Religious Tendencies in Brazil: Disenchantment, Secularization, and Sociologists

Abstract

According to Comte’s project, Sociology was founded in order to replace Theology. This chapter is devoted to the study of this principle as applied to two instances of religious change in Brazil. First, the rise of a “holy alliance” between social scientists and the practitioners of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, reinterpreted as a religion that leads to the exit from religion, due to the scant attention it attributes to the notions of sin, guilt, repression, etc. This has led to the devaluation of the spontaneous diversity and pluralism of the African influenced religions of Brazil, which are increasingly replaced by a common ritual and theological denominator, elaborated by social scientists according to their own philosophy of religion and history. Second, the Theology of Liberation, viewed as the mundanization of Catholicism, which, not unlike the intellectual upgrading of Candomblé, was largely done under the guidance of social scientists and thinkers (In a way, the movements toward both the “churchifying” of Candomblé and to the “sociologization” of Catholicism are part and parcel of the same basic trend toward secularization “in the South American way”). Yet, despite huge intellectual investment, the Afro-Brazilians did not give up their pluralism and did not develop a single, coherent theodicy of their own. Similarly, the effort at mundanization and deprivatization of the Theology of Liberation led to the devaluation of an “enchanted” theodicy. But the people soon found other forms of enchantment through en masse adhesion to Pentecostalism. Indeed, according to a major premise of this chapter, there can hardly be religion, in spite of efforts to give it a rationalized theology, without a core of implausibility, due to its necessarily “enchanted” origin.