Brasil, um país de fé: por que o maior país católico do mundo, também é o maior país pentecostal do mundo?

Abstract

This research aims to show that in Brazil, there were several religious influences that generated from the mixture of peoples and their religions, a very people-oriented mystical supernatural. Thus, with the arrival of Pentecostal missionaries in 1910, Pentecostal theology found fertile ground, because its message had God intervening in a visible way in the life of the people, healing their diseases, saving their soul and generating hope of eternal salvation. Therefore, we investigate to what extent the religious culture of Brazil, the fruit of the various ethnicities that formed what we now call the Brazilian people, favors the Classical Pentecostal Theology and its development in the various strata of its society. For this, the text presents in an introductory way the religious history of the settlers, shows the religious expressions practiced in Brazil before the arrival of the settlers, as well as the religiosity that black Africans brought to Brazil, reports the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries, analyzes the Pentecostal missionaries arrived in Brazil with a Classical Pentecostal Theology, as well as the possible causes of its growth in Brazil. Turning, then, to contemporary issues related to the centennial of Brazil's largest Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God. In this analysis it is assumed that the theory of Max Weber's "elective affinity" can be added to the proposal of Clifford Geertz, where it is assumed that the development of Classical Pentecostalism in Brazil was favored in the forming of its people by very particular social issues that, because of affinity, among all the possibilities of the already present evangelical theology, opted by cultural affinity for Pentecostalism.