Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns

My first book, Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict over Cold War Human Rights Policy published in September 2020 with Cornell University Press, argues that debates among Central American and U.S. Catholics over the Church’s direction influenced Ronald Reagan’s policies toward Central America. The flash-point for these intra-Catholic disputes was the December 1980 political murder of four American Catholic missionaries in El Salvador: Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan.

Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns contends the intra-Catholic debate intensified as conservative, anticommunist Catholics played instrumental roles in crafting U.S. policy to fund the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan contras, and as liberal Catholics protested against it. To gain support for U.S. policy, non-Catholics, including Reagan, interjected themselves into this intra-Catholic divide by questioning Catholic opponents’ patriotism and their authenticity as Catholics. Critics focused on Maryknoll nuns, missionaries who contested Reagan’s interpretation of events in Central America, as the epitome of Americans’ lack of support for U.S. Cold War foreign policy, of Catholics’ abandonment of anti-communism, and of nuns’ changing role within the Church.

Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns highlights religious actors as human rights advocates, decenters U.S. actors in international relations by showing the interplay between Central American and U.S. Catholics, and challenges the idea that only evangelical Protestants held sway over Reagan by exposing Catholics’ influence on U.S.-Central America policy debates.

Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns won the 2020 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, from the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute. The award honors the best current, non-fiction book published in English on human rights, democracy, and social justice in contemporary Latin America. The American Catholic Historical Association honored Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns with the 2021 John Gilmary Shea Prize for the most “original and distinguished contribution” to the history of the Catholic Church.

You can read a roundtable on the book and my response here. The book is also available through Amazon.