Being Catholic in South America is the default in most cases, especially if you're poor. Being protestant almost always means you or your family had it pushed on you by American imperialism, or in rarer cases your family has been protestant for like 300 years and is descendant from early colonizers. That's my understanding.

Protestants in South America are much more of a tool of American imperialism than Catholicism at the moment due to the history of liberation theology, etc. Evangelicals in particular have strong ties with doctrinal shifts in their American counterparts, so they tend to follow arguments on particularly American shit. They also import evangelical teachers from America as if they are God, and reject the history of Christianity generally unlike Catholics.

There's a much longer answer here about class interests, prosperity gospel, and pentecostalism, but I think the above is generally good.

The "Option for the Poor" is a key Catholic doctrine and in South America especially leads to a Liberation Theology approach. Catholicism is a broad church, and judging it based on US tradcaths who think the only Church Council that counts is Vatican I is a mistake.

There is also the fact that the poorer classes tend to be Catholic and the richer Protestant.

as bad as the catholic church is, it's nothing compared to the psycho shit our evangelicals imported from burgerland

Catholics are taught the ten commandments and have some general idea of caring for others .

Where as evangelicals are told they can do what ever they want and as long as they say they are Christian they will get into heaven. 🤷

American Catholics are basically evangelicals

Could also do with the fact that the Catholic Church actually converted indigenous people. Where as evangelicas just seem to be European colonizing descendents.

It's probably the latter

Evangelicals have always been shit in LATAM. We really should do what Japan did and force them tf out because all they do is push genocidal anti-lgbt shit that their gringo masters told them to.

Protestant work ethic is a hell of a drug

Evangelicals worship mammon, Catholics at least try to worship God. Hope this helps!

The big difference is that evangelical leaders are aligned with the same kind of rhetoric that you see in US televangelists, prosperity gospel shit through and through. Highly conservative, virulently homophobic and full of violent rhetoric. I've seen some people here speculating that evangelicals are in their majority richer, but that's exactly the opposite of what really happens here in Brazil.

In my experience, poorer people in Brazil are overwhelmingly evangelical. It's evident when you walk around in a poor neighborhood - you see at least one evangelical church per block. They prey on the poor and the desperate, and every single person I know has at least one story of an acquaintance or relative giving away thousands of bucks to their local pastor, probably buying the story that god would give them back double or some bullshit like that.

Additionally, whenever a politician buys his way into the good graces of evangelical leaders, they get an instant boost to their polling numbers. The reason for that is that evangelicals, contrary to catholics, are mostly a very active part of their respective churches. They go to the culto, they act as a community, and they tend to think very much like each other.

Dont know where to bring this up, but ive seen two cars in the past week or two with Bolsonaro bumper stickers. I live in Philadelphia.

catholics in countries where theyre the main group includes most normal people. catholics in less catholic countries are more liable to be converts/committed, and therefore (adjective) evangelical about it.

the same works in reverse, evangelicals outside the areas in the US it sprang up are almost all quite recently converted, very gung ho insane people. we dont even use one church name to describe them, just the appellation evangelical because theres constantly new (grifts) springing up to renew fervor and restart missions

a lot of the time religious differences will follow class differences for example in the UK the majority of Christians are Catholic but Catholics tend to be poor, working class and often immigrants, whereas protestants are more likely to be members of the bourgoise.

Without looking it up it's very likely that in Brazil Catholics are poorer on average than Evangelicals who are wealthy immigrants from America so have different class interests

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people went over most of the social reason, there is a political one, which is Pastors and high ranking evangelical church members are deeply tied to bolsonaro, like they were getting money that was supposed to be used in schools sent to them at some point in the last 4 years like there is a institutional support for bolsonaro in the evangelical church, also bolsonaro is deeply tied with the millitias on rio which ARE EVANGELICAL AS FUCK, pretty much that is it, the catholics also have some influential people who are way more left, like Padre Lancellotti whose charity and anti hostile architecture has lead to an law project with his name that forbid hostile architecture in public spaces, which still cooking in the legislative right now

Same reasons evangelicals flocked to trump, or more accurately, because of how trump and bolsonaro both sucked up the them to win their votes