Evangelical Brazil
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🔗 via aeon.co.
Highlights
Protestants account for one-third of the population, while the number of Catholics has just dipped below 50 per cent. By far the largest proportion of Brazilian Protestants are evangelicals, specifically Pentecostals, neo-Pentecostals and related branches. By the centenary of Raízes do Brasil in 2036, Protestants will outnumber Catholics in Brazil for the first time in the country’s 500-plus-year history.
utopian thinking probably died as far back as the 1964 military coup. But many have continued to uphold the country’s cultural traits as admirable and enviable – even models for the world.
‘Brazilianization’, a trope taken up by various intellectuals in recent decades, signals a universal tendency towards social inequality, urban segregation, informalisation of labour, and political corruption. Others, though, have sought to rescue a positive aspect: the country’s informality and ductility, particularly in relation to work, as well as its hybridisation, creolisation and openness to the world, made it already adapted to the new, global, postmodern capitalism that followed the Cold War.
By the 2000s, Brazil was witnessing peaceful, democratic alternation in government between centre-Left and centre-Right for practically the first time in its history. Under President Lula, it saw booming growth, combined with new measures of social inclusion. But underneath the surface of the globalisation wave that Brazil was surfing, violent crime was on the up, manufacturing was down, and inclusion was being bought on credit.
In 2013, it came to a shuddering halt. Rising popular expectations generated a crisis of representation – announced by the biggest mass street mobilisations in the country’s history. This was succeeded by economic crisis and then by institutional crisis, culminating in the parliamentary coup against Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff. Now all the energy seemed to be with a new Right-wing movement that dominated the streets. It was topped off by the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. Suddenly, eyes turned to the growing prominence of conservative Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal outlooks in national life.
In the final 2022 pre-election poll, evangelicals split 69-31 in Bolsonaro’s favour. Although he is Catholic, he was baptised in the River Jordan in 2016 by Pastor Everaldo, an important member of the Pentecostal Assembleia de Deus
The creationist and anti-gay Pentecostal Marcelo Crivella shocked many when he defeated a human rights activist to become mayor of Rio de Janeiro in 2016
The articulation between evangelicals and Bolsonaro only strengthened through his term. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s denial of the severity of the virus was, in part, a demonstration of evangelical coronafé, or corona-faith: ‘that confidence, that certainty that God is with you and that he will never, ever, at any time fail those who have believed in him,’
Later in his term, Bolsonaro nominated the ‘terribly evangelical’ Presbyterian pastor André Mendonça to an empty Supreme Court seat. Upon Congressional approval, the president’s wife Michelle, a crucial link to the evangelical public, was filmed crying, praying and speaking in tongues.
After Bolsonaro left office, his supporters stormed government buildings in Brasília
back in 1997 it was estimated that one-third of militants in the agrarian land reform movement, MST, were Pentecostals, which would have been double the rate of the local population at the time
Sixty years ago, Brazil’s population was evenly split between town and country. Now it is 88 per cent urban
the growth of evangelical Christianity in a society as unequal as Brazil is a phenomenon of the poor and working class
Conversion and dedication promises – and, in some cases, delivers – a better life: not just money, but also in terms of relationships, family and especially health
Brazil is the only country whose demonym finishes in the -eiro suffix in Portuguese. So you have the Francês, the Argentino, the Americano, the Israelense… but the Brasileiro. It suggests an occupation, like marceneiro (carpenter), pedreiro (bricklayer), mineiro (miner). To be Brazilian was not a state of being, but an activity, a doing.
- Protestant evangelicals—particularly Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals—are rapidly growing in Brazil and are expected to outnumber Catholics by 2036.
- Brazil experienced political shifts from economic growth under President Lula to crises leading to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the rise of right-wing leader Bolsonaro, who was strongly supported by evangelical Christians.
- Evangelical influence increased in national life, evident in Bolsonaro’s alliances with evangelical leaders, his COVID-19 denial reflecting ‘corona-faith’, and significant evangelical support in elections.
- The growth of evangelical Christianity among the poor and working class in an increasingly urban Brazil offers promises of betterment in finances, relationships, and health, reflecting a cultural shift where being Brazilian is seen as an active pursuit.