Brazil’s changing religious landscape
I was surprised to learn that today, November 30th was a holiday, because it isn’t on the national calendar. It turns out that it is a holiday in the Federal District, Brazil’s Washington, DC, and a few local jurisdictions. Today is Evangelical Day. This lines up perfectly with a topic I’ve had on my list of future blog posts: the shifting religious demographic in Brazil.
Brazil has been an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country since it was colonized by Portugal in the 16th century. King João III sent a Jesuit mission to the territory in 1549, and the recruitment of indigenous people ensued in the name of education and evangelization, which often shamefully involved forced labor.
Catholicism has been the dominant religion in Brazil for all of its history and was the official state religion from 1500 to 1889. In modern times, the Catholic church remained powerful and integrated in prevailing politics, supporting Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian regime in the 1930s. With the coup d’etat and subsequent military-civilian dictatorship beginning in 1964 the Catholic church became a voice of dissent and swung so far left that it was considered the most socially radical in Latin America. Priests and nuns were some of the victims of torture and disappearances.
After the end of the dictatorship in the late 1980s, the Catholic church in Brazil moved back toward conservatism, perhaps in reaction to the liberalization of Vatican II, and perhaps because of the swelling ranks of protestants in the country, particularly Pentecostals (such as the Assembly of God), and subsequently Neopentecostals.
Brazil is the largest Roman Catholic country in the world and the church is interwoven throughout the culture. I was struck by a mundane, but potent, exemplar of this recently. I was planning a lunch with a friend, and we decided to make a Mediterranean pasta salad. She wondered what I usually used as the macaroni. I said ditalini, small tubes. I didn’t know how to say ditalini in Portuguese, so we looked together at images on Google. “Ah, she said, Ave Maria.” Then ensued moments of hilarity as I tried to understand how that could be the name. She said the larger macaroni of this type, what I would call ditali, is called Pai Nosso (The Lord’s Prayer). Because it’s a longer prayer, and the macaroni is larger.
Ditalini in Brazil
The prevalence of evangelical churches has surged in recent decades, even while Catholicism remains in the majority. From 2000 to 2010, the percentage of Catholics dropped from 74% to 65% of the population, with the percentage of Protestants growing 15% to 22%. A Datafolha survey in 2020 reported that 50% of Brazilians responded that they were Catholics, 31% evangelicals, and 10% stated no religion. Other responses were: 3% spiritualist, 2% Umbanda, Candomblé or other Afro-Brazilian, with Jewish only 0.3%.
In Brazil, evangelico is an inexact term widely used to describe conservative Protestants. My impression from travel in Brazil since the 1970s is that the Assembly of God made huge inroads in rural areas over the decades; the Pentecostal denomination began in Arkansas in the United States in 1914 and put its energy in missions to far flung regions. It seems nearly every small town has an Assembly of God church, often in a humble store front painted blue on the outside. Being evangelico in Brazil was a lonely place until recent decades, when other non-denominational groups became hugely attractive to many Brazilians, with their use of music and fervor of the spirit, and it must be noted, television. These charismatic elements are seen most prominently in the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, UCKG), whose Bishop and founder Edir Macedo is the owner of the multi-billion-dollar broadcasting conglomerate, RecordTV. An article in The Guardian newspaper just yesterday reported on the UCKG’s coercion and exploitation of adolescent members of their youth group in London, noting that Bishop Macedo has been included in Forbes list of billionaires.
The evangelical movement in Brazil does not shy away from politics, and is most often associated with the current president, Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, speaks fervently as an evangelical believer, and evangelicos account for a large proportion of Bolsonaro’s political supporters, who strongly support Bolsonaro’s positions on gender and sexuality—often expressed in the form of misogyny and homophobia.
There have been ugly examples recently of intolerance toward non-Christian religions, with the Commission to Combat Religious Intolerance reporting the majority of attacks in the state of Rio de Janeiro in 2021 were against Afro-Brazilian religious groups, with more than half of these attackers linked to evangelical religions. In October, followers of Bolsonaro caused chaos at a celebration of Nossa Senhora da Aparecida, considered as principal patroness of Brazil by Catholic believers.
Bolsonaro lost the presidential election and his opponent, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, is to be inaugurated on January 1, 2023. Even Lula, previously not known for verbalizing religious views, courted the evangelical movement during his campaign, though most likely with limited success.
Questions of belief, doctrine and political affiliations aside, my unscientific impression is that the evangelical movement, writ large, is surging in Brazil’s popular culture. Today’s Federal District holiday, Evangelical Day, is just one reflection of that.
NB: I set the title of this blog post before beginning research online, where I discovered the Pew Research Center framed an article the same way. You can’t copyright titles, but I think this parallel confirms what a phenomenon the religious changes are in Brazil.