Within less than a decade, Brazil will have as many evangelicals as Catholics, a transcendence born of the prosperity gospel
A gospel service at the Baptist church Maranata in Jaboatao dos Guararapes, Brazil, September 2022. Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
A gospel service at the Baptist church Maranata in Jaboatao dos Guararapes, Brazil, September 2022. Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
is a writer and political analyst based in São Paulo, Brazil. He hosts the global politics podcast Bungacast, writes the Daily Liver Peckings newsletter, and is the co-author of The End of the End of History (2021).
In 1856, Thomas Ewbank published Life in Brazil, an account of the Englishman’s six months spent in the country a decade earlier. In it, he argued that Catholicism as practised in Brazil and across Latin America constrained material progress. In this, the visitor would be joined by a long line of critics, from the writer and later modernising president of Argentina, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento – who denounced the negative influence of Spanish and Indigenous cultures in Latin America, including the role of the Catholic Church – to the conservative Harvard academic Samuel Huntington.
The Church of St Cosmas and St Damian and The Franciscan Monastery at Igaraçu, Brazil (c1663) by Frans Jansz Post. Courtesy the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
