Religion: Protestants in Brazil

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How Protestantism has failed—and how it is succeeding—in Roman Catholic Brazil was told last week by a man who has investigated. Having spent three months last year in Brazil for the International Missionary Council, J. Merle Davis has put his findings in a book, How the Church Grows in Brazil (International Missionary Council; paper $1, cloth $1.50). His hopeful conclusion: in Brazil, Protestantism is probably "growing faster than in any other country in the world."

Fifty-three years ago Brazil broke its official ties with Catholicism, opened the country to other faiths. Two generations of Protestant missionary work have gained about 1,000,000 adherents to various churches: Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, Episcopal, Pentecostal. Fourteen-fifteenths of the work goes on in a 300-mile-wide coastal zone extending from Rio Grande do Sul to Para; the tiny remainder lies in the vast inland rural areas.

The urban picture is bright. City parishes have large middle-class congregations, are financially independent, conduct up-to-date schools, carry on extensive social and recreational work. In the rural sections the picture is less heartening.

Nevertheless Davis believes that the future growth of Protestantism in Brazil lies in the vast untouched rural areas. But, says he, "the urban type of church" will fail there. In backwoods Brazil, says Davis, "people are . . . illiterate, in debt, undernourished, suffering from endemic and parasitic diseases, ignorant of the first principles of hygiene, sanitation, balanced diet, baby care. . . . Homes are bare hovels, crops are blighted by cutworms, and animals are decimated with tuberculosis. . . . When the theological seminaries of Brazil recognize this . . . by including in their curricula courses of rural economics, rural sociology, public health, diet and nutrition, youth activities, handcrafts, nursing . . . church finance . . . the teaching of Christian giving, a new day will dawn. . . ."