During the first half of the 20th century, Brazilian Protestants turned to their pens and periodicals to defend the legitimacy and beneficial nature of their presence in a majority Catholic nation. This period—spanning Brazil’s first republic, Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian Estado novo, and the developmentalist era of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961)—witnessed several regime changes and new national constitutions. Amid these political shifts, the Brazilian Catholic church sought to increase its cultural and symbolic dominance in the country. Meanwhile, several Brazilian Protestant groups came together to form the Confederação Evangélica do Brasil (CEB) in 1934, both to coordinate Protestant educational and social work and defend freedom of Protestant religious expression. With their denominational roots in Brazil extending less than one hundred years and their ties to US mission boards making them appear suspiciously foreign, Brazilian Protestants vehemently defended their patriotism. Relying on the writings of many CEB leaders, the organization’s periodical Unum corpus, and biannual reports, I argue that the Brazilian ecumenical leaders used several strategies to create a rhetorical defense of Brazilian Protestant legitimacy. They expressed occasional appreciation for Brazilian Catholics, celebrated Brazilian Protestant history and public recognition of contemporary Brazilian Protestants, and stridently opposed Catholic attempts to achieve cultural or social dominance. I also argue that because they maintained a constant defensive posture, the Brazilian Protestant ecumenists of the 1930s–1950s embraced a vision of ecumenism that explicitly excluded Roman Catholicism.

The desegregation of Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) offers a critical case study for scholars of American religious history, illuminating how white evangelical institutions responded to the racial transformations of the post-civil rights era. Unlike southern evangelical colleges that defended segregation on overt theological grounds, DTS never explicitly framed its exclusion of Black students within a scriptural mandate. Instead, the seminary’s shift from racial exclusion to intentional Black student recruitment in the 1970s reflects what Martin Luther King Jr. once described as a “more cautious than courageous” approach. Anchored in biblical literalism, DTS president John Walvoord’s reluctance to use scripture to justify segregation played a key role in the school’s transformation. This article fills a gap in the historiography by examining how institutional culture, theological commitments, and broader cultural pressures converged to produce a quiet and incremental model of desegregation—neither overtly racist nor actively prophetic—offering a more complex portrait of evangelicalism and race in the second half of the twentieth century.

While much critical scholarship has pointed out that liberal peacebuilding can contribute to consolidating authoritarianism in host countries, little is known about the political effects in the deployer country. This article analyses the relationship between foreign and domestic peace processes and far-right forces in Brazil. We ask if Brazil’s leadership role in the United Nations’ Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (2004–17) and its own domestic pacification efforts in Rio de Janeiro with the Pacifying Police Units (2008–14) contributed to the strengthening of the far right in Brazil. Relying on a combination of literature review, document analysis, and fieldwork interviews, we argue that Brazil’s engagement in liberal peacebuilding processes strengthened the far right in Brazil in two important ways. The first was through a military capture of politics, as a large portion of the military elite that participated in both interventions enabled the military to take a more prominent role in Brazil’s domestic politics. Second, Port-au-Prince and Rio de Janeiro became crucial sites for experimentation with a range of policy ideas that Bolsonaro later capitalised on, namely, a punitive turn in security policies and the mobilisation of conservative Evangelical actors and morals to support and justify the military occupation.

This article tells the story of Lottie Beth Hobbs, one of the most important figures of the anti-ERA movement – and therefore a founding mother of the Religious Right. Although opposition of fundamentalist women to the ERA increasingly has been recognized in the founding of the Religious Right, Hobbs’s role remains underexplored. Relying on a moral and political framework indebted to her lifelong commitment to the Churches of Christ, Hobbs spearheaded a rhetorical and ideological shift that first united disparate conservative causes under a “pro-family” banner, then focused their attention on the threat of a tentacular secular humanism. By focusing on Hobbs’s career, this article bridges two scholarly foci on modern American conservatism, one highlighting anti-ERA organizing in the 1970s and the other focused on “family values” activism during the Reagan administration.

In the aftermath of World War II, eugenics and the pseudoscientific base used to justify its practices are generally understood to have phased off the scene. If, however, eugenics never actually disappeared but has been persistent, and in turn becomes one of the best explanations for mass incarceration today, what role did Christianity—especially Evangelicalism—play in this unprecedented moment of imprisonment? Building on legal scholarship identifying the significant role of eugenic philosophy that manifests in penal policy and ongoing phenomena into the early twenty-first century, this article examines key figures in the backdrop of eugenics’ particular early developments, and leading figures—namely, Billy Graham and Prison Fellowship’s Chuck Colson—whose ministries operated in close proximity to the prison during the latter twentieth century and especially over the past fifty years as incarceration rates skyrocketed. After examining several important theological tenets reflected within Evangelicalism that are compatible with eugenic logic, a critical approach is developed drawing from more robust theological considerations that if appropriated earlier might have found evangelicals resisting the mass incarceration building efforts rather than supporting them.

This paper explores the origins of two different emergences of the Christian worldview concept, and their relationship to understandings of cultural conflict. It will offer an analysis of the historical, cultural, and theological context for each emergence. In both cases, worldview was what Ian Hunter has termed a “combat concept.” Section I of the paper will offer an overview of the origins of Christian worldview thinking in the late nineteenth century through the thought of James Orr (1844–1913) and Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Section II will deal with the second major emergence of Christian worldview as a combat concept in the 1970s, focusing on figures like Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984), Chuck Colson (1931–2012), and Nancy Pearcy (1951–). Both contexts exhibited increased cultural and religious pluralism, and conservative Christians displayed a heightened sense of ideological conflict. Worldview became a tool for differentiation from, and contention with, the “other.”

This article explores the impact conservative criticism has had on companies’ behaviour in Brazil. We investigate whether Natura and Boticário − the two largest Brazilian cosmetics companies − have maintained or reversed LGBTQ-oriented marketing and advertising when confronted with criticism from conservative groups. We draw on interviews with stakeholders, company investors and LGBTQ activists, in addition to complaints filed with the Conselho Nacional de Autorregulamentação Publicitária (National Council for Advertising Self-Regulation, CONAR), and companies’ documents on finance and social responsibility. Overall, even when faced with a negative backlash from conservative opinion, companies have persisted in their commitment to diversity issues and LGBTQ inclusion in marketing. However, firms have also employed evasive strategies, such as targeted communication and less controversial forms of retail design, signalling compromises with conservative stakeholders and customers.

This article presents a new approach to understanding ritual: embodied world construction. Informed by phenomenology and a philosophy of embodiment, this approach argues that rituals can (re)shape the structure of an individual's perceptual world. Ritual participation transforms how the world appears for an individual through the inculcation of new perceptual habits, enabling the perception of objects and properties which could not previously be apprehended. This theory is then applied to two case studies from an existing ethnographic study of North American evangelicalism, indicating how the theory of embodied world construction can shed new light on how individuals are shaped by ritual practice.