As with the election of Donald Trump two years earlier, the victory of Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 has occasioned extensive political commentary. Observers well versed in the administrations’ trademarks: the demonization of political opponents and marginalized populations; the populist attacks on “elites,” state institutions, the judiciary, and electoral integrity; the defense of patriarchy and “traditional” values; the embrace of chauvinism, “law and order,” and militarization of public policies; the braiding of free market policies with truculent economic nationalism; the glorification of a past historical order. The rise of the far right in the United States and Brazil has left civil libertarians scrambling to defend democracies under siege. It has also sent scholars back to the archives in search of the ideological and institutional roots of right-wing politics in the Americas.
Benjamin A. Cowan’s Moral Majorities Across the Americas is one such study, a work of substantial importance in light of the global political moment. Building on his earlier monograph, Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (2016), which shined light on the religious roots of anticommunism in Brazil, including transnational linkages, Cowan aims to provide greater understanding of the far right culture wars in the Americas in recent decades. Although Latin Americanist historiography has extensively explored the impact of liberation theology on politics in the region, Cowan illuminates the fierce religious counteroffensive against social liberalization across denominations and continents in recent decades. Indeed, right-wing Catholic and Evangelical Protestant leaders and organizations in Brazil, he contends, have played a pivotal role in the global networks of ultraconservative political mobilization.
Conservative thought fundamentally abjures the erasure of social hierarchies, whether in the voting booth, the workplace, or the home. The religious far right roared back in Brazil and the United States amid the contested ambitions of welfare states and expanded capitalist markets, the empowerment of historically disenfranchised populations, shifting gender roles, and the sexual revolution. While such context looms as Cowan’s historical backdrop, the book’s earlier chapters focus more extensively on intramural disputes within the Catholic and Protestant Churches that contributed to the radicalization of the religious right and the strategic forging of interdenominational political alliances.
The Vatican II Conference (1962–65), with its advocacy of the empowerment of the poor, gestures toward ecumenism, and challenges to traditional Catholic liturgical practice, was a critical battleground. Here, Cowan focuses on the writings and maneuverings of right-wing Brazilian Catholic activists, who not only conspired to bring about the 1964 military coup that toppled leftist João Goulart but waged a worldwide war against liberalization inside the Catholic Church. Dom Geraldo Proença Sigaud, archbishop of Diamantina, Minas Gerais, was a leader of Coetus Internationalis Patrum, a global organization of church fathers that championed conservative causes at Vatican II. Dom Antônio de Castro Mayer, bishop of Campos, Rio de Janeiro, fulminated, “We must reprove [the schema on ecumenism] as an attack on the spirit of social hierarchy which is the spirit of the Church … it is necessary that this social hierarchy also [continue to] be reflected in the solemnities of the Church” (37). And Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP)—founded in 1960 by lay activist Plínio Corrêa de Oliveira to defend traditional Catholicism against modernization, secularization, egalitarianism, and “social change” (27) and enshrining the spiritual and patriarchal social order of the medieval church—would spread to the United States and dozens of other countries. Interweaving analysis of far right religious discourse with reports of military intelligence agencies and correspondence of the Brazilian embassy to the Vatican, Cowan demonstrates their ideological symbiosis.
In subsequent chapters, Cowan fleshes out analogous tensions between social progressives and reactionaries in the Protestant churches in Brazil. Right-wing Evangelicals in Brazil, favored by sectors of the military regime for their cultural conservatism, emerged notably on the political scene as representatives and lobbyists at Brazil’s Constituent Assembly of 1987. The counterattack against progressives pushing for greater social equity and individual liberties in the nation’s transition to democracy was, in many ways, an ongoing deviation from Evangelicals’ traditional apoliticism—for which Brazilians claimed to take a “great lesson” from North American preachers such as Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and Oral Roberts (75).
Under military rule, Evangelicals had mobilized against communism, gender and sexual liberation, and religious liberalism. The latter, epitomized in the ecumenical, left-leaning stance of the Swiss-based World Council of Churches and its censure of the military’s human rights abuses, was a prominent bugbear of Brazil’s religious conservatives. Progressive Protestants in Brazil, typically hailing from mainline communities, were also besieged. Founded in 1959 with the support of US missionaries, the ultraconservative Confederation of Fundamentalist Evangelical Churches of Brazil (CIEF) aimed to defend “Biblical and historical Christianity” against “all the forms of theological and moral apostasy in the bosom of the Church of Christ in our days” (133).
Brazilian Evangelical preachers networked with their North American counterparts; participated in the global Christian right’s International Policy Forum, with its dedication to “free enterprise” and “traditional family moral values”; hosted a meeting of the fundamentalist International Council of Christian Churches; and even served as missionaries in the United States. Here too, Cowan traces the military government’s mutually beneficial relationship with conservative Evangelicals (including key support for media licensing) that would serve to buttress the explosive growth of this community—particularly among poorer and nonwhite Brazilians—over recent decades.
Conservative Christians thus found common political ground across religious denominations and national borders during the Cold War and its aftermath. On multiple occasions, Cowan ticks off the laundry list uniting the religious right: “anticommunism; a strident, detailed moralism; antiecumenism; defense of hierarchy per se; antistatist dedication to private property and free enterprise; and vociferous defense of the primacy of the supernatural in a world perceived to be increasingly secularized” (19). It espoused the sanctity of the spiritual, reverence for social hierarchy, nostalgia for an imagined past, and a politics of victimhood. Cowan’s work can be read as an urgent action item, a reckoning with the religious right’s historical roots in the Americas, its transnational force, and its contemporary political crusade. The Brazilian case study, which overshadows the US component, thus serves to underscore a broader international phenomenon.
This rich study is not without its shortcomings. Dichotomies in religious politics are fleshed out, but contradictions and nuances less so: the liberationist wing of the Catholic Church, after all, was never that progressive when it came to the legalization of abortion. And it was under military rule that divorce was legalized in Brazil in 1977. In analyzing the rise and resilience of a religious-political movement, Cowan might have ventured beyond the rhetoric of leaders to explore the lived religion of rank-and-file right-wing Christians in Brazil or the United States. Anthropologists and religious studies scholars have mined such practices and mindsets for years; in Brazilianist scholarship, John Burdick’s pathbreaking Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena (1996) explores the logistical and ideological appeals of Pentecostalism and Afro-Brazilian religions over the Catholic Church’s liberationist Christian Base Communities. And although Cowan consistently emphasizes Brazilian agency in the making of the Christian right, a shining example, the global empire of the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God), curiously gets just passing mention, as does the so-called prosperity gospel, intrinsic to the presumed appeal of certain Evangelical preachings and tie-ins to the politics of neoliberalism.
While Cowan might have engaged more extensively with the sociology and anthropology of religion, he has uncovered fascinating material about the scale and scope of Brazilian right-wing religious thought and leadership. His scholarship offers an important contribution to the study of the Christian far right in the Americas and will be of considerable interest to historians and social scientists.
