At present, Protestants account for one-third of the population, while the number of Catholics has just dipped below 50 per cent. By far the largest proportion of Brazilian Protestants are evangelicals, specifically Pentecostals, neo-Pentecostals and related branches. By the centenary of Raízes do Brasil in 2036, Protestants will outnumber Catholics in Brazil for the first time in the country’s 500-plus-year history.

In 2018, the far-Right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro shocked the country by winning the presidency, bolstered by an evangelical vote that would remain faithful to him and his socially conservative, politically reactionary and cosmologically apocalyptic politics.

No one holds Brazil as an existing paradise. Few even sustain any expectation that it will deliver on what was promised for it. And, indeed, utopian thinking probably died as far back as the 1964 military coup. But many have continued to uphold the country’s cultural traits as admirable and enviable – even models for the world.

Brazilianization’, a trope taken up by various intellectuals in recent decades, signals a universal tendency towards social inequality, urban segregation, informalisation of labour, and political corruption. Others, though, have sought to rescue a positive aspect: the country’s informality and ductility, particularly in relation to work, as well as its hybridisation, creolisation and openness to the world, made it already adapted to the new, global, postmodern capitalism that followed the Cold War.

By the 2000s, Brazil was witnessing peaceful, democratic alternation in government between centre-Left and centre-Right for practically the first time in its history. Under President Lula, it saw booming growth, combined with new measures of social inclusion. But underneath the surface of the globalisation wave that Brazil was surfing, violent crime was on the up, manufacturing was down, and inclusion was being bought on credit.

In 2013, it came to a shuddering halt. Rising popular expectations generated a crisis of representation – announced by the biggest mass street mobilisations in the country’s history. This was succeeded by economic crisis and then by institutional crisis, culminating in the parliamentary coup against Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff. Now all the energy seemed to be with a new Right-wing movement that dominated the streets. It was topped off by the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. Suddenly, eyes turned to the growing prominence of conservative Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal outlooks in national life.

So why the association of evangelicals with darkest reaction? In large part, it’s class prejudice, argues the anthropologist Juliano Spyer, whose book Povo de Deus (2020), or People of God, sparked widespread debate in the country and was a finalist in Brazil’s most prestigious nonfiction prize in 2021. For opinion-formers, the evangelical is either a poor fanatic or a rich manipulator, but the reality is that the religion is socially embedded in Brazil, particularly among the poor and Black population.

What explains this explosion? The anthropologist Gilberto Velho points to inward migration, the primary 20th-century phenomenon in Brazil. Tens of millions of poor, illiterate, rural and profoundly Catholic people from the arid northeast of Brazil migrated to big cities, especially in the industrial southeast. Spyer tells me they ‘lived through the shock of leaving the countryside for the electricity of the city – but also the shock of moving to the most vulnerable parts of the city.’ The loss of networks of support, particularly of extended family, was filled by the establishment of evangelical churches. This is why the geographer Mike Davis called Pentecostalism ‘the single most important cultural response to explosive and traumatic urbanisation’.

The ‘neo-Pentecostal movement today flourishes in a context of dismantling of labour protections,’ argues Brazil’s leading scholar of precarity, Ruy Braga. This requires less a methodical dedication to work, and more the neoliberal self-management typical of popular entrepreneurship. We are dealing not with the Protestant work ethic, but with an evangelical speculative ethic. Quantification becomes the criteria of validation, be it for believers or churches competing in the religious marketplace. ‘Blessings are consumed, praises sold, preaching purchased,’ as Alencar puts it.

Whether this is mere capitalist survival or somehow utopian depends on whether you agree with the Catholic theologian Jung Mo Sung’s assertion that evangelicals insert a metaphysical element – perfectibility; the realisation of desire through the market for those who ‘deserve’ it – into mundane society. For a critic of the prosperity gospel like Sung, this neo-Pentecostal consumer-capitalist utopia is necessarily authoritarian. Divine blessing – manifest through the crente’s increased purchasing power – is bestowed as a result of the believers’ spiritual war against the enemies of God: the ‘communists’ and the ‘gays’.

The ‘communists’ (who might in fact just be centrist progressives or Catholics) want to give money to the poor; these in turn may be sinners (drug users or traffickers, for instance). This goes against the way that God distributes blessings, which is to favour, economically, those who follow the prosperity gospel.