Scholars of the US Christian Right tend to approach their study through an exceptionalist lens that shows a unique set of circumstances leading to the various incarnations of the movement over time. The new conventional wisdom from Randall Balmer and others demonstrates that the religious right was animated in its modern incarnation primarily by racial concerns, specifically in response to the federal government's intervention in segregation academies and universities throughout the South. Only later did the nascent movement pivot to correlated issues of abortion, gay rights, and women's rights. What other country would confront the “American dilemma” accompanied with the sexual politics of the 1960s that together played such pivotal roles to produce reactionary religious right politics?

This is where Moral Majorities Across the Americas steps in to enlarge the frame to look globally, with a special focus on Brazil. Comparisons are often made between the US and Brazil—they are both large, racially diverse, and largely Christian. Brazil has few white people and has quite different racial dynamics; it did not suffer an American-style Civil War and its associated history. Spoiler alert: even without American racial politics, Brazil developed a similar religious right reactionary movement. Of course the movement's contours are shaped by the circumstances of the country, but the parallels are almost uncanny even if there are still remarkable differences.

There is a lot going on in this deeply researched manuscript. The archival material is superb, neatly integrated, and overstuffed into the chapters. Even the two-page summary in the conclusion introduces new material. Naturally, I was a bit overwhelmed with it given that I prefer to run such material through a regression model to summarize relationships. I'll quickly summarize the book's contents before offering some perspective on how it might work for social scientists.

The book begins with grand ambitions to provide the explanations for how Brazil and the US ended up with the religious right politics of Trump and Bolsonaro. The argument, perhaps, is best stated on p. 12, “[T]he contemporary Right…can only be understood by comprehending the variety of Rights…as a result of a fundamentally transnational set of processes.” And, he argues, Brazil played a particularly important role in that transnational set of forces, even though most of the book is focused inside Brazil. Chapter 1 focuses on the early Right activity among Catholics, while Chapter 2 looks to the Right among evangelicals and their links to the military government drawing on extensive material from the secret services, before turning to the progressive religious left in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 turns to transnational linkages—correspondence, visits, and conference attendance—before Chapter 5 provides some summary assessment of the “themes” that unite the Right: anti-ecumenical ecumenism, anti-communism, opposition to secularization, conditional support for intrusive government, and the victimhood of traditionalists. More specifically, the Right supported private property, rejected pluralism, were ardent nationalists, and favored traditional culture. These themes are abundantly clear throughout the volume, backed with extensive remarks from a wide variety of archival material.

In the end, this was a frustrating book for me as a social scientist. Cowan, a historian, did very little thinking about creations of religious right movements across countries. Instead, the analysis is confined to documenting correspondence links, visits, and attendance at conferences. While not inconsequential, it begs the question of how such organizations were in place to conduct such correspondence in the first place, what the conditions were like in each country, and what is the direction of influence. It remains a deux ex machina left to “a history of conservative activism” (p. 2). Second, it wasn't clear whether Cowan was more concerned with national religious right movements or a transnational religious right movement—the presence of “transnational” is notably missing on the cover page, but the book focuses considerable attention on the transnational. Related, it seems there were several instances or waves of the religious right in Brazil over time as in the US, but the book was rather fluid about which links were particular to what time periods. It was opaque to me whether those links extended through time, but also across space—I don't know how Brazilian religious rights groups interrelated, if at all.

Third, I can't help but constantly ponder denominators and Cowan does not share my affliction. In the end, I do not have a sense of how big the religious right was in Brazil throughout these time periods. Nor does the book offer much in the way of contextualization of the American case. For instance, Carl McIntire is a frequently noted player in the book and, indeed, he was important in starting the International Council of Christian Churches in 1948 to counter the World Council of Churches. The ICCC still exists, though it is hard to find, does not have a public budget, and does not appear to have a website. McIntire and his ACCC and ICCC have not been noted as major players in US Christian Right politics from the 1970s on; the Bible Presbyterian Church which he was instrumental in starting has 33 churches in the denomination. Moreover, I have no sense of how big the Brazilian organizations were, how frequently the various themes were discussed, and how their messages disseminated in Brazilian society. These strike me as critical questions.

If you are interested in Brazil's politics, then Cowan's incredible archival work will likely resonate. Scholars of international conservative movements will likely find the links and conference activity discussed to be of importance. Likewise, “[T]he book is…a history of themes” (p. 6), which may appeal to those studying comparative conservatisms. Social scientists who study religion and politics or who study race, religion, and conservatism are likely to be frustrated by the lack of engagement with the relationships between those forces and the lack of attention to how extensive these groups and their activities were.