letter from Brazil
Since the 1970s, a religious shift has taken place in Latin America. As a proportion of the population, Catholics have declined greatly and evangelicals have increased rapidly. These developments are causally linked.
In the course of this demographic transformation, the Catholic Church lost its privileged position in society and its privileged access to politics. It was replaced by a large number of diverse and autonomous evangelical churches, especially Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal ones.
In absolute numbers, Brazil is the country with the second-largest Christian population in the world (after the USA). It is also the largest Catholic country and the place of the evangelical congregations with the largest number of members in the world. The 2010 Brazilian census identified more than 42 million people of evangelical faith, representing 22.2% of the total population. According to statistics, the part of the population that declares itself to be evangelical should, for the first time, exceed the total number of Catholics in the country from 2032, when the absolute number of followers of each of the two religions should be around 90 million. According to a nationally representative survey conducted in October 2017, about 32% of Brazilians already call themselves evangelicals.
The substantial social weight of evangelical churches is linked, among other things, to their importance as ‘problem solvers’ in precarious sectors of society. Religious communities are increasingly extending this commitment to the political sphere. In Brazil, the interaction between evangelicals and politics has an unparalleled dynamism. The political relevance of evangelicals in this country is based on a social significance that goes beyond the demographic weight of the faith community. The ‘evangelical world’ of Brazil is highly differentiated and now comprises various social strata. The growing social relevance and political power of evangelical churches has gained prominence particularly in Brazil. In the October 2018 elections, evangelicals exerted an important influence in the election of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a former member of the army who was baptised in the River Jordan by an evangelical pastor. He is running for re-election later this year. Will Brazilian evangelicals re-elect him President?
