Like several of its regional counterparts, Brazil’s 1964 coup attacked a reformist government that threatened the interests of an entrenched elite. To fully understand this attack, we must examine those interests and perceived threats to them, particularly in the realms of culture, religion, and morality. The coup not only fit into international Cold War maneuvering; it also conformed to a decades-long trajectory of moralism-as-countersubversion. Brazil’s coup plotters defined their enemies in terms that were vague, circumscribed by traditionalism, and culturally determined. There was, that is, a determinative tension between the “modernizing conservatism” of the regime and anti-modern forces that helped create it. To putschists and hard-liners, many of whom did not share the developmentalism attributed to the regime’s modernizers, the coup and dictatorship should aim to restore Brazil to a mythic, moralistic, Christian, anti-communist, and hierarchical past. As a result, moralism itself became one of the outstanding characteristics of the regime – and the rise of powerful, often extreme Evangelical conservatism (outsized in Brazil today) grew into the regime’s lasting legacy. Brazil’s towering Evangelical Right, an indomitable hallmark of its twenty-first-century politics, thus owes much to the conspiracy that brought dictatorship to Brazil in 1964.