Abstract
The growing religious diversity in Brazil has more to do with a differentiation process within Pentecostalism itself than with the presence of very diverse religious groups. Starting with the analysis of such differentiation process, the article aims to discuss the need of terminological improvement and eventually the necessity of Keynesian rules adopted by the State to regulate ultraliberal religious markets. In unequal societies and religious markets such as those in Brazil, Pentecostal leaders’ greedy attitudes regarding their own adherents and aggressive intolerance against other religions’ followers are coherent with a functionalist religious market conception. In this view, highly aggressive strategies of some Pentecostal churches vis-à-vis other adversaries are seen as belonging to the normal functioning of a (neo-liberal) self-regulated social subsystem. Therefore, reflections on religious diversity inspired on a market model assume neoliberal macro conditions (total deregulation and free competition) as granted or desirable. Religious diversity would appear as the “natural” consequence of religious competition. However, put in Beckford’s terms, how can religious pluralism be achieved under terrible conditions of religious diversity? Intolerant attitudes of neo-Pentecostal leaders undermine the very bases of democracy and put the discussion on religious diversity and pluralism under new theoretical and political exigencies.
Highlights
The Catholic Church has almost exclusively shaped the Brazilian religious field
The royal patronage system ruled for 389 years during the Portuguese colonial time and the Brazilian empire
When the Pentecostal churches Assembly of God (AG) and Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) entered into the political arena in 1986, they did it in a corporatist way, adopting a populist behavior of manipulating faithful people to obtain electoral benefits, according to the church’s ruling staff’s previously determined goals
Summary
The Catholic Church has almost exclusively shaped the Brazilian religious field. The royal patronage system ruled for 389 years during the Portuguese colonial time and the Brazilian empire. The first two churches, the Christian Community in Brazil (CCB 1910) and the Assembly of God (AG 1911), have already presented differences in doctrine, ecclesiastical organization, evangelizing strategies, and liturgical preferences They grew in different cultural milieus, the CCB among Italian immigrants in rural areas and small cities in the South, and the AG expanded among lower public workers in the state capitals coming from the North to the Northeast coast and down to the Southwest. The third wave of Brazilian Pentecostalism (Freston 1994), called neo-Pentecostalism by Mariano (1999), characterizes those Pentecostal churches founded in Brazil in the 1970s They present some distinguishing features in comparison to previous Pentecostals: abandon the rigid sectarian ethos and the millennium expectation, preach prosperity and the holy war theology, adopt a modern capitalistic managing style in church administration, and make heavy investments in media and well-planned performance in politics. Associated with a kind of disenchantment, urban peripheries of big Latin-American cities (Mexico City, São Paulo and Buenos Aires) are currently places where the number of Pentecostals and people without religion grows more (Rivera 2016)
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