Protestant identities and the Catholic renewal

From the early 1870s onwards, Brazilian Protestants and foreign missionaries crystallized a new set of critiques of modern Catholicism in their writings, targeting the hierarchical structure of the church and its devotions. When the political movements inaugurated by the French Revolution struck the power and prestige of the church, believers and religious experts took part in initiatives to revitalize Catholic worship and organization. On the one hand, the church strengthened and broadened its bureaucracy. Rome centralized the training of priests and the First Vatican Council declared the Pope to be infallible in terms of faith and morals, enabling the church to discipline its ranks.Footnote ¹² On the other, brotherhoods and confraternities rejuvenated Catholic worship by propagating the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Marian devotions, invigorating the dedication of believers to religious causes.Footnote ¹³ These reforms merged the world of the church with the world of the faithful and “helped Catholics to reimagine themselves as a transnational community in the modern world.”Footnote ¹⁴ The papacy of Pius IX (1846–78) embodied these transformations. It was he who declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in 1854 and presided over Vatican I. By surrounding himself with able propagandists and resorting to modern means of communication, Pius IX became the first pope to be known as a personality to Catholics.Footnote ¹⁵

The religious fervor of this era had multiple effects in Latin America, disrupting the religious landscape and reviving long-standing colonial devotions in Mexico and Peru.Footnote ¹⁶ In Brazil, the strengthening of the Catholic bureaucracy began as part of an orchestrated effort to moralize the Brazilian clergy engineered by Emperor Pedro II and the cleric Antônio Ferreira Viçoso, appointed in 1845 to the bishopric of Mariana, Minas Gerais. Dom Viçoso's diocesan reform comprised the imposition of strict moral standards upon his flock and the training of promising seminarians in European schools.Footnote ¹⁷ This initiative was boosted in 1858 with the foundation of the Pontificio Collegio Pio Latino Americano in Rome, a seminary dedicated to the training of Latin American priests.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1870 fifty Brazilians were studying there. These orthodox and well-educated clergymen became the vanguard of the Romanization of the Brazilian church, acting as bishops, seminary rectors and theology professors.Footnote ¹⁹ Their attempts to assert the supremacy of Rome over the national church evolved into a political conflict. Following the advice of papal decrees that had not received imperial approval, Bishops Vital Oliveira of Olinda and Recife and Antonio Macedo Costa of Belém commanded the lay brotherhoods under their dioceses to expel Freemasons in 1872. Imperial ministers put the bishops on trial and condemned them to four years of imprisonment with hard labor in 1874. Although they received imperial amnesty in the following year, this conflict, known as the Religious Question, exerted a lasting impact on the Brazilian Catholic imagination.Footnote ²⁰

A renewal of religious life occurred simultaneously in different parts of the country. In the province of Ceará, Father José Maria Ibiapina carried out itinerant missionary work between 1862 and 1883 opening houses of charity, which served as schools for the daughters of local elites, orphanages and workhouses.Footnote ²¹ The people who staffed them, know as beatas and beatos, organized collective mobilizations to restore rundown shrines and cemeteries and acquired some prestige among the faithful.Footnote ²² In the latter half of the nineteenth century, laypeople and clergymen appropriated Catholic hostility to Freemasonry and Protestantism in their attempts to revive the centrality of Catholicism in the life of the nation. Faithful Catholics mobilized themselves to aid the church in its struggle against secularization by going on pilgrimage to Rome, praying for Pius IX and sending donations to the Vatican.Footnote ²³

In this context, Brazilian Protestants and foreign missionaries produced a systematic critique of the Catholic renewal that addressed the religious transformations of the era. For them, the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility had been one of the most repulsive transformations of modern Christendom. Starting in September 1870, the Presbyterian periodical Imprensa Evangelica (Evangelical Press) published a series of articles titled “Is the Papal System a Divine Institution?”, claiming that the primacy of the Pope had neither been instituted by the Scriptures nor practiced by the early Christian church.Footnote ²⁴ They drew upon the writings of church fathers, such as Origen, Augustine and Jerome, to subvert the Catholic interpretation of the biblical verse supporting Peter's supremacy: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). The periodical's editors claimed that in this verse Jesus had emphasized Peter's confession, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” In their arguments, Christ had established a regime of equality amongst his disciples, past and present, and empowered them with the Holy Spirit to lead the church.Footnote ²⁵ But Vatican I also had apocalyptic connotations. The year 1870 had been to Brazilian evangelicals a reminder of the unfolding of biblical prophecies. They viewed the dogma of papal infallibility and Pius IX, respectively, as the great apostasy and the “son of perdition” of II Thessalonians, and portrayed the Franco-Prussian war as a sign of the end of times: a divine punishment against Paris, the “modern Babylon.”Footnote ²⁶

Although the Imprensa Evangelica was a small paper that had at its peak a thousand subscribers, reading practices in evangelical churches extended its reach. In congregations destitute of ordained ministers it was common for laypeople to read aloud sermons and hymns printed on the periodical during services.Footnote ²⁷ And in the following decades, Protestants elaborated on these early critiques of the Vatican Council and its legacies. In 1897, Presbyterian pastors in São Paulo published a translation of a discourse given by the Croatian bishop Josip Strossmayer at the council, for whom the Christian church lived its golden age in the centuries preceding the establishment of the papacy. Quoting from patristic literature, Strossmayer objected to the theological rationale that asserted the primacy of Peter and added that by proclaiming the infallibility of Pius IX, Catholics should also admit the infallibility of previous incestuous and homicidal popes.Footnote ²⁸ For Eduardo Carlos Pereira, the influential Brazilian pastor, grammarian and founder of the Independent Presbyterian Church of São Paulo, the neo-Catholicism of Vatican I restored old pagan politics and represented the ultimate destruction of the primitive democratic community of the apostles.Footnote ²⁹

In the context of the Religious Question, when debates surrounding the legal status of the church in Brazil were hotly contested, four tracts translated by Protestants in Rio de Janeiro extended the evangelical objection to Catholic faith and politics into the realms of ethics and civil loyalty. The first was a document written by the German bishop Joseph Reinkens, one of the central exponents of the Old Catholic movement that opposed Romanized Catholicism. For Reinkens, the papacy of Pius IX had perverted the Christian faith and degenerated its original rites into a spiritual despotism, crushing the sense of personal responsibility.Footnote ³⁰ The second tract, written by the German pastor Erich Stiller, began by tracing in general lines the history of the Reformation, showing how John Wycliffe, Martin Luther and John Calvin sought to purify the Christian church and eliminate doctrinal distortions. Building upon the Protestant suspicion of ecclesiastical authority, Stiller claimed that Christ's atonement dissolved priestly mediation and transformed the church into a spiritual and invisible reality, centered around the sufficiency of the Bible and the gifts of the Spirit.Footnote ³¹ The third was a translation of William Gladstone's critique of Catholic politics. For Britain's prime minister, the decrees of Pius IX extended indefinitely the territorial power of the church and repudiated the foundations of modern civilization, putting the civil loyalty of Catholics in check since they owed allegiance both to Rome and to their nations.Footnote ³² The last of these tracts was Émile de Laveleye's The Future of Catholic Peoples, which also proved to be the most influential. It popularized the idea that instead of race, religious practice determined the pace of social progress. Laveleye claimed that Protestantism was the force underlying the fast development of German and Anglo-Saxon countries, while the attachment of Latin societies to the Catholic Church explained their backwardness.Footnote ³³

All these tracts were printed at the Laemmert publishing house, one of Brazil's largest publishers owned by Eduard and Heinrich Laemmert, the sons of a German Protestant minister.Footnote ³⁴ Some of these publications achieved a relatively high circulation for that period, especially Laveleye's tract, which sold 4,500 copies.Footnote ³⁵ Although they were fairly highbrow literature, written in argumentative style and unappealing to the modestly educated first generation of Brazilian believers, their ideas informed much of the evangelical critique of Catholicism in sermons and popular tracts. In 1877, for instance, Brazilian Presbyterians published a series of articles titled “Differences between Catholics and Protestants” in the Imprensa Evangelica elaborating the arguments of Erich Stiller. Written in the form of a simple dialogue, it depicted an evangelical convert trying to persuade his Catholic neighbor that whereas Protestantism was entirely devoted to the Trinity, Catholicism was anthropocentric.Footnote ³⁶ In a sermon delivered to the Presbyterian Church of Rio de Janeiro in 1874, the American missionary Francis Schneider deployed Stiller's distinction between the visible and the invisible church. Whereas the former was materialized in local congregations of Christians, to the invisible church belonged all those who were “called by the divine grace to participate in the blessings of the same Gospel, saved by the same Savior, sanctified by the same Spirit … and though they are spread throughout the whole world and belong to different communions, they are, nevertheless, united by intimate and closer spiritual bonds than those of the external community.”Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, William Gladstone's verdict on the incompatibility between Pius IX's decrees and the values of modern civilization continued to inform the evangelical objection to Romanized Catholicism in the early twentieth century.Footnote ³⁸

The most enduring legacy of this critique of Catholic hierarchy and practice to Brazilian Protestants was the idealization of the early church. The evangelical impetus to restore the pristine purity of the apostolic era in its ecclesiastical forms, moral teachings and spiritual experiences animated converts and religious experts in the modern world. In the twentieth century, Christian primitivism was a powerful force behind American and southern African Pentecostals’ destructive attitudes to tradition and to their yearning to be led by the Holy Spirit.Footnote ³⁹ For Brazilian Protestants, Christian primitivism assumed various forms, shaping conceptions of conversion, ecclesiastical hierarchy, education and democracy. They portrayed contemporary Catholic rites as the result of a long process of degeneration of the apostolic church. Eduardo Pereira summarized this spirit in 1920 by writing that “Protestantism is nothing else than primitive Catholicism shaking away from itself papal Romanism.” For him the Protestant solution against religious degeneration propounded a return ad fontes: “Protestantism is not a new religion founded by Luther, Calvin and other sixteenth-century reformers; it has the same age as the Bible,” preceding all Roman innovations.Footnote ⁴⁰ For another prominent Presbyterian pastor, Erasmo Braga, the Reformation was a movement of “reversion to primitive Christianity.” He affirmed in 1928 that the evangelical attachment to the Bible, a consequence of such reversal, transformed Protestants into enthusiastic advocates of universal education.Footnote ⁴¹ Brazilian Protestants and foreign missionaries believed that the adjective “evangelical” encapsulated this restorationist impulse. They urged converts to read and disseminate the message of the Gospels (os evangelhos) and reform their beliefs and behavior in their light. A careful, heartfelt return to the Gospels would enable believers to rekindle the spiritual energy of the apostolic church.Footnote ⁴²

Evangelical evaluations of Catholic worship deployed similar notions of religious purification. Brazilian converts believed that the medieval church introduced a set of religious distortions in Christian worship, including the veneration of images, the mediation of saints and the centrality of Mary. The inexpensive and accessible tracts published by the Brazilian Society of Evangelical Tracts, founded in São Paulo in 1883, are illustrative. The Presbyterian pastor José Zacharias de Miranda argued in 1885 that the worship of images and statues created a “deplorable state of affairs,” substituting “the spiritual worship to a God who is spirit for a material worship paid to the gods of wood, rock, clay, etc., fabricated by the hands of sinners!” For Miranda, the veneration of images subverted Christian piety and materialized Christian spirituality.Footnote ⁴³ Materialization was a key concept in the evangelical critique of Catholic worship, indicating a disposition to conforming higher spiritual realities to mundane practices and objects. Eduardo Pereira deployed this concept in his objection to the popular Marian devotions. In a tract written in the form of a dialogue between himself and a rural family from Minas Gerais, Pereira claimed that, like Catholics, Protestants believed that the Virgin Mary was “blessed among women … surrounded by glory in Heavens.” For him, Catholics erred in referring to Mary as “Mother of God,” for God was not subject to human authority. This projection of worldly hierarchies to the Holy Family illustrated the depth of the “impious and fatal tendency of the Roman church in materializing the spiritual Kingdom of God, seizing upon the rough ideas of the people to conceive the Heavens in the image and likeness of earthly society.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In other tracts, Pereira praised the examples of Mary and the saints but contended that Catholic tradition misplaced them at the center of Christian worship.Footnote ⁴⁵ For Protestants, the Catholic attachment to intermediaries, including priests, saints or godfathers, expressed a pagan inclination to materialize worship.

Such a straightforward rejection of material and human mediation and insistence on the spiritual dimension of faith reshaped individual subjectivities and conceptions of social life amongst converts. The restorationist impetus of evangelicals gave way to iconoclastic attitudes. Believers conceptualized conversion as a “break with the religion of our parents” and, convinced that Catholic traditions distorted Christian worship, destroyed icons and statues of saints in bonfires or by throwing them to rivers.Footnote ⁴⁶ The evangelical emphasis on individual salvation strengthened notions of self-reliance in Brazil, encouraging first-generation believers to break from traditional links of patronage and godparenthood.Footnote ⁴⁷ Furthermore, in envisioning the church as a spiritual reality, Brazilian Protestants and foreign missionaries facilitated the reimagining of the Christian worldwide communion by casting themselves as active participants in a community of disciples spread through time and space.

But for Protestants, another specter emerged in response to the Catholic reforms of the Vatican Council. An article published in the Imprensa Evangelica in 1883 argued, “Romanism has become the father of the atheism and materialism that prevails across Europe.” Their formula was simple. The Catholic Church offered its followers a choice: either complete conformity to superstitious and deformed beliefs, or utter disbelief.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Protestants were equally concerned with the religious indifference of Brazil's “intelligent classes,” and their evangelistic zeal led them into the terrain of the prevailing social and political debates.

Protestants and the spirit of the time

For evangelicals, the political transformations of Brazilian society in the late 1880s carried certain ambiguities. The abolition of slavery in 1888 excited their missionary fervor with the challenge of evangelizing the newly freed slaves. But for them, the prospect of a future reign of Princess Isabel, the devout Catholic imperial heir who signed the abolitionist law, sounded as a threat.Footnote ⁴⁹ Protestants believed that the legal status of religious minorities under the empire was unstable, dependent on the interpretation by local political chiefs and police delegates of constitutional clauses on religious tolerance.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the following year, a military coup overthrew Emperor Pedro II and installed a republican regime that carried out some of the reforms that Protestants long aspired to, including church–state separation, secularization of cemeteries and the creation of civil registrations of births and marriages. Protestants, however, held the positivist elite that capitalized the republican movement in suspicion. The religious scenario was similarly complicated. Despite the lay character of the republican constitution of 1891 the church managed to retain some privileges, such as permission to receive public funds destined to charity work.Footnote ⁵¹ For the ecclesiastical hierarchy, disestablishment meant deliverance from the burdensome imperial patronage.Footnote ⁵² Released from state control and still resentful of the assault of the Religious Question, Catholics sought to regain terrain lost since the 1870s. Throughout the First Republic the Brazilian church strengthened its connections with the Vatican, trained its priests in prestigious European schools, opened new seminaries and bishoprics throughout the country, reinforced control over lay associations and expanded its bureaucracy.Footnote ⁵³ In the evangelical imagination, the twilight of the nineteenth century could be the best of times and the worst of times.

The peaceful character of such momentous political transformations caught the attention of evangelicals. For the American missionaries it was remarkable that unlike their home country, Brazilian society had been able to abolish slavery without provoking a war, and that unlike France, Brazilian republicans overthrew the monarchy without triggering a revolution.Footnote ⁵⁴ For the most part, Protestants favored what British sociologist David Martin has called “peaceable cultural transformation”—individual processes of spiritual regeneration—over radical upheaval.Footnote ⁵⁵ Evangelicals decried the socially corrosive effects of revolutionary action. Eduardo Pereira, for instance, expressed his disapproval of the French Revolution in dramatic words, claiming that when the “atheism and impiety” of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot fired the popular spirit, “the people became a monster, and its excesses terrified humanity.”Footnote ⁵⁶ He also bemoaned the “sanguine ferocity” of the revolutionaries of 1793.Footnote ⁵⁷ Evangelicals continued to disapprove of revolutionary change in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1922, the linguist and pastor who succeeded Pereira's leadership at the Independent Presbyterian Church of São Paulo, Otoniel Mota, dubbed a story he heard in the Brazilian countryside “the deeds of a bolshevist tapir.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In it, a wounded tapir rushed into a tent armed by a hunting crew, dragged the tent away and threw the cook into a cauldron of hot beans.Footnote ⁵⁹ Needless to say, he equated bolshevism with disorder. Unlike the Mexican Protestants who supported revolutionary mobilization against Porfirio Díaz's regime in 1911, Brazilian evangelicals eschewed radical political disruption.Footnote ⁶⁰

This antirevolutionary inclination of Brazilian Protestants resonated with secular and religious expectations of the era. Throughout the political transition of the late nineteenth century, conservatives, liberals, republicans and orthodox positivists disagreed on many issues, but it was a near consensus that political change should shun revolutionary action. Apart from a Rio de Janeiro-based radical republican minority, they agreed on the peaceful nature of political transitions.Footnote ⁶¹ Catholics, in spite of their political resentment, similarly expressed their aversion to radical change. In the 1920s, thinkers such as Jackson de Figueiredo and Father Leonel Franca argued that the tensions of modern civilization derived from political and religious ruptures such as the Protestant Reformation, and the French and the Russian revolutions, which crushed a God-given natural hierarchy.Footnote ⁶² Inspired by principles of order and harmony, and opposing notions of individual freedom and class struggle, Catholics sought to respiritualize the social order.Footnote ⁶³ It would be misleading, therefore, to situate Protestants, Catholics and secular political elites into opposite ideological positions. They responded in various forms to the political and religious transformations of their era, sometimes converging on specific points.

Selectivity characterized the evangelical interaction with secular ideologies. Protestant engagement with the political and social ideas of the age evolved through a pattern of cautious accommodation and selective rejection. Their uses of liberal and Enlightenment concepts are illustrative. Swiss historian Jean-Pierre Bastian argued that the political programmes of Protestant missionaries and local converts, upholding the principles of liberty of worship and religious disestablishment, resonated with the dispositions of radical liberals in nineteenth-century Latin America.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, although the aspirations of missionaries and converts converged with specific elements of the reformist agendas of political elites, their relationship was riven with suspicion. Brazilian Protestants indeed defended the idea of free churches in a free state, advocated principles of religious tolerance and believed in self-improvement and social progress.Footnote ⁶⁵ But they despised the legacy of modern French philosophers and the Francophile inclination of Brazil's intellectuals. Eduardo Pereira depicted the Brazilian intelligentsia as a “reactionary, disbelieving, mocking class, whose revolted reason … impels it, naturally, beyond the middle line where the truth is.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Although some Brazilian positivists held Protestantism in high esteem and despite the fact that technical education offered in Protestant schools resonated with the positivists’ modernizing ambitions, Brazilian evangelicals openly criticized French positivism.Footnote ⁶⁷ In 1883 Imprensa Evangelica published a series of articles depicting positivism as a man-made religion with universalist ambitions but incapable of attending to the spiritual needs of mankind, and evoked images of its founding fathers’ despair on their deathbeds.Footnote ⁶⁸ For Brazilian Protestants, Rome and Paris were the two Babylons of the modern world. They decried the incredulity of French intellectuals who figured in the intellectual repertoire of Brazilian elites, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Littré and Comte.Footnote ⁶⁹

They did embrace, however, specific concepts arising from Enlightenment and liberal thought, as an abolitionist tract written by Eduardo Pereira in 1886 demonstrates. Brazilian Protestants were slow to take up the antislavery cause. The abolitionist agenda had potential to cause conflicts with foreign mission bodies and the communities of American Confederate immigrants who settled in the countryside of São Paulo.Footnote ⁷⁰ In 1884, influenced by the publication of a famous abolitionist book by the politician Joaquim Nabuco, Protestants began to uphold the cause from their pulpits and presses. The American missionary James Houston delivered a sermon to the Presbyterian Church of Rio de Janeiro in the same year objecting to the use of Mosaic Law to justify the practice of enslavement in Brazil.Footnote ⁷¹ Pereira's tract was the most elaborate evangelical defense of abolitionism. He began by evoking a scene witnessed in his childhood of a slave being tortured and questioned the “civilized” and Christian status of the Brazilian monarchy. Pereira claimed that slaves were “violently deprived of their natural rights” and that “slavery [was] the violation of a human right, a sacrilegious attack against the Creator's work.” It was from evangelical pulpits in the United States and Britain that preachers stirred the national consciousness against “the heinous slave trade.”Footnote ⁷² His abolitionist arguments resembled those of John Wesley a century earlier, who also deployed Enlightenment concepts in his attack on slavery.Footnote ⁷³ But for Pereira, such emancipatory liberal ideas were a creation of Christianity, not of French thinkers: “Liberty and fraternity, sublime utopias of the human spirit, are the universal fruits of true Christianity.”Footnote ⁷⁴ This argument was similar to Émile de Laveleye's, who affirmed that “the French Revolution did not invent the so-called principles of 1789” of liberty and fraternity: they had been rehearsed two hundred years earlier by the Puritans in England and the United States.Footnote ⁷⁵ Brazilian Protestants did deploy Enlightenment and liberal concepts of freedom and natural rights in their writings, but they grounded such concepts on Christian traditions, disconnecting them from their original sources and reconfiguring their meanings.Footnote ⁷⁶

In the period from 1870 to 1930 evangelicals developed a complex relationship with the concept of race. Throughout the nineteenth century, the settlement of German and Swiss Lutheran immigrants in Brazil was part of a social experiment informed by racialist thinking. It was believed that white immigrants would supply Brazil's thriving agrarian economy with a “civilizing” workforce. Intellectuals and bureaucrats conceived the whitening of Brazilian society as a solution to its backwardness.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even ardent abolitionists such as Joaquim Nabuco objected to the immigration of Chinese workers based on racialist assumptions.Footnote ⁷⁸ In historian João José Reis's words regarding imperial policies of tolerance, “if the letter of the law stated that religions would be tolerated, the spirit of the law was intent at protecting religious freedom among white Protestant foreigners who resided in Brazil.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The intellectual antecedents of racial thought in Brazil and Latin America came from various sources: from the dictates of environmental determinism; ethnologists and physical anthropologists who believed in innate differences between human races; and social Darwinism, which postulated an ultimate triumph of the “superior races” through evolutionary processes. For the Brazilian intelligentsia, who lived in the last country of the Americas to abolish slavery and in a miscegenated society, these indictments were especially agonizing. Influential men of letters, including the literary critic Sílvio Romero and the engineer and writer Euclides da Cunha, countered such pessimism by suggesting that racial mixture would eventually whiten Brazilian society.Footnote ⁸⁰ Few went as far as the physician Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, who believed in insurmountable racial differences and held negative views of miscegenation.Footnote ⁸¹ The idea of degeneration, equally pervasive in Brazilian social thought, extrapolated the boundaries of racial thinking into the domains of individual behavior and health care: alcoholism, laziness, consanguineous marriages, diseases and inappropriate upbringing had degenerative consequences for humans.Footnote ⁸² The dictates of racial theories and the fuzzy concept of degeneration appeared not only in scientific compendia and medical journals, but also in literature, historical research and museum exhibitions, giving these ideas a wider social resonance.Footnote ⁸³

Evangelical missionaries and Brazilian Protestants, however, held theories of racial difference under suspicion. Modern mission theorists upheld the biblical principle of the unity of humankind in contrast to the “polygenism” of physical anthropologists, who claimed that human races had different origins.Footnote ⁸⁴ Missionaries and Brazilian converts emphasized the regenerative capacity of knowledge, conceiving conversion and education as drivers of self-improvement and social improvement. In this context, Émile de Laveleye's tract The Future of Catholic Peoples exerted a lasting influence on evangelical appropriations of racial theories in Brazil. His tract compared the development of Latin, German and Anglo-Saxon societies and postulated that instead of race, religion determined the pace of modernization. In Laveleye's arguments, Protestantism nourished positive attitudes towards education, trade and the arts, while Catholicism degenerated into despotism and ignorance. He picked examples from Switzerland to support his claims that the Latin cantons of Neuchâtel, Vaud and Geneva made greater progress in their industrial and commercial achievements than the German cantons of Lucerne and Valois: “the first are Latin, but Protestants; the latter are German, but subject to Rome. Worship and not race is, therefore, the cause of the first's superiority.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This argument gave leverage to Brazilian evangelicals’ positive views of the modernizing effects of conversion.

Theories of racial difference and degeneration set a foothold in Latin America when British and American missionary societies started to organize international conferences aimed at studying the impact of their enterprise. Foremost among them was the World Missionary Conference convened in Edinburgh in 1910, which brought together evangelical leaders from various parts of the world.Footnote ⁸⁶ In similar gatherings throughout the twentieth century, participants believed that Christian fellowship displaced racial differences.Footnote ⁸⁷

A similar feeling predominated at the Panama Congress of 1916, the first of its kind in Latin America, as the writings of two Brazilian participants demonstrate. One of them, Erasmo Braga, wrote an account of the congress interpreting its significance to the religious, social and diplomatic life of the Americas. Planned and organized by American missionary societies, the Panama Congress also included twenty-seven Latin American delegates who took on leadership roles.Footnote ⁸⁸ Braga envisioned the event as a fraternal encounter between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin races of the Americas and observed that “the spiritual bond that connects them is stronger than the sentiment of race.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In order to properly analyze the social features of American societies, he claimed, observers should pay attention to the intellectual and spiritual contents of the racial elements that formed the populations of the continent, instead of ethnic factors. Braga resorted to “Laveleye's law” when arguing that historical trajectories and religious differences determined the unequal progress of Latin and Anglo-Saxon America, and that social organization and civil liberties prevailed wherever evangelical Christianity made inroads.Footnote ⁹⁰

Another Brazilian participant at Panama 1916, Eduardo Pereira, wrote in 1920 a major work of religious controversy titled The Religious Problem of Latin America partly based on his impressions of the congress's significance. Like Braga, he acknowledged the importance of Laveleye's work, claiming that “the scientific method” validated his explanation of the decadence of Latin peoples.Footnote ⁹¹ Referring to the conference as a gathering between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races, Pereira propounded a wide-ranging interpretation of Christian universalism. He rejected the cephalic index, used by Brazilian scientists to identify traces of racial degeneration, as a valid tool for the assessment of racial differences.Footnote ⁹² For him, the concept of race was “anthropologically uncertain and historically confused,” whereas the “monogenism of the human family” was firmly established in the realm of science. Bringing together notions of biblical and scientific authority, Pereira claimed that Darwin's evolutionary theory showed unequivocally that mankind had a common biological origin and nothing could oppose the idea “that all human races were conceived as varieties of one only primitive family, headed by the biblical patriarch.” Ever since Darwin's theory was articulated,

This belief in the convergence between evolutionary theories and the biblical cosmogony was not unusual at that time. Evangelical missionaries in other parts of the world also embraced elements of Darwinist science in their defense of a theological anthropology that stressed human universality.Footnote ⁹⁴ What was significant in the Brazilian context was the replacement of the postulates of racial determinism by a loosely defined religious determinism.

Obviously, that was not the only evangelical response to racial theories. Nineteenth-century theologians in Britain and America debated whether the Bible presented enough evidence to sustain the principle of the common origin of humanity and some American theologians enumerated a plethora of biblical passages justifying slavery.Footnote ⁹⁵ Defenders of African slavery found a theological rationale to assert the inferiority of Africans in the biblical story of Noah's curse upon his son Ham.Footnote ⁹⁶ Whereas some of Brazil's most influential evangelical ministers rejected central tenets of scientific racism, they nevertheless embraced some of its postulates. Erasmo Braga, for instance, deployed notions of environmental determinism to explain the differences between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon races.Footnote ⁹⁷ Eduardo Pereira, despite his broad definition of Christian universalism, did not eschew the concept of race altogether. For him, specific behavioral traits distinguished the human races. In his classification, Latin peoples were sympathetic, communicative and friendly, and tended to collectivism in their social organization, while the Anglo-Saxons were a practical people, attached to the particularity of facts, and individualistic. Degeneration for Pereira meant the radicalization of such traits: Anglo-Saxon individualism could degenerate into insolence and selfishness, whereas Latin collectivism could degenerate into indolence and parasitism.Footnote ⁹⁸

Another variety of Brazilian racial thinking corresponded to what historian Barbara Weinstein has called the racialization of regional differences. Early twentieth-century writers based in São Paulo argued that the bandeirantes, the seventeenth-century slavers and pathfinders who rode the countryside in search of precious minerals, formed the cradle of modern Brazil. For such scholars, the region of São Paulo presented few traces of African influence and they depicted the bandeirantes as a “race of giants”: lighter-skinned, proto-capitalist entrepreneurs who contrasted with the decadent darker-skinned mullatoes of the Brazilian northeast.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Reverend Otoniel Mota contributed to such scholarship and deployed similar arguments, claiming that the presence of African slaves in São Paulo had been minimal in the colonial period and did not alter the region's racial composition.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He also objected to the traditional depiction of the bandeirantes as violent and “uncivilized” and contended that they dispensed generous treatment to Indians and Africans.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, Mota sought to restore the image of the mixed-race caipira population of the Brazilian countryside, portrayed in popular literary works as lazy, uneducated and superstitious. In a series of popular tales conceived to be read in family meetings, Mota identified the caipiras as a sort of bandeirante people, recasting them as brave and warmhearted individuals who settled in the backlands, fought with a harmful environment and, obeying God's commandment to Adam and Eve, “subdued the jungles and the beasts,” taming wild nature.Footnote ¹⁰²

Theological diversity

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Protestant churches of Brazil entered a new era. The evangelical population evolved from small congregations scattered along the coast and in the south and center south of the Brazilian territory into a sizeable community of over 700,000 immigrants and converts across all states of the republic by 1930.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the early 1900s, a series of clashes between foreign missionaries and local ministers over the administration of Protestant schools and seminaries led some Presbyterian and Baptist churches to separate from foreign mission bodies.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ At the same time new religious currents spread throughout the Brazilian territory, including spiritism, positivism and Afro-Brazilian religions such as umbanda, finding adepts among the emerging urban middle classes.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These processes of religious diversification and ecclesiastical independence further fragmented the Brazilian religious landscape and pushed missionaries and ministers to adapt their evangelistic strategies. The consolidation of evangelical Christianity in Brazil gave rise to a second generation of believers who introduced new dynamics into processes of religious change. They did not experience conversion as a rupture with the religious and social background of their families and were able to benefit from years of formal education in mission schools and seminaries.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Well-educated local ministers widened their ambitions, participating in international missionary conferences, publishing in anglophone theological journals and entering some of Brazil's most prestigious literary and educational academies.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Under these circumstances, the interaction between religious and secular knowledge unfolded in different ways in the evangelical imagination.

The ideas associated with the Christian Brethren, a movement originating in nineteenth-century Ireland and southwest England, complicated the Brazilian evangelical arena. Breaking away from the hierarchical model and ritualism of the Anglican Church, the Brethren reaffirmed the supremacy of the Bible, believed in the imminence of Christ's second coming, centered their religious services on the Holy Communion and opposed denominational divisions. For one of their founders, John Nelson Darby, the modern Christian church found itself in ruins by casting aside its dependence on the Holy Spirit and instituting formal training and ordination as prerequisites for the Christian ministry.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Brethren believed that the Holy Spirit endowed Christians equally with authority to lead the church. Their suspicion of ecclesiastical institutionalization spurred a vigorous missionary movement embodied in the “faith missions,” whose exponents objected to the mechanisms of fund-raising of missionary societies and called evangelists to “live by faith,” relying on God's providence and adopting a simpler lifestyle.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

A web of evangelical organizations and independent missionaries operating in Britain and Portugal introduced Brethren theology in Brazil from the 1870s. The pioneer was Richard Holden, a Scottish Episcopal minister with a successful missionary career in Brazil between 1860 and 1872.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Holden came into contact with the Brethren upon his return to England. Later on, Holden and his wife Caterina moved to Portugal and began to circulate Brethren literature across lusophone evangelical networks.Footnote ¹¹¹ In a series of letters written in 1879 and published in 1906, Richard Holden deployed Darby's concept of the “ruin of the church” and claimed that the creation of denominational faith confessions, notably by the Presbyterians of Rio de Janeiro, exemplified the insubordination of modern Christendom to the authority of Christ, the Bible and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ¹¹²

The most active advocate of Christian Brethren doctrines in Brazil was the British engineer Stuart McNair. In the early 1890s he moved to Lisbon and met Caterina Holden, from whom he received news of independent evangelical gatherings in Brazil. In 1896, McNair and the Brazilian convert Daniel Faria established the movement's headquarters at the Livramento Hill, one of Rio de Janeiro's earliest shantytowns.Footnote ¹¹³ There, McNair and Faria opened a publishing house that circulated evangelical literature throughout the Luso-Atlantic world. Following Holden's arguments, McNair objected to denominational divisions and to the distinction between clergy and laity. For him, evangelical services should rely solely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit and give believers the opportunity to exercise their “spiritual priesthood.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ McNair also esteemed divine providence and invited evangelical missionaries to operate independently, abandoning the bureaucratic schemes that provided their salaries.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Their ideas had a significant impact on the Brazilian religious arena. The Brethren's objection to confessional divisions entailed a sharp critique of the Protestant denominationalism that crystalized in twentieth-century Brazil. Their reliance on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit carried the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers to its ultimate conclusion, shunning ecclesiastical hierarchy. In doing so, the Christian Brethren espoused a radical egalitarianism that intensified the individualizing implications of religious change in the country.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In contrast to the Presbyterians and Methodists, who built a complex institutional apparatus around schools, seminaries and hospitals, the Brethren developed assertive methods of direct evangelization that further extended the reach of evangelical Christianity in Brazil. Because of this, they lacked the mechanisms of institutional reproduction of other denominations. But their ideas lived on through their hymnody and theological production, penetrating all other Protestant branches. The evangelist Henry Maxwell Wright, a Lisbon-born British missionary who spent most of his career in Portugal, made several trips to Brazil between 1881 and 1914 supporting the Christian Brethren, amongst other groups. Wright was a prolific hymn writer and translator. His songs expressed the urgent evangelistic appeal characteristic of the Brethren and made their way into the hymnals of all Brazilian denominations.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Besides, Presbyterian ministers and seminary professors relied on Richard Holden's studies of the apocryphal books to justify their exclusion from the biblical cannon.Footnote ¹¹⁸ And although the Brethren held religious enthusiasm in contempt and Stuart McNair decried the emerging Pentecostal “tongues movement” as heretical,Footnote ¹¹⁹ it was the Assemblies of God in Brazil that decades later reissued some of McNair's books.

In the early twentieth century, the ideas associated with the Social Gospel provided a counterweight to the individualism of the Christian Brethren. This expression began to circulate in Anglo-American Protestant circles from the late nineteenth century, expressing an evangelical unease with the material and spiritual anxieties of the working classes. The proponents of the Social Gospel in the United States and Britain, coming from both evangelical and liberal Protestant backgrounds, supported a variety of public reforms and conceived cooperation and social justice as signs of the kingdom of God.Footnote ¹²⁰

Brazilian Protestants started to engage with public issues, including educational reform, health care and the abolition of slavery, from the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the Panama Congress of 1916 Brazilian ministers came into contact with the Social Gospel as a distinctive doctrine.Footnote ¹²¹ One of the congress's speakers was the Methodist bishop Francis McConnell, a leading exponent of the Social Gospel in the United States. In his address, McConnell claimed that the wars between science and Christianity, characteristic of the nineteenth-century religious experience, had given way to reconciliation in his age. This convergence could alleviate men's anxiety in an era of war and industrialization by overcoming the forces of poverty and hunger and affirming the supremacy of human values in the world.Footnote ¹²² Brazilian participants at Panama 1916 were deeply impressed by McConnell's address. Eduardo Pereira remembered the speech and argued that the contemporary reciprocity between religion and science should “conquer physical nature in the name of humankind and, together, solve the urgent problems of health and pauperism, as well as the social problems of organization and morality.”Footnote ¹²³

Erasmo Braga became the key advocate of the Social Gospel in Brazil. Like Pereira, he too called attention to the impact of McConnell's lecture at Panama.Footnote ¹²⁴ Unlike Pereira, though, whose appreciation of the speech was inscribed in a work of religious controversy blaming Catholicism for such social ills, Braga's critique of the Catholic Church was milder. Braga was a second-generation believer who did not experience conversion as a rupture with the cultural world of his parents. For him, what justified the Protestant missionary enterprise in Brazil was not simply the ubiquitous social and cultural influence of Catholicism, but a number of social issues: high levels of illiteracy; outbreaks of syphilis, malaria and tuberculosis; popular addiction to cachaça (distilled sugarcane juice); and the disaggregating effects of industrialization.Footnote ¹²⁵ In a remarkable passage of his report of the Panama Congress, Braga affirmed that the transformations caused by the “vivifying energy of the Gospel” could be best perceived in the domestic intimacy of rural and urban families, whose converted members handled Bibles, evangelical journals and hymnals daily. In “the midst of the prevailing indifference” the spiritual struggles involved in such processes of religious change shaped the character of the youth, influencing their “sexual hygiene,” fostering movements for fairer work relations and leading them to “electoral honesty.”Footnote ¹²⁶

Braga best showed his commitment to the Social Gospel in a conference on comparative religions convened by the Spiritualist Crusade in Rio de Janeiro in 1928. His long address asserted that the movement of “reversion to primitive Christianity,” which animated both early modern reformers and contemporary Protestants, transformed them in “one of the greatest elements of culture,” as they sought to make the Scriptures accessible to all social classes.Footnote ¹²⁷ Responding to the critics of evangelical Christianity, Braga explained the meaning of Protestant individualism. It was a process of self-discovery and moral liberation by which converts reconciled their consciousness with God. This transformation produced “incoercible” individuals who did not compromise their renewed conscience under surrounding moral pressures. Protestant individualism, then, projected itself into social life, for converts fought against present-day iniquities, including the industrialization of human relations, the distance between capital and work, class and racial conflicts and the strong nationalisms of the post-World War I era. Only a united body of committed Christians could combine efforts on a global scale and Christianize the social order. And here Braga acknowledged his debts to exponents of the Social Gospel, including Walter Rauschenbusch, Johann Blumhardt and Francis McConnell.Footnote ¹²⁸

Erasmo Braga's appropriations of the Social Gospel in the 1910s and 1920s coincided with the rise of sanitation and antialcohol campaigns launched by government authorities and independent associations in Brazil.Footnote ¹²⁹ Braga expressed his enthusiasm for such endeavors and quoted in his books long passages from the reports of the Dr Belisário Pena, a leading exponent of the sanitation campaigns, as if such advances in public health and temperance signaled the expansion of the kingdom of God.Footnote ¹³⁰ Evangelical concerns with hygiene and sobriety, then, were by no means a simple expression of moral conservatism or indicators of an individualistic lack of a “social ethic,” as some scholars have argued.Footnote ¹³¹ They emerged in tandem with international theological discourses and local secular concerns, and expressed a distinctly evangelical interest in individual and social improvement. While most studies of Latin American theology locate the rise of social Christianity in the post-World War II context,Footnote ¹³² it is possible to situate the rise of social theologies in the continent within a longer historical trajectory that can be traced back at least to the 1910s.Footnote ¹³³

At the same time, this generation of well-educated Brazilian ministers began to engage with the doctrinal disputes around the authority of the Bible that occupied the minds and hearts of believers and religious experts in the modern era. At least since the late eighteenth century, European religious and secular scholars had begun to deploy historical and literary exegetical tools to examine biblical texts. Liberal Protestant theologians admitted that biblical narratives contained historical imprecisions and resonated with the myths and cosmogonies of other Middle Eastern religions.Footnote ¹³⁴ Although some of them praised the moral teachings that emanated from the Bible, orthodox Christians regarded modern biblical criticism as a threat to the authority of their sacred text. The range of responses to such theological disputes was vast and one of them came from archaeology. In nineteenth-century Europe and Britain, evangelical archaeological societies financed excavations aimed at confirming Old Testament stories as an antidote to the apparent skepticism of liberals.Footnote ¹³⁵

These theological debates began to stir the Brazilian evangelical arena in the early twentieth century. American Methodist missionaries and Brazilian pastors started to clash about the infallibility of the Scriptures in denominational conferences in 1905.Footnote ¹³⁶ The influential pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Rio de Janeiro, Álvaro Reis, argued that the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 was a fruit of theological liberalism, an argument that also circulated in American evangelical networks.Footnote ¹³⁷ Even Gilberto Freyre, while still a young Baptist student at Baylor University, praised in the Brazilian press in 1919 the qualities of the American evangelist Billy Sunday, who preached “the doctrines of Grace and personal Salvation … in their evangelical purity … without the stains of the ‘higher criticism.’”Footnote ¹³⁸ For them, evangelical piety, theological orthodoxy and modern biblical scholarship seemed irreconcilable.

In other cases, though, evangelical ministers blurred the distinctions of such disparate approaches, bringing together the evangelical attachment to the Bible and the scientific fervor of their era. Erasmo Braga, for instance, demonstrated his interest in all “scientific innovations” that recovered the “original message” of the Bible, including archaeology, literary criticism and the historical-critical method.Footnote ¹³⁹ For Eduardo Pereira, the “critical study of the Bible” did not threaten the “inherent spiritual supremacy” of Christ. Rather, it shed light on the Bible and played a key role in reconciling Christianity with the Brazilian secular intelligentsia.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Otoniel Mota deployed his solid philological knowledge and interest in archaeology to elucidate the interpretation of complex biblical passages.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In the minds of Brazilian Protestants, developments in biblical scholarship spilled into other areas of social life. When the Modern Art Week, that important catalyst for the modernist movement, took place in São Paulo in 1922, Erasmo Braga delivered a speech titled “The Bible and Literary Culture” to the Young Men's Christian Association of Rio de Janeiro. For him, the rise of philological, historical and critical biblical exegesis happily coincided with the modernist interest in folklore studies. Braga claimed that scholars would only begin to understand the “residues of humanity's primitive beliefs” and “the elementary forms of our sentiments and the foundations of our psychology” by paying attention to the religious elements in them, formed by a wider biblical culture.Footnote ¹⁴² He believed that biblical scholarship could illuminate the modernist interest in cultural archaism.Footnote ¹⁴³

The strongest contribution to biblical scholarship in this period came not from a trained minister, but from a journalist. It was the work of José Carlos Rodrigues, the influential editor and owner of the Jornal do Commercio, South America's largest circulated paper. Upon his retirement in 1915, Rodrigues resumed a project he had been preparing for years: a commentary on the Old Testament. The resulting work, a massive two-volume set of over 1,300 pages, was published in Edinburgh in 1921 at his own expense. This project was designed to meet the needs of Brazilian Protestant churches in the 1920s, interested in furnishing seminarians and prospective ministers with solid training and theological literature. In it Rodrigues claimed that the Old Testament contained the first set of God's foundational revelations to mankind, before their completion in Jesus Christ.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The book's first chapter was published separately in Rio de Janeiro in 1918, and in it Rodrigues demarcated his position regarding modern biblical scholarship. On the one hand, he rejected the literalist approach to the Bible, which he associated with the Rabbi of the Gospel, attached to the smallest details of the law. For Rodrigues, the Old Testament contained a broad set of fundamental religious and moral teachings mixed with some inaccurate historical data of lesser importance.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ On the other, he criticized both the scientific skepticism of the era and the theologians who sought to establish similarities between the book of Genesis and modern scientific findings. The Bible was, for him, a religious book that shed no light on the laws of nature. It was the moral teachings that mattered. So Adam and Eve were not the first humans, but symbols, and the biblical cosmogony corresponded to old Babylonian and Mexican myths, but inculcated vital religious ideas.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

In spite of the apparent unorthodox outlook of such ideas, Rodrigues upheld a decidedly evangelical approach to the Bible. He embraced the idea of the spiritual inspiration of the Scripture, claimed that the unfolding of biblical prophecies throughout history attested to the book's authority and expressed an unreserved enthusiasm for the operations of Bible societies.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Similarly, although Erasmo Braga, Eduardo Pereira and Otoniel Mota embraced certain theological, philosophical and scientific principles that may sound out of tune with the evangelical tradition, they regarded themselves as thoroughly orthodox Christians and rejected accusations of “modernism.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ These men shared in both the religious enthusiasm of the missionary era and the scientific confidence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, merging the evangelical belief in the inspiration of the Scripture with modern biblical scholarship. They were closer intellectually to the anglophone theologians who raised the standards of academic theology in Britain and America but remained orthodox in their beliefs, such as Joseph Lightfoot and Philip Schaff, than to German liberal theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf Harnack.Footnote ¹⁴⁹