Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns

In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns, Theresa Keeley analyzes the role of intra-Catholic conflict within the framework of U.S. foreign policy formulation and execution during the Reagan administration. She challenges the preponderance of scholarship on the administration that stresses the influence of evangelical Protestants on foreign policy toward Latin America. Especially in the case of U.S. engagement in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Keeley argues, the bitter debate between U.S. and Central American Catholics over the direction of the Catholic Church shaped President Reagan's foreign policy.

The flash point for these intra-Catholic disputes was the December 1980 political murder of four American Catholic missionaries in El Salvador. Liberal Catholics described nuns and priests in Central America who worked to combat structural inequality as human rights advocates living out the Gospel's spirit. Conservative Catholics saw them as agents of class conflict who furthered the so-called Gospel according to Karl Marx. The debate was an old one among Catholics, but, as Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns contends, it intensified as conservative, anticommunist Catholics played instrumental roles in crafting U.S. policy to fund the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan Contras.

Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns describes the religious actors as human rights advocates and, against prevailing understandings of the fundamentally secular activism related to human rights, highlights religion-inspired activism during the Cold War. In charting the rightward development of American Catholicism, Keeley provides a new chapter in the history of U.S. diplomacy and shows how domestic issues such as contraception and abortion joined with foreign policy matters to shift Catholic laity toward Republican principles at home and abroad.

Theresa Keeley is Assistant Professor of U.S. and the World at the University of Louisville.

Theresa Keeley has written a book that is well-researched, timely, and provocative. This is an excellent book and provides both scholars and the general public an opportunity to relook at the Cold War and Central America, which ultimately has become a prelude to the ongoing and current debates about how religion, gender, and culture intersect and shape the role of the United States in the world.

Keeley's narrative is a timely addition to the limited scholarly work on the Catholic dimension of Reagan's Central American policy. Her study is a highly readable, unbiased account of the contentious policy debates that divided Washington and the nation during the 1980s.

Once again, Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns is a fascinating study which places the messiness of religion at its center and illuminates the Catholic dimensions of U.S. policy towards Central America. For scholars of Catholicism, it offers insights into how to study lived religion and gender, as well as how to consider liberation theology in the American context. It is a thought-provoking work, inviting us to grapple with the significance of religion to this particular historical moment.

William Michael Schmidli, Leiden University, author of The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere:

Theresa Keeley deftly examines archival material ranging from presidential libraries to religious organizations' records, offering a fresh approach to U.S. interventionism. In an innovative analysis that integrates U.S. foreign relations, religion, gender, and competing ideas about development, Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns convincingly demonstrates the centrality of intra-Catholic debates in shaping U.S. policy toward Central America during the Cold War.

Virginia Garrard, University of Texas, co-author of Latin America and the Modern World:

I'd been waiting years for a book like this. In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns Theresa Keeley provides an enormously important take on the Central American conflict and its impact. Her precise snapshots of what socially engaged Christianity really looked like in the 1970s and 1980s are invaluable.