Evangelical population growth in Brazil

The seventh largest country in the world by population, Brazil is also the largest Catholic country in the world, but that status is changing quickly, according to this article in The Guardian: Catholics now make up little more than half Brazil’s population, by Tiago Rogero. An excerpt:

Thirty years ago, Catholics made up 82.9% of Brazil’s population but now account for just over half, 56.7%, according to the 2022 census – whose results on religion were only released on Friday.

Meanwhile, the number of evangelicals has continued to grow, rising from 9% of the population to 26.9% over the past three decades.

Although the growth rate has slowed slightly – rising by 6.5 percentage points between 2000 and 2010, and 5.3 since – the new data shows that, for the first time, at least one in four Brazilians identifies as evangelical . . . .

The new IBGE data also showed that, proportionally within each group, there are more Black evangelicals than white ones – a particularly relevant finding given that the majority of Brazil’s population, 56%, is Black.

Although Catholics remain the majority in both cases, just one in four white Brazilians identifies as evangelical, compared with one in three among Black Brazilians.

The article indicates that evangelicals have become a political force in Brazil, somewhat echoing the status of their brothers and sisters in the United States. The most immediate effect of this is an erosion of support for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who will be standing for re-election next year.

“Rationally, the government understands it needs to engage with evangelicals, but internally, many of Lula’s party leaders still believe religion is a thing of the past and that the faithful are simply people who haven’t had proper access to education,” said the anthropologist and historian Juliano Spyer, author of books on the evangelical movement in Brazil. 

Given this context, how should Brazil's Christians exercise their responsibilities as citizens? How might Christians—both Catholic and evangelical—be a force for public justice in that country? As it happens, I have written a book intended to assist Christians in living out their faith in public life. It's called Citizenship Without Illusions. I would love to see a Portuguese translation of this book for Brazil, Angola, and the rest of the lusophone world. I hope this will eventually come about.