Evangelical churches have grown by 543% in 20 years in Brazil, according to a survey carried out by researchers at the University of Sao Paulo.
In 1990, there were just over 7,000 evangelical churches in the country. But by 2019 the number had surged to 109,560, with 17 new churches opening every day. This rate of expansion is so pronounced that one respected Brazilian demographer believes that evangelical Christians will outnumber Roman Catholics in under a decade from now.
The survey divided Christian denominations into four main groups: missionary: Baptist; Presbyterian and Methodist churches, with others including undetermined and Pentecostal denominations. The latter have the largest number of churches, nearly 49,000, followed by undetermined (25,554), missionary (22,400) and neo-Pentecostals (12,825). The researchers point out that the explosion of evangelical churches is matched by the increase in the number of evangelicals in Brazil, who could become a majority in the coming years.
'...evangelicalism will surpass Catholicism by 2032...'
The latest Demographic Census carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (BIGS) shows that the number of evangelicals in the country more than doubled between 1990 and 2010. In 1990, 9% of the population was evangelical, in 2010, evangelicals were already 22.2%. According to another survey by private polling research institute Datafolha, 31% of Brazilians identified themselves as evangelicals in 2020, compared with just 51% who consider themselves Roman Catholics.
José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a demography expert at BIGS, said in 2020: 'It's clear that the number of Catholics has decreased at a faster rate over the past few years. From the end of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century, the Catholic Church lost about 1% of its followers per decade. From the 1990s on, it started to shrink about 1% per year'.
Alves believes that this process has further accelerated since 2010 and he now estimates that the current rate of Catholic decline is 1.2% per year, compared to annual evangelical growth of 0.8%. If nothing changes, evangelicalism will surpass Roman Catholicism in Brazil by 2032, he calculates.
