Moral Majorities Across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the Creation of the Religious Right By Benjamin A. Cowan. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 304 pp. $29.95 (paper), $95.00 (hardcover).

Abstract

of Race can be read as a history of ideas companion to political and cultural histories of Anglo-Americanism like Kathleen Burk’s Old World, New World (2008). One of the blind spots of Bell’s Anglotopian subjects was that they saw Anglo-American racial amity as immanent, rather than as an identity that needed to be fostered and rejuvenated over time. Except for Wells, the thinking of few of the figures Bell writes about evolved much, and they seemingly learned little from the failures of earlier Anglo-American union visions. Perhaps, this is evidence that racial utopias are by their nature ahistorical, proverbial “castles in the sky” that remain evanescent, but whose pursuit causes real harm to those groups excluded from the providential community. It would be interesting for other scholars to extend Bell’s scholarship to look at how capital and class shaped visions of Anglo-American union—to what extent was this an elite, and furthermore a conservative, project, and to what extent was it a racial vision that manifested itself in different ways and forms in different parts of the late-Victorian global English-speaking society. One of the great merits of this book is how it suggests many fruitful further lines of inquiry on the nature of white supremacy and Anglo-Saxonism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.