Global, Transnational, and Everyday Religion

Abstract

As well as important changes in the economic, political, and social fields in Brazil, another key factor that must be taken into account in a discussion of religion among Brazilian migrants is Brazil’s religious field, which has undergone important changes in recent years (Freston 2008; Pierucci 2004).¹ Brazil remains the largest Catholic country in the world, yet recent census figures reveal a significant decline in Catholicism over the last 20 years, coupled with a striking increase in Protestantism — in particular evangelical Protestant (Pentecostal) movements (IBGE 2012; see also Pierucci 2004; Prandi 2008). These unprecedented changes in Brazil itself are to some extent reflected, and arguably amplified, in the religious affiliations and practices of Brazilians in diaspora, most visibly through the emergence of multiple Brazilian places of worship in receiving contexts (Freston 2008). Such phenomena raise important questions with regard to the relationship between migration patterns and religiosity (ibid.). Moreover, as recent scholars have argued, the changing patterns of religion in Brazil have far wider implications contributing to Brazil’s emerging position as ‘a key center of religious creativity within an emerging and polycentric global religious cartography’ (Vasquez and Rocha forthcoming).