the very least the sisters were considered dupes, and at the worst they were described as not “real nuns” but terrorists and subversives who tried to shoot their way through a road block and therefore got what they deserved.

The author provides a strong case for her thesis: the influence of conservative Catholics clearly influenced and shaped Central American policy from a conservative Catholic lens. Reagan and his foreign policy advisors used the divisiveness of the Catholic church that surfaced during the Cold War and after the dramatic changes of Vatican II. Criticizing “wayward” Catholics as politicized communist promoters, conservatives in the administration even attacked the Catholic Speaker of the House, Thomas “Tip” O'Neill, whose aunt was a Maryknoll nun. His aunt connected him to Maryknoll sisters who sent him on-the-ground reports from her sisters in Latin America. Congressional conservatives mocked him for accepting information from nuns, who they saw as helping to create foreign policy.

This book is a masterful tour de force of research and analysis, providing depth and richness to debates on foreign policy and how religion and religious influence help provide a justification for American intervention in Latin America. Keeley mined diverse, in-depth, and rich primary sources for her research. These include national and international secular and religious periodicals and news sources, government documents, archives of religious congregations, public and private correspondence, Congressional Hearings reports, university archives, and private collections.

Finally, Keeley's epilogue unites past with present, highlighting both religious and gender tensions in a post–Cold War world. She states that the issues have changed but the arguments about gender, religion, and American culture remain politically volatile. This is an excellent book and provides both scholars and the general public an opportunity to relook at the Cold War and Central America, which ultimately has become a prelude to the ongoing and current debates about how religion, gender, and culture intersect and shape the role of the United States in the world.