In Religious Conflict in Brazil, Erika Helgen examines Catholic/Protestant conflict in northeastern Brazil and its intersections with the modernizing Brazilian church and state. As Helgen notes, Brazil's northeast was not known for rampant Protestant conversion in the early twentieth century. In fact, “[in] 1940 only 0.73 percent of the northeastern population was Protestant, while the national average was three times that percentage, at 2.61 percent” (4). Northeastern Brazil was best known as the site of a nineteenth-century millenarian movement led by Antonio Conselheiro, a charismatic Catholic leader unsanctioned by the official church who threatened the emerging Brazilian state. Brazilian journalist Euclides da Cunha chronicled the movement and the state's violent repression of it in Rebellion in the Backlands, creating a permanent association of the northeast with religious fanaticism.

Helgen's approach to Christianity in Brazil is thus novel. She focuses on the fraught relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism rather than examining one or the other of the two branches of Christianity independently. She selects a peripheral region whose religious history was characterized by “fanaticism” as the site of her study. Helgen suggests that beginning in the 1920s, Catholics and Protestants in the northeast identified their practice of faith as the foundation for a modernizing Brazilian state, creating conflict and competition between them and leading to mutually exclusive appeals for government sanction and/or protection of their respective religious practices.

Helgen based her book on deep archival research undertaken by traveling throughout the northeast and accessing both Catholic and Protestant church archives whose records frequently reveal as much about their “opponents” as about their own churches and practices. She complemented these records with court cases in which the state at the local, regional, and federal level was drawn into religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. In addition to being innovative and deeply researched, Religious Conflict in Brazil is a compelling read. Helgen is a masterful story teller who transformed a complex history into a page-turner driven by tension, conflict, and idiosyncratic individuals whose agendas defined the development of their faiths and thus the region and the state.

The complexity of Helgen's argument unfolds in a beautifully structured and written analysis which begins at the national level where she provides an overview of changes in the Brazilian Catholic and Protestant churches and the consolidation of the state under Getulio Vargas. This foundation emphasizes, on the Catholic side, embrace of a Restorationist model encouraging Romanization, modernization, lay activism, and anti-Protestantism and, on the Protestant side, diminished U.S. missionary power and increased Brazilian or “native” control of evangelization. Catholics and Protestants both claimed the mantel of nationalism and appealed to the state for protection of the right to practice and protect their religious faiths as an act of nationalism. Catholics claimed that Protestants, who initially depended on U.S. missionary and financial support, represented a foreign invasion while Protestants claimed the mantel of liberalism, rationalism, and separation of church and state. Helgen demonstrates that Brazilian nationalism was thus forged in religious conflict.

Most of the book focuses on local Catholic parishes, priests, and Protestant congregations in the northeast. After gaining control over evangelization, Brazilian Protestants in the northeast became increasingly representative of the region's population. Protestant pastors represented the diversity of the region with many sharing African or indigenous descent and modest economic means. Conversion followed the population, which was forced by economic necessity caused by drought and instability to migrate from one rural region to another establishing and re-establishing churches. Helgen argues that the increasing presence of Protestant churches in the northeastern hinterlands contributed to Catholic perception of it as a prevalent plague despite the relative paucity of Protestant churches and converts.

While Helgen's analysis of the growth of Protestantism highlights patterns with individual pastors and converts represented only by name, her account of Catholic anti-Protestant violence includes detailed biographies and histories of charismatic Catholic clerical powerhouses who sometimes used their positions to push the Restorationist agenda of the national church through lay organizations and who enjoyed political support at the local level. Helgen demonstrates that clergy who successfully tied their anti-Protestant local agendas to the Brazilian Church's Romanization maintained their legitimacy despite or even because of fomenting acts of anti-Protestant violence.

Indeed, Helgen shows that clergy used the power of the church and local political alliances to facilitate brutal direct and indirect violence, ranging from demands that the Catholic faithful refuse to sell food or water to Protestants, to destruction of Protestant churches, and even to murder, since it was “not a crime to kill a Protestant” (114). These actions sanctioned by bishops, motivated by priests who sometimes enjoyed cult-like followings, and undertaken during Catholic celebrations reinforced images of northeastern religious fanaticism, particularly since Protestants appealed to local and state officials to protect them by characterizing their Catholic enemies as fanatics. Ironically, the violence and charismatic power of individual Catholic clergy undermined Romanization and modernization of church and state and reinforced an image of northeastern faithful as fanatics.

While Religious Conflict in Brazil is unique in its focus on Catholic and Protestant conflict and competition, it joins a growing body of literature examining religiously inspired violence, state formation, and modernization. These new works offer a distinct view of church and state in Latin America by shifting from examination of the Catholic Church as an institution directed by hierarchy to an examination of the role that believers/laity motivated by priests played in fomenting movements (sometimes violent) that defined the state. The work could be read fruitfully in relation to Robert Curley's Citizens and Believers: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Jalisco, 1900–1930 (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), Silvia Arrom's Volunteering for a Cause: Gender, Faith, and Charity in Mexico from the Reform to the Revolution (University of New Mexico Press, 2016), and Stephen Andes and Julia Young's edited volume Local Church, Global Church: Catholic Activism in Latin America from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II (Catholic University of America Press, 2016). The fluidity of Helgen's writing and the clarity of her arguments make this an ideal book for undergraduate or graduate students in classes focused on Christianity, Latin American state formation and modernization, and/or Brazil.