African-derived religions in Brazil include, most prominently, Candomblé and Umbanda, as well as Xango, Batuque, Cantimbo, and Macumba, which are regionally associated traditions. African-derived religions have played an important role in the formation of Afro-Brazilian ethnic identities, both historically and today. Such traditions have been both celebrated and denigrated at different times and by different actors, from the Catholic Church in the post-independence era—which characterized them as evidence of “backwards” African culture and Afro-Brazilians as failing to become “true Catholics”—to today’s Pentecostals, who condemn Candomblé and Umbanda as “devil worship.”

Not all African religions survived to become African-derived religions. Islam, for example, was the religion of many of the Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, and other slaves brought to Brazil, but was subsumed by other practices that gave rise to Candomblé and Umbanda. Thus, today’s practices represent an amalgam of various traditions, which continue to evolve in conversation with practitioners in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa. Though statistics report that Candomblé and other African-derived religious participants are few in number—under 5% of the population—this fails to reflect the many Brazilians who are not initiates but who nonetheless may visit a practitioners (such as a healer), perhaps to address a challenge around health, money, or love. In fact, the 2010 census found that 13% of the Brazilian population claim to have more than one religion, usually Catholic and Umbanda or Catholic and Spiritist.

As suggested by the common Brazilian saying, “if one does not come due to love, one comes due to pain,” solving the problems of life, particularly physical healing, is central to both Candomblé and Umbanda. Illness, diagnosis, and cure all have a supernatural aspect and many of the religious rituals are strategies for maintaining or restoring physical, mental, or social well-being. Possession is another characteristic of African-derived religion, locating liminality within the physical being.

Candomblé

Candomblé draws on the religious traditions of a multiplicity of African ethnic groups, but especially the Yoruba, Fon, and Bantu. Like Santeria and Voudoun elsewhere, Candomblé recognizes a pantheon of deities known as orishas (orixás), many of whom are associated with Catholic saints, a reflection of early syncretism under slavery as slaves were forced to hide their beliefs within the veil of Catholicism. Full participation requires initiation, a lengthy ceremonial process during which an initiate becomes bound to a particular orisha. Daily practice at a terreiro, a Candomblé temple, includes the fulfillment of various ritual obligations, offering food and sometimes animal sacrifices to an orisha or orishas, public and private celebrations, consultations with clients, and celebrations. Public festivities draw a wide range of onlookers, from devotees, to Brazilians and tourists for whom the cultural aspects of Candomblé appeal strongly.

Umbanda

Umbanda is a uniquely Brazilian faith that originated in Rio de Janeiro during the 1920s and spread extensively thereafter. Umbanda practitioners span a continuum of practice along a spectrum that includes elements of African traditions, Catholicism, Spiritism, Kardecism, Hinduism, Buddhism and various forms of mysticism. Practitioners also span a breadth of demographic identifiers. With its nationalist symbols and its white, middle-class adoption of Candomblé traditions Umbanda has a troubled past. To many, especially black practitioners of Candomblé, Umbanda is, at worst, another instance of racial exclusion. At best, middle-class institutional and intellectual leadership reproduces and perpetuates Brazil’s traditional patron-client structure within an urban setting. 

The Umbanda pantheon draws upon the racial troika of racial democracy, providing space for the spirits of old Africans, ex-slaves, and indigenous warrior as well as the white spirits privileged by the European and American-derived Spiritist traditions. Practitioners believe that the spirit world communicates with that of the living via spirit possession and that these spirits can intercede on people’s behalf. Rituals are the means by which such contact is made. Reincarnation, spiritual evolution, and healing also play roles of varying import depending upon the interpretation by the mãe- or pãe-de-santo (titles for female and male priests, respectively) of a particular temple. 

Umbanda’s lack of standardization, its innate syncretism, and its lack of exclusivity allows for continuous reinvention and reception to new cultures and adherents. For example, Umbanda has become popular among Japanese Brazilians. For those living in Brazil it provides a symbol of assimilation; for those who migrated to Japan in the final decades of the twentieth century it serves as a cultural marker. Rejected by the native born Japanese,  immigrants cloak themselves in an explicitly Brazilian identity. Its emphasis on holistic healing has also attracted Western Europeans and North Americans.

Sources:

Ushi Arakaki, “Japanese-Brazilians among Pretos-Velhos, Caboclos, Buddhist Monks, and Samurais:  An Ethnographic Study of Umbanda in Japan,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 249-70. 

Diana DeG. Brown, Umbanda Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil (Ann Arbor:  UMI Research Press, 1986).

Alejandro Frigerio, “Umbanda and Batuque in the Southern Cone:  Transnationalization as Cross-Border Religious Flow and Social Field,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez, (Leiden: Brill, 2013) pp. 165-95. 

Deirdre Meintel and Annick Hernandez, “Transnational Authenticity:  An Umbanda Temple in Montreal,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez (Leiden: Brill, 2013) pp. 223-47.

Clara Saraiva, “Pretos Velhos across the Atlantic:  Afro-Brazilian Religions in Portugal,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 197-222. 

Stephen Selka, Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in Bahia, Brazil (Tampa: University Press of Florida, 2007).

Robin E. Sheriff, Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 13.

Manuel A. Vásquez and Christina Rocha, “Introduction:  Brazil in the New Global Cartography of Religion,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, ed. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 1-42.

The Assembly of God is Brazil’s largest Pentecostal church, claiming more than 14 million members. Part of the first wave of Pentecostal churches, two Swedish missionaries from Chicago introduced the church to northern Brazil in the 1910s and it retains a headquarters in Belém. Unlike other imports, the church empowered Brazilian converts from its first days and relied on Brazilians to evangelize their compatriots. Brazilians served as church planters, ministers and leaders, independent of foreign mission boards and pastors.

Church doctrine demands a radical break with converts’ prior lives and churches historically advocate an sober lifestyle, proscribing smoking, drinking, fashion, cosmetics, television, football, fighting, and attending non-religious festivals. For poorer populations, this provides an obvious, and often attractive, alternative to the prevalent sexual competition and cultural violence within their neighborhoods and the church typically attracts Afro-Brazilians and others on the economic margins. However, as members of better economic standing join the church and second generation youth rebel against lifestyle restrictions by leaving, ministers have begun to offer a more relaxed reading of traditional rules.

The church became politically active in the 1980s, announcing its intention to ultimately send at least one representative to each State Parliament. The politicization paralleled a formalization of a national church hierarchy, which now channels its political activities through the General Convention of the Assemblies of God in Brazil, founded in 2001. In this effort, the church’s theology of clean living proves an asset in winning votes as adherents have a reputation amongst their neighbors for honesty and plain dealing.

Sources:

Steve Brouwer, Paul Gifford, and Susan D. Rose, Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (New York:  Routledge, 1996).

John Burdick, Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1993).

Maria das Dores Campos Machado, “Evangelicals and Politics in Brazil: the Case of Rio de Janeiro,” Religion, State and Society, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 69-91.

Kei Otsuki, “Ecological Rationality and Environmental Governance on the Agrarian Frontier: The Role of Religion in the Brazilian Amazon,” Journal of Rural Studies 32 (October 2013), pp. 411-19.

The Brazilian Conference of Bishops (CNBB) was founded in 1952 by a group of bishops who were deeply critical of the economic and political status quo. This perspective grew out of the bishops’ backgrounds, many of whom were from poorer, rural states, but was also related to independent funding received from European Catholic organizations that allowed for autonomy from the state. The CNBB advanced the adoption of Paulo Freire’s model of “critical consciousness,” an educational method that emphasizes awareness of social, economic, and political injustice and the imperative to act upon that awareness.  

Over the coming years, the CNBB became the representative, authoritative, and respected voice for the church in Brazil, accepted by other ecclesiastical authorities and by Brazilians themselves, and also playing a role in the articulation and spread of Liberation Theology in Latin America. Additionally, the CNBB played a role in mediating between priests—arguably the most radical element within the Catholic church as a result of their daily involvement in the lives and struggles of impoverished Brazilians—and more conservative bishops.

The Catholic Church is deeply enmeshed in Brazil’s culture, beliefs, and institutions. The Church arrived with the Portuguese conquest in the sixteenth century and has since been the dominant religion. From 1500 to 1889, Catholicism was the official state religion. Even after disestablishment and the efforts at secularization that began under the First Republic (1889-1930), the Catholic Church retained its property holdings and continued to play a significant role in public ritual and private social life.

The Catholic Church began the modern era as part of an alliance between politicians and the business oligarchy that held back meaningful political reform and social justice activism, particularly during the nascent years of the Brazilian labor movement. During the 1930s, the conservative Church supported the authoritarian Getulio Vargas regime, who, in turn, restored power to the institutionally weakened church, relying on it for ideological support.

After World War II and continuing through the 1960s, the Catholic Church faced a number of challenges. First, a wider variety of educational options became available to middle and upper class Brazilians and enrollment in Catholic schools fell. Second, the 1960s saw Brazil’s shift from a largely rural society to an urban society. Urbanization disrupted traditional relationships in rural areas, including those with the Church and those often mediated by the Church, for example between tenant farmers and landowners, and created demand for new social networks within the urban setting. It presented Brazilians with a wider variety of options in the ideological marketplace, including evangelical Protestantism, African-derived religions, socialism, and communism. These alternative ideologies, especially Pentecostal and evangelical Protestantism, often met the rural migrants’ demand for new networks.

Rural migration into cities also swelled levels of urban poverty. The endorsement of human rights, democracy, and religious freedom by the Second Vatican Council provided an official theological language within which to frame such concerns. The catalyzing event for the Church was the rise of military dictatorships between 1964 and 1980, which deepened Brazil’s economic woes and ushered in a dark era of suppression, censure, torture, and killings, including those of Catholic priests, nuns and bishops.

In response, the Catholic Church in Brazil underwent a transformation from conservative buttress to the state in the 1930s to a prominent critical voice against capitalism and political policy, becoming the most radically progressive of the Latin American Catholic Churches. Priests and bishops joined the struggle for labor and land rights and in coming decades worked to expose abuses committed by the military junta. The Church organized community groups meant to address basic concerns among the poor, but which later became politicized under the military dictatorship. Underpinning these changes was the development of Latin American liberation theology, a set of ideas which emphasize the role and rights of the poor and marginalized, and social justice as salvation. Ultimately, the Church emerged as the primary oppositional voice against the military and facilitated the transition to democracy in the 1980s by allying itself with grassroots movements, trade unions, and opposition political parties.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Roman Catholic Church entered a period of marked conservatism in reaction to Vatican II and pushed back against the progressivism of Brazilian Catholicism. It emphasized a need for evangelism over political action in the context of a changed religious marketplace—in which Pentecostalism’s share grew larger and larger—and in which Catholicism was no longer presumed to be the most powerful and unifying tradition. As socialism and Marxism began to recede in the popular imagination in the 1990s, the same effects rippled through the church and grassroots enthusiasm waned. These efforts manifested in the empowerment of conservative Brazilian clergy, and the growth of a charismatic Catholic movement and, among Afro-Brazilians, the adoption of an Africanized mass, as adaptive strategies to appeal to congregants.

Though transformed yet again, the Catholic Church maintains a streak of progressivism that has withstood the post-Vatican II retrenchment. Today’s Brazilian Catholics are internally diverse, ranging from staunch conservatives to radical progressives, and include members of all socioeconomic strata.

Catholic activism is enabled on an institutional level, via the Brazilian Conference of Bishops, and on the level of the laity, through Ecclesiastical Base Communities (CEBs). The CEBs were forums in which liberation theology was discussed with the intention of instituting change on the community level. CEBs facilitated a religious critique of social, economic, and political policies and provided a channel to communicate the needs of the laity to priests and bishops. They trained and nurtured future political and social leaders, especially from traditionally disadvantaged populations, such as the urban and rural poor, women, and Afro- and indigenous Brazilians.

The rise of competing religious movements has been the strongest challenge to the Catholic church in the current century. While Brazil remains the largest Roman Catholic country in the world, the number of Roman Catholics has fallen steadily from 95% of the population in 1940 to approximately two-thirds in 2009. Much of the exodus consists of women, young people, and the middle classes. However, since 2000, ‘no religion’ has become the primary replacement. This competition has prompted a number of responses, including a deepening of social justice activism inspired by liberation theology, as well as the emergence of charismatic Catholic worship that echoes Pentecostalism. One of the outcomes of liberation theology and Catholic activism was the emergence of a specifically Catholic black consciousness movement, which manifested in an enculturated mass inspired by African traditions and which drew explicit links between race and poverty.

Sources:

John Burdick, Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 2.

Robert M. Levine, The History of Brazil (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), p. 85.

Christine A. Gustafson, “Faith-State Relations in Brazil:  What Does Religious Competition Mean for Democracy?” Religion and Politics in a Global Society, ed. Paul Christopher Manuel, Alynna Lyon, and Clyde Wilcox (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books, 2013), pp. 113-138.

Kevin Neuhouser, “The Radicalization of the Brazilian Catholic Church in Comparative Perspective,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 54, No. 2 (1989), pp. 233-244.

Eric Patterson, “Religious Activity and Political Participation: The Brazilian and Chilean Cases,” Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2005), pp. 1-29.

Manuel A. Vásquez and Christina Rocha, “Introduction:  Brazil in the New Global Cartography of Religion,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 1-42. 

Islam is practiced by over 200,000 Brazilians—making it the largest Muslim community in Latin America—most of whom are Arab in origin, with smaller but growing numbers of Brazilian converts. The Brazilian Muslim community includes both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims.

Islam arrived in Brazil with West African slaves, including Hausa, Malinkes, and Yoruba. Muslim slaves were largely victim to the political circumstances in what is present-day Nigeria. Instability and war associated with the creation of the Sokoto Caliphate generated thousands of Hausa slaves, many of them rival soldiers. Muslim slaves were also captured during the internal wars of the Yoruba Oyo Empire to the south. However, early Brazilian Muslims were not solely representative of one or two ethnic groups, but many, including Africans who converted to Islam in Brazil.

Early Muslims met privately for prayer, to learn to read and write Qur’anic Arabic—notable during a period when most white Brazilians were illiterate—for spiritual guidance, and in some areas, to plan uprisings (such as the 1835 Malê Uprising). African Islam transformed under slavery, being forced to accommodate circumstances that made it difficult for enslaved Muslims to pray regularly or to observe religious dietary laws. Some slave owners forbade the practice of Islam entirely and punished slaves for teaching or learning Arabic. Nonetheless, a thriving community existed in the 1860s, as attested by a Baghdadi imam who settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1866 who estimated that Brazil had as many as 20,000 Muslims, most of whom were in Salvador. Over time, the population declined. Some African Muslims returned to Africa, while intermarriage, public education, Catholic syncretism and conversion to Catholicism and African-derived religions further diminished numbers.

The current Muslim population of Brazil is made up largely of Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Arabs and their descendants with smaller numbers of African migrants and Brazilian converts. The first wave of Levantine Arabs arrived in the 1890s fleeing political and economic instability in the Ottoman Empire, the majority of them Christian but many Muslim. Immigration peaked around World World II, and though it has slowed, Arabs continue to arrive in Brazil. Most live in São Paulo and operate thriving Islamic community centers and mosques. Though facing little friction overall, there are accounts of Pentecostals verbally harassing Muslims, particularly women wearing Islamic dress.

Sources:

Muhammad Abdullah al-Ahari, “The Caribbean and Latin America,” Islam Outside the Arab World, eds. Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 443-461.

Cristina Maria de Castro, The Construction of Muslim Identities in Contemporary Brazil (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013).

Cristina Maria de Castro, “Muslim Women in Brazil: Notes on Religion and Integration,” Gender, Religion, and Migration: Pathways of Integration, eds. Glenda Tibe Bonifacio and Vivienne S. M. Angeles (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), pp. 167-181.

Jon Tofik Karam, “Muslim Histories in Latin America and the Caribbean,” An Introduction to Islam in the 21^st Century, eds. Aminah Beverly McCloud, Scott W. Hibbard and Laith Saud (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2013), pp. 249 -

João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993).

Beginning in the early twentieth century, Japanese nationals (Nikkei) arrived in Brazil as contract agricultural workers. Most were younger sons from rural areas of Japan facing the economic upheaval that accompanied Japan’s modernization efforts; few intended to emigrate permanently. In the 1920s, when the United States restricted further Asian immigration, the Japanese government assisted emigrants to Brazil under the auspices of the Kaigai Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha (KKKK), the Overseas Development Corporation. Brazil’s landowners welcomed the new immigrants as replacements for freed slaves but did not treat them better than slaves. To improve their situation Japanese workers either took advantage of loans and land grants made available through the KKKK to purchase their own farms in Brazil or moved to urban areas where they established a variety of small businesses. Such investments in property transformed the guest workers into permanent immigrants.  

Brazilians found it hard to accommodate a new immigrant group that did not fit the traditional triangular paradigm of white, black, and mixed race. By the 1930s, a public debate erupted over Japanese assimilation potential as ‘non-whites’ and whether to bar further immigration. While some restrictions resulted from these debates and the advent of World War II, they were eased in later decades. Today, there are over one million ethnic Japanese in Brazil, most who reside in Greater São Paolo.

The first Nikkei practiced a nominal Buddhism. Their transient intentions and the Japanese government’s refusal to allow monks to accompany them limited religious activities. However, a few monks flouted the government’s order. The first Buddhist Temple in Brazil opened in 1932. After World War II, Japanese religious institutions dispatched official missionaries to serve the immigrant communities. By then, a specific pattern had emerged amongst Japanese families in Brazil. The eldest son took over the father’s business, spoke Japanese, and remained immersed in Japanese cultural norms, including religion. The younger children went to university, spoke Portuguese, and were often baptized Roman Catholic by their parents. By the 1980s, only 25% of Japanese immigrants and their descendants practiced a traditional Japanese religion, such as Buddhism or Shintoism, while almost two-thirds identified as Roman Catholics.

In the 1980s Japan faced a shortage of unskilled factory workers and actively recruited the descendants of the Nikkei. Facilitated by the economic crisis in Brazil, this reverse migration resulted in downward social mobility and identity renegotiation for the young, middle-class Japanese Brazilians, the Nikkeijin, who accepted the offer. Disrespected by the native Japanese for their performance of manual labor, lack of cultural conformity, and non-existent language skills, many Nikkeijin returned to Brazil when the Japanese manufacturing sector stagnated.

Sources:

Ushi Arakaki, “Japanese-Brazilians among Pretos-Velhos, Caboclos, Buddhist Monks, and Samurais:  An Ethnographic Study of Umbandi in Japan,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, ed. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez, (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 249-70.

Cristina Moreira da Rocha, “Zen Buddhism in Brazil: Japanese or Brazilian?” Journal of Global Buddhism 1 (2000).

Manuel A. Vásquez and Christina Rocha, “Introduction:  Brazil in the New Global Cartography of Religion,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, ed. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez, (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 1-42. 

Keiko Yamanaka, “Return Migration of Japanese-Brazilians to Japan:  The Nikkejin as Ethnic Minority and Political Construct,” Diaspora, A Journal of Transnational Studies 5 (1996),  pp. 65-97.

Brazil’s Jewish community is the oldest in the Americas, with the first American synagogue founded in Recife in 1636 during the brief period of religiously tolerant pre-Portuguese Dutch rule. Brazil’s earliest Jews arrived in the sixteenth century, conversos or “hidden Jews” fleeing the Portuguese Catholic Inquisition. They ran thriving businesses, importing and exporting goods, including slaves. Upon the assertion of Portuguese Catholic power, this original community fled to the West Indies, New Amsterdam (now New York), and to Europe. A second wave of migration occurred during the nineteenth century with the discovery of diamond mines, drawing European Ashkenazi Jews, and with the expansion of Amazonian rubber exportation, drawing Moroccan Sephardic Jews. By World War I, the Jewish community numbered roughly 7,000, and would grow to 30,000 by the end of the war with an influx of North African Sephardim.

German and Polish Ashkenazi Jewish refugees began streaming into Brazil during the 1920’s, making up nearly half of all eastern European immigrants at this time. The following decade saw the rise of nationalist, nativist and positivist ideas about social and cultural progress. In embracing these ideals, Brazilian intellectuals deemed Jews—portrayed as non-European, impoverished communists as well as greedy capitalists—as a detriment to progress, and “Semitic” immigration was officially (though not practically) limited in 1938. The Nazi Party also encouraged anti-Semitism among the German diaspora, though it never reached the extreme seen in neighboring Argentina.

The post-Getulio Vargas era saw important and welcome changes in the government’s relationship with Brazil’s Jews. The government enthusiastically supported the creation of the state of Israel, granted it official recognition in 1949, and has maintained close diplomatic relations since. The government also loosened restrictions on the expression of ethnic identity and immigration, and Sephardic North African migrants along with Syrian and Egyptian Jews saw another influx in the 1950s. Today, Jewish Brazilians number roughly 120,000, over half of whom live in São Paulo.

Sources:

Sara E. Karesh and Mitchell M. Hurvitz, “Brazil,” Encyclopedia of Judaism (New York: Facts on File, 2006), pp. 68-69.

Jeffrey Lesser, “Brazil,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture, eds. Judith R. Baskin and Judith Reesa Baskin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 78-79.

Jeffrey Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

The Malê Uprising was a slave revolt in Salvador, Bahia, organized by Muslims—known as Malês—during the last ten days of Ramadan in January of 1835. Captured rebels wore Muslim dress, including head coverings and long white tunics, and carried prayer beans as well as Qur’anic amulets on their bodies for protection. The revolt was organized primarily by Hausa and Nagô (Yoruba) Muslims, but non-Muslim Africans from various backgrounds also participated, numbering roughly 600. The uprising targeted whites, but also mulattos and native-born black Brazilians—namely, those who did not belong to the African-born slave and free population and who were seen as part of slaveholding society. Having come from African slave-holding societies, Malês expressed a desire to upend the Brazilian status quo and enslave mulattos, though their ultimate goals against the well-armed Brazilian security forces were unclear.

The 1835 uprising took place during a chaotic period of frequent revolt (including slave revolt), economic downturn, rising poverty, military and federalist rebellion, and strong anti-colonial sentiment. It was also a time when the population of Bahia was mostly of African origin, whether free or enslaved, which made up the lowest rung of society. Numerous other uprisings had taken place over the prior three decades but the 1835 event was by far the largest and most significant. It was also a period of Islamic conversion among the enslaved and free Africans of Bahia, who were receptive to Qur’anic messages that sympathized with marginalized peoples and who largely respected and admired the Malês. As a result of the 1835 revolt, security forces in Bahia and elsewhere seized any items associated with Islam, including all documents written in Arabic.

The social pressures and fears associated with slave revolts, of which the Malê Uprising was the largest in the Americas, were a contributing factor to the legal cessation of the importation of slaves from Africa in 1850 and, eventually, to the 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil.

Sources:

Dale T. Graden, “An Act ‘Even of Public Security’: Slave Resistance, Social Tensions, and the End of the International Slave Trade to Brazil, 1835-1856,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 2 (1996), pp. 249-282.

João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993)

The Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) was an Afro-Brazilian consciousness movement and umbrella organization founded in 1978 in São Paulo. It encompassed a variety of grassroots anti-racism and Afro-Brazilian pride organizations throughout Brazil’s major cities, and established “struggle centers” in dance studios, Candomblé terreiros, and in other spaces of cultural significance to Afro-Brazilians. The MNU promoted two ideas: that Afro-Brazilians trace their roots to Africa, and that they have shared a common oppressor both in Africa and in the Americas.

Sources:

Stephen Selka, Religion and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in Bahia, Brazil (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a Brazilian philosopher and educator, best known for his model of “critical consciousness,” a forerunner of critical pedagogy. Freire considered education a force for empowerment and liberation. As such, he argued a pedagogical approach should be developed with rather than for the students, especially those who come from oppressed, marginalized populations. Freire’s model, developed to empower the oppressed, encouraged students to critique the educational situation as well as the subject, highlighted the connections between individual problems and their social context, and emphasized the importance of a dialectical coordination of inquiry and learning process.

Born to middle class parents, his father’s death during the Depression impoverished the family. This experience greatly influenced Freire’s philosophy, pedagogy, and politics. The family’s religious tradition was mixed—his father was a spiritualist, his mother a devout Roman Catholic—and Freire was raised a Catholic. In college he participated in Catholic Action, a religious organization that challenged laypeople to express their faith through acts of service, especially to the poor. This challenge and experience motivated Freire to develop adult literacy programs in northeastern Brazil. At the time, literacy was a prerequisite for voting in elections.

Freire expressed his ideology as equal parts Jesus Christ and Karl Marx. He rejected both a magical Christianity of divine intervention, which led to passivity on the part of the poor, and a theology of social service, which sought only to alleviate the suffering of the poor.  Instead, he advocated a spirituality of human action aimed at dismantling oppressive forces and structures. Although he often expressed frustration and disappointment with the institutional church’s failure to take up the prophetic call for the revolutionary transformation of society, he maintained close ties with many Catholic clergy, particularly those associated with Liberation Theology.

His left wing politics, his close ties to the socialist government of João Goulart, and a belief that his literacy programs were too political led to his imprisonment by the military dictatorship in 1964 and the banning of his writings. Freire escaped, fled to Chile, and then spent sixteen years in exile, including a year as a visiting professor at Harvard and ten years as an education advisor to the World Council of Churches. Throughout his exile copies of his seminal book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, were smuggled into Brazil, where it served as a shared point of reference for intellectuals and human rights advocates. Freire returned to Brazil in 1980, where he taught at the University of São Paulo and served as the Minister of Education for the City of São Paulo.

Sources:

Darrell Boyd, “The Critical Spirituality of Paulo Freire,” International Journal of Lifelong Education 31 (November-December 2012), pp. 759-78.

Rebecca L. Hegar, “Paulo Freire:  Neglected Mentor for Social Work,” Journal of Progressive Human Services 23 (2012), pp. 159-77.

Jonathan Warren, “‘A Little with God Is a Lot:’ Popular Religion and Human Security in the Land of the Brazilian Colonels,” Religion and Human Security: A Global Perspective, eds. James K. Wellman and Clark B. Lombardi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 130-49.

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing sector of Brazilian Protestantism. It is made up of Classic Pentecostalism, founded by European and American missionaries during the first half of the twentieth century, and Neo-Pentecostalism, a later generation of indigenous churches that emerged after 1970. The first group includes such significant denominations as the Christian Congregation, the Assembly of God, Church of the Foursquare Gospel, Brazil for Christ, and God is Love. Major Neo-Pentecostal churches include Sara Our Land Evangelical Community, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the International Church of the Grace of God, and Reborn in Christ. 

Pentecostalism is largely decentralized, both structurally and theologically, although in recent decades significant centralization has begun to occur among the newer churches. Individual churches typically operate independently and autonomously, while sharing certain characteristics, such as a focus on the imminent return of Jesus to Earth (“second coming”) and a belief that intimate contact with the Holy Spirit allows access to Jesus Christ. Unlike traditional Protestant churches, which privilege individual interpretation of God’s written word, Pentecostalism locates the source of knowledge and power in the direct revelation received from God via baptism in the Holy Spirit. Spiritual gifts (charisma), such as glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and divine healing, are important expressions of the movement. While the older churches emphasize glossolalia, the newer Neo-Pentecostal churches focus on spiritual warfare, especially demon exorcism. The Neo-Pentecostal churches have also introduced the Prosperity Gospel to Brazil, a key belief of which is the power of Jesus Christ and the gospel to heal not just physical and emotional illness, but an individual’s economic ills as well.

Most members are poor, black and female with limited education. This reflects the history of Pentecostalism, which sought out impoverished Brazilians as rural networks began disintegrating, urbanization increased, and economic modernization heightened the marginalization of many, particularly Afro-Brazilians. Prior to the emergence of Liberation Theology, the Catholic Church failed to institutionally address the needs and interests of the growing poor and Pentecostal churches proliferated among these populations. Pentecostal congregations offered a replacement community with strong prohibitions against the temptations of urban life (drink, drugs, sex, gangs, in some cases, television). The emphasis on adherence to doctrine and devotion to prayer rather than Biblical knowledge and learning offered a comfortable space and opportunities for church leadership to the often illiterate laborers. Finally, with their theological emphasis on individual salvation and an unmediated relationship with Jesus, these churches stressed an ethos of individuality that resonated with those outside the existing client-patron structure. More recently, Neo-Pentecostalism’s embrace of the Prosperity Gospel, associating upward social mobility with devotion, also contributed to its widespread appeal among the urban poor and middle class.

Pentecostal and particularly Neo-Pentecostal churches make extensive use of old and new media (television, radio, and the internet). Increasingly, they are expanding their proselytization efforts abroad, especially in Europe, but also in the United States. In the creation of transnational networks Brazilian football players play a key missionary role.

Pentecostalism entered politics in the 1990s, with large voting blocs throwing their substantial weight behind Pentecostal and church-endorsed candidates, oftentimes church pastors and bishops running for office. Though Pentecostal churches initially lacked the organized political networks that the Catholic Church cultivated during the military dictatorship, they successfully leveraged their evangelical structure, processes, and culture. Many Pentecostals perceive political participation as a religious duty, another battleground in the ongoing spiritual war against demonic influences, with individual and communal health, wealth, and salvation at stake. This belief forges a fervent commitment to candidates and causes.

Such fervency can create problems. Several prominent churches issue strong attacks against Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian religions, such as Candomblé and Umbanda. They consider Catholicism obsolete and the others as a channel for demons’ entry into the world. The Neo-Pentecostal Universal Church of the Reign (Kingdom) of God is particularly known for such beliefs.

Still, unlike Pentecostals in North America, crentes (“believers”) don’t always vote along conservative lines, don’t congregate in a single political party, and have been surprisingly instrumental in the success of some leftist politicians, including Labor Party president Lula da Silva. On an individual level, some Pentecostals are engaged in social justice activism similar to their Catholic counterparts. However, Pentecostals are more likely to accept the status quo and work to climb the socioeconomic ladder while politically active Catholics are more inclined to change it.

Sources:

Christine A. Gustafson, “Faith-State Relations in Brazil:  What Does Religious Competition Mean for Democracy?” Religion and Politics in a Global Society, eds. Paul Christopher Manuel, Alynna Lyon, and Clyde Wilcox, (Lanham, MD:  Lexington Books, 2013), pp. 113-138. 

Maria das Dores Campos Machado, “Evangelicals and Politics in Brazil: the Case of Rio de Janeiro,” Religion, State and Society, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 69-91.

Carmen Rial, “The ‘Devil’s Egg:’ Football Players as New Missionaries of the Diaspora of Brazilian Religions,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez, (Leiden:  Brill, 2013), pp. 91-115. 

Kenneth Serbin, “The Catholic Church, Religious Pluralism and Democracy in Brazil,” Kellogg Institute, February 1999, accessed May 5, 2014.

Manuel A. Vásquez and Christina Rocha, “Introduction:  Brazil in the New Global Cartography of Religion,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez, (Leiden:  Brill, 2013), pp. 1-42. 

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus or IURD) is one of the largest and strongest Neo-Pentecostal churches in Brazil with global reach. Founded by Bishop Edir Bezerra Macedo and two other pastors in 1977, the church encompasses 8 million members in over 150 countries, television networks (including the second largest in Brazil), radio stations, newspapers, a publishing house, a record company, and numerous other business enterprises both in Brazil and elsewhere. 

Sources:

Christine A. Gustafson, “Faith-State Relations in Brazil:  What Does Religious Competition Mean for Democracy?” Religion and Politics in a Global Society, eds. Paul Christopher Manuel, Alynna Lyon, and Clyde Wilcox (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), pp. 113-138.

Clara Mafra, Claudia Swatowiski, and Camila Sampaio, “Edir Macedo’s Pastoral Project:  A Globally Integrated Pentecostal Network,” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 45-67.

Manuel A. Vásquez and Christina Rocha, “Introduction:  Brazil in the New Global Cartography of Religion” The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions, eds. Christina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 1-42.