The matters with evangelical lives in Brazil
Why is the most popular religion among Brazil’s people of African descent ignored and attacked by so many educated white Brazilians?
Everything that, when it was black, it was from the devil / And then it turned white and it was accepted I’ll call Blues / That’s it, understand / Jesus is blues
Baco Exu do Blues, Bluesman
Racism is a widely debated topic in Brazil today, due to the size of the Afro-descendant population, the racism that endures in social relations and more recently because of the debates opened in the United States as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. In this context of opening up the social wounds of slavery, the news and analyses produced by Brazil’s elite intellectuals in general describe evangelicals in simplistic and uninformed ways, as being fanatical defenders of the ultra-conservative president Jair Bolsonaro, merchants of faith or as religious intolerants that attack places of worship of candomblé, macumba and other religions of African roots.
Given the connections in Brazil between people of African descent and evangelicals, between evangelicals and poverty, and the presence of a robust sociological literature on these subjects, I intend to discuss in this paper two interrelated questions: What mobilizes poor — predominantly black — Brazilians to convert to Protestantism? And why is evangelical Christianity — viewed as a social phenomenon — a subject virtually ignored by the — predominantly white — schooled elite in Brazil?
The research
I spent 18 months living and working in a poor neighborhood in the metropolitan area of the city of Salvador as a doctoral student. This experience opened the opportunity for me to meet and become friends and participate in the lives and routines of some evangelical families. Salvador is in the Northeast, the country’s poorest region and also where the majority of the colored population of Brazil live.
My ethnographic data are about ordinary people. During fieldwork I observed and discussed with informants, both evangelicals and non-evangelicals, the consequences of religious practices and of sociality in local evangelical churches. For this reason, this article does not deal with issues such as religion and government politics at the local or national level. Living in an poor neighborhood, my interest concerning religion was to examine the consequences of evangelical Christianity for social mobility.
I am not an expert on religion and my doctoral research was about uses and consequences of technology, but the growing importance of this topic in Brazil given the growing number of evangelicals, its consequences in the realm of politics, entertainment, consumption, and education, associated with the absence of literature that is accessible to readers who are not social scientists,[1] motivated me to study and write about this sensitive subject. My book about evangelicals[2] was released in Portuguese this past October and to write it, I used my ethnographic data to present key studies published by social scientists from Brazil and other countries.
My field research took place in one of the many urban peripheries in which evangelical churches have multiplied and continue to grow. I will now describe the location where the research took place and its residents.[3]
The field site
My field research took place between April 2013 and August 2014. My wife, I, and our two cats moved with most of our furniture from a middle-class neighborhood in the Southeast of the country to a low-income neighborhood on the edge of the metropolitan area of the city of Salvador, which is currently the fourth largest city in the country.
An aerial photo of our new neighborhood would show a pattern of urbanization similar to that of medieval towns and citadels. Instead of the regularity of modern city blocks, we see a series of roads that meander from the center of the neighborhood to connect with other urbanized nearby places. It is located at the edge of urban and rural settings and the growth of the neighborhood is uneven as it results from a gradual process of squatting in the surrounding fields.
In 2014, approximately 15 to 20 thousand people lived in this neighborhood. Residents are mainly colored, young adults and adults who moved to the neighborhood in the last 40 years due to the opening of job opportunities associated with the tourism industry. Nine large-scale international tourist resorts are located up to 20 kilometers distance from the neighborhood, and given the yearlong warm weather they open every day of the year. Three times a day, every day, a large cue of buses enter and leave the neighborhood to drop off and pick up employees.
Adults over 30 years old usually had a maximum of four years of basic education and when they were not functionally illiterate, they read and wrote with difficulty. They mainly worked as cleaners, cooks, watchmen, drivers, gardeners or had other manual occupations. Young people can have up to 13 years of basic education, so some of them get better paid jobs outside the neighborhood as waiters, salespeople or low-level admin employees in offices. Among young people with low schooling, the dream is to buy a motorbike to work as couriers and transporting people on short distance trips.
In terms of government services, the neighborhood has three schools, a health center, a police outpost and an office in charge of social security issues. The service of the two primary schools is well rated by the residents. Neighborhood policing is inconsistent. Locals do not bother to call the police or request ambulance services during emergency occasions because they are often slow to arrive. The health center and the high school are the target of most complaints, due to the inadequate condition of the buildings, the lack of equipment and the constant absence of teachers at school and doctors and nurses at the health center.
Evangelicals in the neighborhood
Protestantism arrived in Brazil in the 19th century and even Pentecostalism, the most popular Protestant branch today here, was already present in the country since 1910.[4] The evangelical boom happened in the midst of what anthropologist Gilberto Velho classified as Brazil’s main social phenomenon in the 20th century: the migration of tens of thousands of illiterate Brazilians from rural areas in the Northeast to the capitals of the South and Southeast.[5] They settled in areas surrounding cities — we call these peri-urban neighborhoods “periferias” or “peripheries”. These rapidly expanding urban spaces lacked — and many still lack — fundamental government services and even Catholic churches in the vicinity. It is in these locations that evangelical Christianity expands. They represented only 5% of Brazilians in 1970 and in 2019 there was one evangelical for every three people in the country.
We understand how evangelical Christianity is a phenomenon of the popular strata by entering a “periferia” in Brazil. In the neighborhood I lived, evangelical churches are everywhere, and they include a wide spectrum of protestant organizations, from branches of historical denominations to Pentecostals. There were many dozens of evangelical churches of all sizes, but only nine candomblé yards and one small catholic church.
The largest local evangelical denominations in the neighborhood had their own churches with internal space to house approximately 400 worshipers during services. They occupy expensive real estate locations near large businesses — food markets, pharmacies, construction material shops — on the main street. These churches generally represent nationally known organizations as the Assembly of God or the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.[6] The local Assembly of God had, in addition to the main temple, another 22 churches connected to it spread throughout the neighborhood, including in the most remote areas, to facilitate residents’ access to its main activities. The smallest churches, mostly new denominations, opened in rented garages in less visible areas, and operated with nothing but a few plastic chairs.
The influence of evangelical Christianity can also be seen in relation to the number of activities that these churches offer. In some cases, there are activities throughout the week, from morning to evening. The Assembly of God, one of the churches I attended and was welcomed as a researcher, offered a variety of activities every day of the week, including services with specific themes, Bible study courses, activities for teenagers and young people, classes and rehearsals for the church’s musicians, dance rehearsals, counselling service for couples, among other regular events. These activities particularly addressed the needs of fathers and mothers who work during the day and do not want their children to be left unsupervised when they are not in school. Larger churches in the country may invest on the higher education of their female young adults to open nurseries and even schools for its members.[7]
The large number of evangelicals in the neighborhood and the importance of attending religious services to this population motivated the management of some tourist resorts to provide rooms inside their businesses where ministers conducted services to employees working at night shifts or on weekends.
As the literature suggests, the boom of evangelical Christianity in Brazil results from the rapid arrival of thousands of catholic poorly literate migrant workers. English sociologist David Martin characterizes the “explosion of Protestantism” in Latin America in the 1980s as a “religion of the poor” in societies where the Catholic church was often rooted in the social conservatism of political and economic elites.[8] He describes Pentecostalism as a religion “preached in simple language, with simple examples, by simple people for simple people”. Besides its religious assistance, evangelical churches provide a replacement for the networks of support that extended family members originally offered.[9] Churches themselves, but also church members acting informally, can supply their religious peers in need of food, help them find employment, arrange meetings with lawyers or doctors, and — as previously mentioned — offer much desired activities for children and teenagers while parents are away working.
A case study
The experience of Sandro, one of my informants, during his conversion to Pentecostal Christianity may seem extreme, but it is no different than the experiences I heard from many other informants. The context is usually the same: a very unfavorable living situation associated with shortage of money, exposure to violence, substance dependence, illnesses, and different forms of abuse. Church attendance leading to conversion often stabilizes and improves people’s lives, as I will argue later on.
Sandro was born in a rural village in the state of Bahia. He never met his father. At age 11 he left his home and his alcoholic mother to look for opportunities and adventures in the big city. He learned and performed various types of unskilled labor, moved several times from place to place, ended up in a favela in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, had three children with different partners, and frequently used alcohol and cocaine in recreation events.
When I met him, a few years after his conversion, 40-year-old Sandro had an active routine in the neighborhood. He had acquired a 200 square meter plot to build his home on a squatted land at the border of the neighborhood and he had a baby son with his also converted new partner. He worked full time as a builder, had various responsibilities at his church, the Assembly of God, and during his free time on weekends he was building his home and working with other “assembleianos” to build a branch of their church in the same squatted area. On top of these activities, he accepted the somewhat dangerous position of president of the association of residents of that squatted land. He constantly dealt with government officials, political organizations supporting the homeless, and was the community’s spoken person when crime took place there.
I remembered Sandro’s story recently thinking about the expression: — Jesus saves.
One Saturday, Sandro left home to attend a service. It was already dark when he got on his motorcycle to go down a road without pavement or lighting. The road was approximately 800 meters long. There was vegetation and open fields on the sides, but not stores or houses. In the distance, Sandro noticed the approach of a large, high-speed SUV coming in his direction. Before they crossed each other, the driver of the SUV made a sudden maneuver forcing Sandro to stop the motorcycle on the side of the road. There was no one else passing by and Sandro froze with the bright lights from the SUV over his face. As he shut down his motorcycle, he saw the shapes of hooded people with weapons aimed at him. The car had no identification, but Sandro deduced that these people were part of a police surprise action to attack hiding places of local drug dealing gangs.
The event lasted less than a minute and Sandro thought he was going to die. It was quiet, no one spoke until eventually someone from the car shouted: — “he is a “crente” (a believer), let him go.” The hooded men quickly entered the SUV and left.
The expression “Jesus Saves” generally refers to another type of salvation, the salvation of the soul, but in this neighborhood — and I believe across similar neighborhoods in Brazil — it also carries a literal meaning. Sandro probably would have died, like many poor people, particularly those of color, had he not been wearing the typical clothes of the evangelical — long sleeve shirt, tie, and jacket –, which signaled that he was a worker and not a criminal.
Positive consequences of evangelical conversion
I will now briefly report what I observed, living in this neighborhood, about the positive consequences the evangelical conversion produces; but it is important to have in mind, as David Smilde’s study of pentecostalism in Venezuela[10] concludes, that not everyone has the discipline and the resources to uphold the consequences of conversion. Otherwise, family violence, drug addiction, and other common problems that are present in low income urban areas in Latin America would have disappeared.
1. Domestic violence — it is very common, in poor neighborhoods, for male partners to return to their homes drunk on weekends and to beat their wives and children. Conversion to Christianity forbids the faithful from consuming products perceived as drugs, including tobacco and alcohol. The consequence is a substantial reduction in domestic violence.[11]
2. Saving money and investing in the family — Men’s solidarity network in poor neighborhoods is mainly the bar and it is not uncommon for men to have parallel relationships with other women and establish more than one household. Christianity transfers the male social arena from the bar to the church. This results in saved money invested to improve the home, to provide leisure opportunities for the family and to pay for children’s activities, including private university education.
3. Empowerment of women — this is a controversial issue due to the difference in perceptions about empowerment for educated women and for working class women in Brazil. The gain of power of the evangelical woman comes mainly from the restrictions churches impose to men, as mentioned in topics 1 and 2.[12] Churches offer counseling services to resolve quarrelling and promote intimacy and trust among partners and, as a consequence, evangelical women can be encouraged — instead of criticized — as they switch from child and home carers and informal domestic workers to adopting formal paid jobs. This is a brief description of a complex topic and the impact of Christianity may differ depending on various conditions, however, it is notable that women represent the majority (58%) of evangelicals in Brazil[13] and also are more efficient evangelizers than men[14].
4. Education and entrepreneurship — illiterate adult evangelicals are encouraged to take literacy courses that some churches offer or to return to school. There are also studies[15] that conclude how low-income Brazilians do not encourage their children to stay long at school, as they prefer them working from early age as apprentices of adult relatives. During my fieldwork I noticed how local schools were often seen as day care centers for children and teenagers, and not as a place to acquire skills and knowledge.[16] But in general, evangelical families, unlike the others, perceive education as a sign of prosperity that reflects divine blessings. Evangelicals also appeared more interested in entrepreneurship associated with opening small shops, often related to technology: fixing phones, installing safety cameras in businesses or private homes, offering printing services of various kinds. These provide new possibilities of income and also allow parents to supervise their children more directly as they are not away from the neighborhood during work hours.
5. Social service in prisons and with drug addicts — My friends and peers, and also non-evangelical informants during fieldwork, often characterized evangelicals as people that preach Christian morality but in practice care more about themselves than about others. However, little is known in Brazil about the activity of evangelicals in regard to prisoners and drug addicts. After many months living in the field I learned several men I knew and interacted with regularly had spent time in prison; and I was surprised, not because of their past criminal lives, but because their everyday behavior did not suggest they were once exposed to this type of brutal experience. They ones at least were caring husbands, parents, neighbors, and worked hard to earn a living. Sociologist Andrew Johnson concludes, after studying Pentecostalism in Brazilian prisons, that this religious practice promotes a sense of dignity and self-respect similar to that seen among civil rights activists in the United States during the 1960s.[17] Furthermore, evangelical conversion is today the only way for someone linked to highly complex crime organizations to get away from those groups without being killed.
Why evangelical Christianity causes discomfort
The second motivation for studying the phenomenon of evangelical Christianity was to understand why intellectuals, journalists, and most educated Brazilians are not interested in learning about a phenomenon of this magnitude in Brazil and which, as I argued above, has positive consequences in an unequal society such as ours. Not only do they lack interest in the topic, they often (privately) express disdain for evangelicals in general and believe that what they know about religion and Christianity is enough to conclude that the growth in the number of evangelicals is bad for the country.
I felt these reactions every time a piece about my book appeared in a newspaper and echoed through social media. A person responded to an interview I gave saying, quote “I’m proud to be prejudiced against ‘crentes’ and fuck it”, ignoring that such statement is consider a crime under Brazilian law.[18] After reading an interview I gave to the Deutsche Welle, reprinted by Folha de São Paulo, a major national newspaper, a well-known Baptist minister mentioned on his online service that he was surprised that a “secular newspaper” printed something positive about evangelicals, as that is not common.[19]
(Often white) affluent educated Brazilians — I included, before conducting fieldwork — are broadly unaware of the differences between Methodists and Adventist, “assembleianos” and members of the Universal Church of God, and that evangelicals associated with these denominations can be quite different in terms of worldviews and practices. The term “neo-Pentecostalism”,[20] coined by sociologist Ricardo Mariano of the University of São Paulo, is generally applied without criteria in newspaper articles and analysis. And the word “evangelical”, which refers to 68 million people belonging to many different denominations, is often used as a derogatory word, as if the problem being pointed out was the religion and not the attitude of a particular evangelical leader or group. Even the idea of the “theology of prosperity” is interpreted in a simplistic way, as if prosperity represented only financial advantages and not other types of comfort such as access to better health services and harmonious family relationships.
I suggest, based on the robust literature produced by anthropologists who have studied the Brazilian popular strata in recent decades, that the rejection of the evangelical has a component of class prejudice.
As anthropologist Claudia Fonseca wrote,[21] in a passage that is often cited:
“In some way, Brazil presents itself as an extreme case of class society. … This created a system that, in many ways, can be compared to South Africa’s apartheid. There is little contact between rich and poor: they don’t live in the same neighborhoods, nor use the same means of transport. For some, there are private schools, taxis, doctors at $ 100 per consultation. For others, the scrapped public school, precarious public clinics, and buses. In short, for many Brazilians, the only moments of interclass contact occur during conversations with the cleaning lady or during a crime assault. The three-meter high walls erected in front of the bourgeois houses are like a metaphor for the almost insurmountable gap between the two worlds.”
Across the road from the neighborhood I lived there was a beachfront affluent area with several hundred homes and some cozy hotels catered to European visitors unattracted by the experiences big resorts provide. Homes there often had private swimming pools and gardens surrounded by the high walls Fonseca mentions. The poor people living near-by were generally perceived by locals in this affluent area as a necessary nuisance. They were needed for cheap manual labor, but unwanted otherwise. For example, the association of residents of this affluent suburb lobbied to prevent bus lines to connect the two places as to avoid the presence of poor people on “their beaches”.
The idea that prejudice in Brazil intertwines class and race coincides, for example, with analyzes by sociologist Florestan Fernandes, published since the 1960s.[22] He explained how Brazilian racism takes the form of a gradual hierarchy of prestige, based on criteria such as formal education, place of birth, gender, family history and social class. The fact that a person’s skin color would not be an explicit impediment to prosper, but society indirectly filters people coming from certain socioeconomic contexts — which are more accessible to whites — for certain functions and positions.
Nearly half of all evangelicals in Brazil only earn up to twice the monthly minimum wage — which amounts to US$ 410. They are equally exposed to this form of class prejudice, together with the other millions of low-income Brazilians. But evangelicals are also condemned for their attitude of not accepting to be victimized. For American anthropologist Susan Harding, evangelical Christians are a type of “other” often rejected by anthropologists as evangelicals do not accept the position of vulnerable people.[23] This resistance to being pigeonholed is a reason for intellectuals to reject evangelicals, while acting as spokespeople for indigenous, quilombolas and even the urban poor.
To provide context
The purpose of my book was not to deny or ignore the implications that the growth of ultra-conservative evangelical Christianity has on the country. There are reasons for concern: evangelical voters were responsible for the election of ultraconservative president Jair Bolsonaro in 2018[24] and many of the churches that have become religious mega-corporations use their influence to elect politicians who owe obedience to the leaders of those same organizations. As sociologist Ricardo Mariano wrote,[25] the instrumentalization of faith for electoral purposes comes from the argument that the church and God’s evangelizing plan are in danger: “the argument that ‘religious freedom is in check’ is a decisive asset to defend evangelical candidates in their own services”.
The evangelical caucus (“bancada evangélica”) is currently one of the main focuses of support and mobilization of the Bolsonaro government in the two houses of the Brazilian Congress. Along with the recovery of the space of influence in the moral field, the presence of evangelicals within the state helps to obtain benefits for the functioning and growth of the churches. The journalist Andrea Dip’s book argues that the performance of the evangelical caucus acts to guarantee broadcasting concessions, maintain tax exemption to churches, obtain land for the construction of temples and ensure that evangelical events are classified as cultural so that they can benefit from public incentives.[26] But even though this electoral activism of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal evangelicals is a common practice, studies such as those by Ricardo Mariano[27] and anthropologist Jacqueline Teixeira, from USP, record how many believers resist electoral manipulation.[28]
As social scientist David Smilde summarized, “At the grassroots level, evangelical and Pentecostal groups are often the only form of civil society available to people and can have an important local impact by giving them a way to confront violence and violence. injustice in their local contexts”.[29] As sociologist David Martin argues, Pentecostalism is a modernizing phenomenon and has the potential to elevate the poor to the middle class.[30] In societies where the majority of the poor are black or brown, evangelical churches represent protection, offer new opportunities and encourage feelings of dignity and self-respect — which are often not available elsewhere — for those on the margins of our society .
[1] The last book to disseminate findings about evangelical Christianity produced by a Brazilian social scientist and released by a commercial publisher for the non-specialist public, was Os evangélicos, released in 2001 by Jorge Zahar Editores.
[2] Spyer, J. 2020. Povo de Deus: Quem são os evangélicos e por que eles importam. São Paulo: Geração Editorial.
[3] Further information on this introductory topic can be found in Chapter 1 of the book Social Media in Emerging Brazil, which is a version of my doctoral thesis, published in 2017 by UCL Press, and is available free in PDF format.
[4] Brazil’s earliest pentecostal churchers are Congregação Cristão do Brasil and Assembleia de Deus.
[5] Velho, G. 2007. ‘Metrópole, cultura e conflito.’ Rio de Janeiro: cultura, política e conflito. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. 9–30.
[6] I use the names of churches translated to English to make the paper easier to read.
[7] This is the case, for instance, of the Igreja da Lagoinha in Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais.
[8] Martin, D. 2013. Pentecostalism: An alternate form of modernity and modernization. Hefner, R. W. org. 2013. Global Pentecostalism in the 21st century. Indiana: Indiana University Press. 37–62.
[9] Pierucci, A. F. 2006. ‘Religião como solvente: uma aula.’ Novos Estudos-CEBRAP (75): 111–27.
[10] Smilde, D. 2007. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. University of California.
[11] I make this claim based on my fieldwork data. Smilde (2007: 20) mentions an extensive and varied list of researchers who associated the adoption of evangelical Christianity with the abandonment of alcohol consumption.
[12] My book references a wide bibliography about the topic. See Spyer, J. 2020. “Maior igualdade de gênero” in Povo de Deus. São Paulo: Geração Editorial
[13] DataFolha 2019.
[14] Ricardo Mariano credits the expansion of evangelical Christianity to “tireless, efficient and vigorous proselytism, also carried out by laypeople, especially women. They recruit and convert their husbands, children, neighbors and co-workers”. See Dias, O. 2019. ‘Os Evangélicos na Sociedade e na Política: Efeitos e Significados de uma Influência Crescente.’ Fundação FHC (8 mai. 2019) http://fundacaofhc.org.br/iniciativas/debates/os-evangelicos-na-sociedade-e-na-politica-efeitos-e-significados-de-uma-influencia-crescente.
[15] Kuznesof, E. A. 1998. ‘The puzzling contradictions of child labor, unemployment, and education in Brazil.’ Journal of Family History 23(3): 225–39.
[16] Spyer, J. 2018. “Education and work: tensions in class” in Social Media in Emergent Brazil. London: UCL Press.
[17] Johnson, A. 2017. If I give my soul: Faith behind bars in Rio de Janeiro. Nova York: Oxford University Press.
[18] This is considered an incitement to prejudice. Art. 20. To practice, induce or incite discrimination or prejudice of race, color, ethnicity, religion or national origin. (Wording given by Law №9,459, of 5/15/97) Penalty: imprisonment from one to three years and a fine. http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/l7716.htm
[19] Minister João Fonseca from the First Baptist Church of Rio de Janeiro. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1dyLliQxzc
[20] Mariano, R. 1999. Neopentecostais: sociologia do novo pentecostalismo no Brasil. São Paulo: Edições Loyola.
[21] Fonseca, C. 2000. Família, fofoca e honra: etnografia de relações de gênero e violência em grupos populares. Porto Alegre, RS: Editora da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.
[22] Fernandes, F. 2015. O negro no mundo dos brancos. São Paulo: Global Editora e Distribuidora Ltda.
[23] Harding, S. 1991. Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other. Social Research, 58(2), 373–393. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970650
[24] Demographer José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, professor at the National School of Statistical Sciences (ENCE / IBGE), stated: “There is no doubt that the evangelical vote was fundamental for the election of Jair Bolsonaro. Even though they are less than a third of the electorate, evangelical leaders are very active in politics and are reaping the result of years of religious activism in society”.
[25] Mariano, R. 2012. ‘Deus é o voto’. Revista de História do Museu Nacional, Dossiê Brasil Evangélico 87: 31.
[26] Dip, A. 2018. Em nome de quem? A bancada evangélica e seu projeto de poder. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.
[27] Mariano, R. 2012. ‘Deus é o voto’. Revista de História do Museu Nacional, Dossiê Brasil Evangélico 87: 31.
[28] Rossi, Marina. “‘Para Muitas Mulheres o Processo De Empoderamento Está Atrelado à Igreja.’” EL PAÍS, 14 May 2019, brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2019/05/11/politica/1557527356_335349.html.
[29] Smilde, D. 2007. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism. University of California.
[30] Martin, D. 2013. Pentecostalism: An alternate form of modernity and modernization. Hefner, R. W. org. 2013. Global Pentecostalism in the 21st century. Indiana: Indiana University Press. 37–62.
