Abstract
Contemporary debates in Brazil over the meaning of the label “evangélico” and who has the right to use it reveal significant cleavages that divide Brazil’s Protestant populations. Census results from the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IGBE) for 2000 and 2010 also point to the complexity of religious categories in the nation’s religious marketplace. Some evangelicals have found a middle way between theological and political extremes to their left and right. This chapter charts the path of these middle-way evangelicals, their formation of networks, parachurch bodies, and publishing organs, as well as their increasing influence in the academy and in the formulation of public policy at national, state, and local levels.
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Notes
- 1.
Ricardo Alexandre, “Afinal, Quem São os Evangélicos?” Carta Capital, last modified September 9, 2014, https://www.cartacapital.com.br/sociedade/afinal-quem-sao-201cos-evangelicos201d-2053.html.
- 2.
Alexandre, “Afinal, Quem São os Evangélicos?”
- 3.
On these and related themes, see Rudolf von Sinner, “Pentecostalism and Citizenship in Brazil: Between Escapism and Dominance,” International Journal of Public Theology 6 (2012): 99–117; Maria das Dores Campos Machado, “Evangelicals and Politics in Brazil: The Case of Rio de Janeiro ,” Religion, State and Society 40, no. 1 (2012): 69–91; and Paul Freston , “The Many Faces of Evangelical Politics in Latin America,” in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Paul Freston (Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–36.
- 4.
The IBGE classified the evangelical churches as follows: “1) Pentecostal/Neo-Pentecostal Evangelicals: Assembly of God, Christian Congregation, Brazil for Christ, Four Square Gospel , Universal Kingdom of God, House of Blessing, God is Love, Maranatha, New Life, Evangelical Community, undetermined renewed evangelical and other evangelicals of Pentecostal origin; 2) Mission Evangelical Church: Lutheran , Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Adventist and other Mission Evangelicals; 3) Undetermined Evangelical Church: other evangelical groups” cf. ibid.
- 5.
The first Brazilian Pentecostal evangelical denomination, the Assemblies of God, was founded in the city of Belém in Pará in 1910 by two Swedish missionaries who came from the USA. This church, together with its various branches, is still the largest Brazilian evangelical denomination. According to many scholars, the first Neo-Pentecostal evangelical denomination was the God is Love church founded in 1962 by missionary David Miranda, recently deceased. See R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 25–50.
- 6.
While it has become very common since the last decades of the twentieth century for some Brazilian Catholics to identify themselves as “non-practicing,” evangelicals tend not to do so. Instead, it is often a third party (evangelical or otherwise) who will identify an individual as a “non-practicing evangelical.” Indeed, we have met many evangelicals throughout the country who, while not connected with a specific church, use other terms and expressions to define their situation, such as: “I am evangelical” or “I am Protestant”; “I am a believer, but I am not connected with any church”; “I have distanced myself from the Lord and from the church, but I am evangelical,” etc.
- 7.
Paul Freston , “Como Será a Igreja Evangélica Brasileira de 2040?” Ultimato, November/December 2011, accessed June 2014, http://www.ultimato.com.br/revista/artigos/333/como-sera-a-igreja-evangelica-brasileira-de-2040/sem+igreja.
- 8.
For an interesting analysis of how the attempts of various groups and political organizations to co-opt the demands of Brazilian civil society have been frustrated since the end of the Military Dictatorship and demonstration of 2013, see Marcos Nobre, Imobilismo em movimento: Da redemocratização ao governo Dilma [Immobility in motion: From redemocratization to the Dilma government] (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2013). For more on the 2013 demonstrations, see the chapter entitled “Considerações finais, perspectivas: as Revoltas de Junho e tendências do novo modelo de sociedade” [Final Considerations, Perspectives: The June Revolt and Tendencies of the New Model of Society], 142–58.
- 9.
Orivaldo Pimentel Lopes, Jr ., “A Espiritualidade e a Identidade Evangélica Nacional,” in O Melhor da Espiritualidade Brasileira, ed. Nelson Bomilcar (São Paulo: Mundo Cristão, 2005), 73–91 (75).
- 10.
Pimentel Lopes, Jr., “A Espiritualidade y a Identidade Evangélica Nacional,” 78.
- 11.
Carlos Mondragon, Like Leaven in the Dough: Protestant Social Thought in Latin America, 1920–1950, trans. Daniel Miller and Ben Post (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 10.
- 12.
Mondragon, Like Leaven in the Dough, 17.
- 13.
Carlos Mondragón , ed. Ecos del Bicentenario. El protestantismo y las nuevas repúblicas latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Kairós/UNAM/FTL, 2011). English translations of these same essays were published as a special issue of Lindy Scott, ed., Journal of Latin American Theology: Christian Reflections from the Latino South 6, no. 2 (2011).
- 14.
For this sort of evangelical self-examination, see Nelson Bomilcar, ed., O Melhor da Espiritualidade Brasileira; Abdruschin Schaeffer Rocha, et al., Respostas evangélicas à religiosidade brasileira (São Paulo, Edições Vida Nova, 2004); and Ariovaldo Ramos, Nossa Igreja Brasileira: Uma opinião sobre a história recente (São Paulo, Editora Hagnos, 2002).
- 15.
Lyndon Araújo dos Santos, “Protestantism and the Beginning of the Brazilian Republic: Addresses, Strategies, and Conflicts (1889–1930),” Journal of Latin American Theology 6, no. 2 (2011): 19–40. For the early twentieth-century analysis of the journalist in question, see João do Rio, As Religiões no Rio, Coleção Biblioteca Manancial no. 47 (Rio de Janeiro, Editora Nova Aguilar, 1976).
- 16.
Ariel Corpus, “Secularism and Freedom of Conscience: The Historical Tie to Mexican Presbyterianism,” Journal of Latin American Theology 6, no. 2 (2011): 89–106.
- 17.
Daniel Salinas, Latin American Theology in the 1970s : The Golden Age (Boston: Brill, 2011).
- 18.
Salinas, Latin American Theology in the 1970s: The Golden Age, 1–27.
- 19.
Salinas, Latin American Theology in the 1970s: The Golden Age, 70–81.
- 20.
Mortimer Arias, “Polemics and Restatement,” Christian Century 88, no. 22 (June 2, 1971): 698–700, quoted in Salinas, Latin American Theology in the 1970s: The Golden Age, 87–88.
- 21.
Salinas, Latin American Theology in the 1970s: The Golden Age, 83–119.
- 22.
Salinas, Latin American Theology in the 1970s : The Golden Age, 121.
- 23.
Salinas, Latin American Theology in the 1970s: The Golden Age, 150.
- 24.
Salinas, Latin American Theology in the 1970s: The Golden Age, 160.
- 25.
Salinas, Latin American Theology in the 1970s: The Golden Age, 194.
- 26.
Antonio Carlos Costa , Convulsão Protestante: Quando a Teologia Foge do Templo e Abraça a Rua, Kindle edition (São Paulo: Mundo Cristão, 2015).
Bibliography
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———. “The Many Faces of Evangelical Politics in Latin America.” In Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Paul Freston, 3–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Mondragón, Carlos, ed. Ecos del Bicentenario. El protestantismo y las nuevas repúblicas latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Kairós/UNAM/FTL, 2011.
Mondragón, Carlos. Like Leaven in the Dough: Protestant Social Thought in Latin America, 1920–1950. Translated by Daniel Miller and Ben Post. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011.
Nobre, Marcos. Imobilismo em movimento: Da redemocratização ao governo Dilma. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2013.
Pimentel Lopes, Jr., Orivaldo. “A Espiritualidade e a Identidade Evangélica Nacional.” In O Melhor da Espiritualidade Brasileira, edited by Nelson Bomilcar, 73–91. São Paulo: Mundo Cristão, 2005.
Rio, João do. As Religiões no Rio, Coleção Biblioteca Manancial no. 47, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Nova Aguilar, 1976.
Salinas, Daniel. Latin American Theology in the 1970s: The Golden Age. Boston: Brill, 2011.
Von Sinner, Rudolf. “Pentecostalism and Citizenship in Brazil: Between Escapism and Dominance.” International Journal of Public Theology 6 (2012): 99–117.
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Morgan, R.J., Pereira, H.A. (2019). Which Evangélicos? Probing the Diversities Within Brazilian Protestantism and the Case for a “Middle Way”. In: Miller, E., Morgan, R. (eds) Brazilian Evangelicalism in the Twenty-First Century. Christianity and Renewal - Interdisciplinary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13686-4_3
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