I have never been able to witness Brazil’s super-charged Pentecostal scene but I am still remembering how, 40 years back, no one ever thought that the world’s largest Catholic country would pivot so quickly toward Protestantism.
Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, we thought all of South America was a Catholic monolith.
We found out later that folks there were listening to radio broadcasts from the likes of the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and other evangelists and finding out they actually had a choice when it came to churches. As this Washington Post article says:
In the past generation, Brazil has undergone a spiritual transformation like few other places on the planet. As recently as 1980, about 9 in 10 people here identified as Catholic. But that proportion has cratered to 50 percent, and will soon be overtaken by evangelicalism, which now accounts for one-third of the population.
The i story isn’t about statistics, actually. It begins by retelling how a radical Pentecostal group called the “Soldiers of Jesus” visit a spiritualist priest belonging to the Candomblé sect and orders him to either stop practicing macumba (his beliefs) or be killed.
It’s a decision more Brazilians are being forced to make. As evangelicalism reconfigures the spiritual map in Latin America’s largest country, attracting tens of millions of adherents, winning political power and threatening Catholicism’s long-held dominance, its most extreme adherents — often affiliated with gangs — are increasingly targeting Brazil’s non-Christian religious minorities.
Priests have been killed. Children have been stoned. An elderly woman was seriously injured. Death threats and taunts are common.
