Moral Majorities across the Americas

Worry of moral decline. Fears of international communism. Changing sexual mores. The rise of celebrity ministers, new religious publications, and televangelism. The awakening of grassroots conservative activists who not only forge new alliances but also enter politics. Readers might be excused if they assume those phrases describe the growth of the religious Right in the United States. However, as Benjamin A. Cowan expertly points out, such an assumption showcases how narrowly many historians based in the United States have come to interpret what are larger religious and political reactions to the events of the 1960s and 1970s. Though familiar names such as Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and Billy Graham appear in the pages of Moral Majorities across the Americas, Cowan's focus is on Brazil and how its religious Right worked with, learned from, and helped inform its cousin to the north. Cowan calls our attention to the transnational nature of religious conservatives and the issues that galvanized them in the second half of the twentieth century. In his award-winning Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil (2016), Cowan showcased the importance of taking the arguments of the right wing seriously and how those arguments resonated widely and help us better understand the allure of authoritarian and dictatorial governments throughout Central America and South America. Returning to both Brazil and the larger theme of its religious Right, he explores the connections between religious and political conservatives in Brazil and the United States in Moral Majorities across the Americas. Readers will become familiar with the likes of Pastor Nelson Fanini and other founders of the Brazilian religious Right whose work at moral activism became intertwined with their North American counterparts such as Swaggart. They will also be treated to a wonderfully written account that describes how the conservative or traditionalist members of both Brazil's Catholic majority and Protestant minority decided to make common cause to save their nation. That discussion alone should be enough for those historians who study the religious Right in the United States to pick up the book

Authoritarianism · Communism · Democracy · Grassroots · Great Awakening · Immorality · Morality · Mores · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theme (computing · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Religion and Society in Latin America

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