1 The Colonial Prehistory

The way in which various societies deal with religion is connected primarily to the historical process through which the corresponding nation-states have been created. This paper intends to demonstrate that to understand the peculiarities of the religious field in Brazilian society, as well as how religious differences coexist, it is necessary to take into account the historical developments that led to the hegemony of the existing, pervasive Christian culture.

From a historical perspective, it is important to underline that the Brazilian territory was controlled, under the rule of the Royal Patronage, as a Portuguese colony for over three centuries. The Royal Patronage was a combination of privileges and obligations established by the Vatican, which, from the 16^th century to the 19^th century, granted the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns the monopoly and control of territories in South America and parts of Africa and Asia. The colonial State was allowed to build cathedrals, churches, and monasteries, to appoint bishops and archbishops, to administrate ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and to veto any papal bull that might oppose its interests. In this sense, the Royal Patronage was a legal agreement in which the Catholic church was rooted in the State structure (Ecclesia est in statu). This historical fact is not without important consequences for the role of Catholicism in Brazilian society. We can point out at least three major features resulting from this long-term process:

First of all, it is possible to posit that, in Brazil, Catholicism was the political language of the colony, as well as that of the imperial regime. It was quite common for Christian officials to take over political and bureaucratic functions in the structure of the state. In this sense, the bureaucratic organization of the church was entangled with the bureaucracy of the state; the territory and its subjects/ Christians were controlled based on a very similar administrative apparatus and conception of space.

Secondly, the vastness of the territory awaiting control and the scarcity of ecclesiastical and political administrators led to the flourishing of a very popular and autonomous form of Christian faith in everyday experience. In many local situations, these practices were mingled with the sortileges of African slaves and the practices and rituals of native Indians.

Thirdly, the Christian religion became the paradigm which evaluated, controlled, and educated all sorts of popular practices, both in the realm of religion and in the public space of the cities. Catechesis and civilization were perceived as interchangeable public policies.

If we take this historical background into account, it is impossible to assert the existence of a religious field made up of many different religious systems in the newly born Brazilian society before the establishment of the republican political system in 1889. The religious pluralism legally preserved in contemporary Brazil is not a result of the historical regulation of the conflict between different religions by the state, as is the case in France, for instance; on the contrary, it is possible to say that, almost until the middle of the 20^th century, it was commonly understood that popular magical practices were considered to be non-religious (or barbarian) customs. For over fifty years, magical cures, African rituals, and ecstatic dances were considered a public threat to morality and order, as well as practices that were dangerous to individual health. As such, they were prohibited and attacked. This controversial repression came to an end when such practices were finally recognized by law as religious practices after a written doctrinal corpus and an organized liturgical system had been set up and produced. In the same course of action, the magical forces manipulated for practical purposes were transformed into transcendent gods.

Considering the characteristics of this long and complex historical process in Brazil, we can assert that religious conflicts – beginning in the monarchical period and throughout the first republican regime – opposed mainly Protestant and Catholic interests regarding the social and political privileges they could obtain from the state: Catholicism fought to remain the state’s religion, and Protestantism challenged its position. In this sense, religious differences and values themselves did not become a political issue in the historical construction of Brazilian modernity, as was the case in European societies. In fact, the following pages will reveal how religious pluralism took a very different path in Brazil.

2 Religious Pluralism in Brazil

Some of the most significant features of the Brazilian religious field are its immense diversity of creeds, its ongoing capacity to invent new religions, and the widespread belief in God’s existence among the major part of the population. It is important, however, to provide our reader with equivalent ethnographic details on these three main characteristics, in order to offer a general overview of the grounds upon which my main arguments are built.

Despite the Catholic hegemony, the Brazilian religious field is traditionally perceived as being very heterogeneous. It is possible to name at least a dozen different religious groups, and this number is still increasing. Although the majority of the population (170,000,000 people, or 73.8 %) still describes itself as Catholic, the last census in 2000 indicated the presence of 15.4 % Protestants, 1.3 % Spiritists, and less than 1% Jews (101,000), Muslims (27,000), Hindus and Buddhists (427,000), practitioners of African religions (571,000), Indian shamanism, and other esoteric traditions (Romero Jacob et al. 2003, p. 34). Researchers agree that there is a general acceptance of this diversity today. Moreover, individuals very often take part in many other rituals without necessarily abandoning the religion in which they were raised. It is also important to underline that, except for Catholics and some Protestants, Jews, and Muslims, most believers adopted their new creeds in their adult life.

Some of the existing religions in Brazil are typically “homemade” (or remade) and characterized by syncretism. Spiritism, for instance, Allan Kardec’s French doctrine, imported to Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the 19^th century by French immigrants, was widespread in a middle-class milieu of physicians, lawyers, journalists, public officials, and freethinkers. Initially propagated as a religious science, that is, a sort of intellectual criticism of the materialistic aspect of science and the formalism of Christianity, its mediumistic therapeutic practices ended up being prohibited by the Republican Penal Code in 1890. Since then, spiritism has become a mediumistic religion strongly dedicated to healing purposes. Another good example is provided by Umbanda, a popular combination of African witchcraft, spiritism mediumnity, and Catholic morality. Another case in point is the neo-Pentecostal inventive introduction of African possession rituals into its own ordinary cult. A more recent phenomenon is the reorganization of traditional South American Indian shamanistic practices in urban contexts into an “ayahuasca religion system” (Antunes 2012, p. 32; my translation), such as Santo Daime [Saint Daime] or União do Vegetal [Union of the Vegetable].

Still, the “invention” of new religions is not a random process. In fact, in order to be accepted as a “religion”, the new practices have to follow a certain kind of implicit historical code. It includes the avoidance of personal or for-profit purposes as an explicit aim of the new form of organization. It is interesting to stress here that the Christian idea of “charity” is essential for any cult to be recognized and accepted as a religion in Brazilian society. Free assistance to the poor and sufferers is the unconscious model, organizing the disputes for authenticity in the Brazilian religious field. Paradoxical to ordinary perception, the power of any spiritual force also depends on its capacity to deal with and control African sorcery. The prevailing magical perspective in Brazilian popular cosmology, especially in relation to illness and different forms of healing, definitively explains the constant circulation of people across different religions with no need to remain faithful to any particular theological or doctrinal system.

Besides the two traits described above, one of the most striking features of Brazilian religiosity is the almost universal belief in God’s existence even among unbelievers, or among those who do not profess any religious creed. This concept of Godhead, taken after Christianity, retains the idea that this uncreated being is the source and the force sustaining all human realities. This eternal and omnipotent being is also the supplier of all forms of justice and loyalty. In this sense, each religious movement is seen as a different path to promoting general welfare and the common good. Each religious system is perceived as the owner of a particular segment of the universe of sacred forces. The key idea here is “faith” (and not belief – a doctrine that a person or group accepts as true). “Faith” – in the sense of the capacity a given religion has for being able to gain public confidence in its monopoly of sacred attributes – is what moves the Brazilian religious field. An atheist, the very opposite of a religious person, is regarded with diffidence and perceived as untrustworthy because of his/her lack of faith; that is, his/her refusal to have bonds of reciprocity and allegiance with any supernatural sphere and, ultimately, with other human beings.

Based on this ethnographic description of the Brazilian religious sphere, I would like to contribute to the contemporary debate on inter-religious interactions and conflicts by developing four major arguments. They are related to some theoretical and ethnographic views that I consider to be fruitful for a better understanding of religious conflicts: religious differences are historical constructions; secularism has brought new conceptions of “religion”, “ethics”, and “politics”; religious meanings are produced in relation to local perceptions, and there are many different ways (which are not entirely dependent on doctrine) in which different religions can gain visibility and legitimacy in the public sphere.

3 The Historical Construction of Brazilian Religious Diversity

If we take into account the enormous flexibility and creativity of the Brazilian religious field as described above, it is necessary to enlarge our concept of religion in order to have a better understanding of what is said and done in its name.

As we have already mentioned, the political movement resulting in the end of the monarchical regime in 1889 did not come along with any form of an atheistic disposition; and one can also say that when the republican regime was installed, the political elite was not aware of any existing religious conflict. On the contrary, beginning with the imperial regime, the constitution guaranteed the right to religious freedom as a way of fostering the immigration of European Protestant workers. Moreover, the construction of the nation-state never went through the experience of religious conflicts due to the evident historical hegemonic status of Catholicism: on the one hand, there has been some competition between Catholics and Protestants, but there has never been violent antagonism; on the other hand, various outlawed popular practices have gradually transformed themselves into religious movements by drawing on Catholicism as a religious paradigm in order to be recognized as such, and to have their rituals and beliefs accepted as authorized behaviors. Of course this relationship has never been peaceful. For almost one century the Catholic church denigrated Afro-Brazilian traditions and accused them of being instruments of the devil and immorality. More recently neo-Pentecostal churches have taken on the same role. The fast expansion of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in the 1980s was followed by a violent crusade against Afro-Brazilian practitioners, which included physical aggression against those wearing religious bead necklaces and white dresses. The weakening of this tension – or, at least, that of its socially controlled form –came onto the political horizon when Afro-Brazilian traditions were acknowledged as an essential component of the National Intangible Heritage in 2009.

The historical perspective allows us to assert that religious phenomena are contextually defined and cannot be taken for universal and ahistorical events. In this sense, the concept of religion as proposed by this Concept Laboratory – that is, “the transcendental and spiritual system of redemptive expectation”²¹ – does not fit many of the recent movements described by the current literature as “religion”. This classical definition is, in my view, a heritage of the historical construction of Western secularism. In fact, these qualifications better fit the Jewish/ Muslim/Christian traditions, for instance, rather than the range of religious configurations that exist in modern Brazilian society.

The historical examples above are particularly illuminating for the perspective defended here; from this point of view, it is impossible to think of the conditions that enable the peaceful coexistence of different religions without taking into account the particular legal forms – and the cultural conventions that support them – in which differences tend to be organized within a specific state.

It is quite clear that the constitution of 1988 became a turning point in the Brazilian paradigm for dealing with cultural differences and minorities: the traditional miscegenation ideology gave way to different claims of cultural recognition and respect for the public visibility of religious differences. As has been the case with many contemporary nation-states, the historical Brazilian pattern that conceived of the nation’s cohesion in terms of syncretism – that is, the political, symbolic, and ideological mixture of different races and religions – has been displaced by the paradigm of multiculturalism; that is, the recognition and juridical preservation of cultural and religious minorities. Since then, numerous social movements have sought legal protection for their claims. Examples are the Quilombola (slave descendants who claim to have rights to the land of their ancestors), the deaf community (requesting new public policies based upon sign language to cope with the cultural particularities of the deaf), ayahuasca groups (who defend the freedom to drink the Indian beverage ritually), etc. In this sense, Brazilian multiculturalism became politically efficient in order to produce both a new form of empowerment of the poor and other minorities, and a more popular form of governance.

The point here is that new religious borders, as well as ethnic frontiers, were constructed during this process of political negotiation and social interrelations. Not only the content of religious doctrines, but also the dynamics of these interactions and the understanding of the interests they put into motion are crucial when trying to make sense of religious conflicts. However, the problem about multiculturalism is that, when it becomes a political doctrine, it does not take into account that the processes of representation of ethnic and religious differences are based on the fiction of their authenticity.

For nearly one century, Brazilian intellectuals had to cope with the puzzling issue of the construction of a national identity out of different races and cultural traditions – mainly African, indigenous peoples, and Portuguese. Various models were proposed, all of which were based on a public policy of racial whitening. In this sense, democracy has never been considered a key element in the imaginary of the nation’s representation. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, has to do with the construction of a new form of democracy, based, not only on universal values, but also on the public expression of different religions and creeds.

4 Democracy, Religious Secularization, and the Public Sphere

The international consensus that nation-states have to protect and give equal rights to minorities is very recent. Thus, the nation’s existing legal frameworks for dealing with cultural differences have to be renegotiated in order to be adjusted to contemporary conditions. In Brazil, the end of two decades of dictatorship raised the issue of how to reconstruct the basis for a new democratic regime.

In order to deal with the democratic deficit, the Brazilian constitution of 1988 stimulates new government arrangements intended to include citizens in the governance process. The key word summing up this political moment is “democratic participation”. Inspired by this international movement demanding that more political responsibility be given to the common citizen, priests, pastors, and other representatives of different religions have addressed many positions in the new fora created to deliberate on issues related to national public policies.

In this sense, it is possible to assert that secularism, insofar as it has become the state’s political doctrine, may not be only a simple requirement to separate religious institutions from secular ones as far as government is concerned. As Talal Asad (2003, p. 2) suggests, it also “[…] presupposes new concepts of ‘religion’, ‘ethics’, and ‘politics’”. One must say that this is very true of the Brazilian democratization process. Many contemporary observers tend to consider the main characteristic a religion must have, in order to respect the requirements of democracy and the secular order, either that of contributing to the construction of a civil society, such as Catholicism has done in Poland and Brazil, or that of promoting public debate over liberal values, such as individual freedom or human rights. The problem here is that, as Talal Asad (2003, p. 182) has pointed out, “[w]hen religion becomes an integral part of modern politics”, their practitioners are not “indifferent to debates about how the economy should be run, or which scientific project should be publicly funded, or what the broader aims of a national education system should be”.

As mentioned, the key word summing up the ideological direction of this period is “democratic participation”. The development of this new arena of participation has profoundly affected the way in which religious actions are perceived in Brazilian society and expanded to the public field in which ethics and political values interact. In a general analysis, it is possible to say that health, education, and public assistance have become new religious skills. In some situations it turns out to be very difficult to distinguish between religious organizations and enterprises or academic fora.

Some recent examples are the way in which the Brazilian National Evangelical Network of Social Assistance (RENAS) has empowered its staff by providing them with technical education and academic knowledge, such as leadership and human resources, in order to qualify them to face different social problems such as hygiene, government accountability, public assistance, etc. As a consequence, many Christians, who were well-trained as missionaries and had high-level academic educations, were trained to foster civil society networks to develop their agenda in different fields, such as the environment, poverty, health, education, etc. Moreover, their professional experience has frequently allowed them to be incorporated into the government staff at local or state level. It is thus possible to demonstrate that Christian professional institutions have a significant role in the formation of Brazilian public opinion and are able to propose reasonable ways of viewing particular problems, as well as to guide parliamentary activity and submit new laws. Recent studies have demonstrated that evangelical participation in the political sphere is also increasing. Rio de Janeiro, for instance, has had three Protestant governors from 1999 to 2004, and 37 % of its legislative assembly was taken up by evangelical representatives in this period. As for public opinion, one should not forget the importance of mass media instruments (television and radio channels); and although they are state networks, hundreds of TV channels have been distributed to religious institutions in the past two decades.

Intellectuals tend to think that there are two major kinds of religion: those which have some characteristics that make it possible for them to play a positive role in the public sphere, and those which are essentially unable to do this.

Although I somewhat agree with Talal Asad when he claims that power articulates the public sphere and that many kinds of demands and religious minorities are excluded from its circle of acceptability, I still think that there are many ways of gaining the capacity to speak and be heard. Broadly speaking, it is possible to assert, in terms of a descriptive model, that the Catholic church is more inclined to develop a habitus with the purpose of practically demonstrating how to behave, speak, and think within a particular public culture than are Afro-Brazilian traditions. In fact, Evangelical and Catholic movements have been investing a great deal of effort to train their practitioners in this direction in the past decades. In her doctoral dissertation, for instance, Eva Scheliga shows how certain evangelical movements articulate individual religious experience in terms of a general understanding of the importance of “social responsibility” (Scheliga 2011, p. 100). They advocate that churches should have a more responsible relationship with society and secularism.

At the opposite end are Afro-Brazilian traditions. For them, and especially in Candomblé cults, the Judeo-Christian notion of sin does not have any significance. The difference between good and evil depends, in fact, upon the relationship between the practitioner and his or her personal god. This popular view of an incidental and external evil agency, in a sense conflicts with the Christian idea of sin and personal responsibility. The pervasiveness of this idea in Brazilian society somehow exemplifies its well-known permissiveness and dislike of abiding by the rules. The kind of social cohesion that ensues is not universal enough to bind all members into a single society. The sort of patriarchal authority that supports this kind of social network limits its interest to social allegiances. The classical tension between the universality of the political community of the Catholic church – centered on the general image of the poor – and the communitarian domain of Candomblé houses – centered on the value of household allegiance –becomes evident here.

But the characteristics above, ordered into an abstract scheme to be better described and understood, cannot be taken for essential features. In order to grasp their meaning, it is necessary to put them into action, for they might have unpredictable roles in the public sphere under specific political circumstances. This is very true in the case of Afro-Brazilian religious leaders who marched against “religious intolerance” in 1980. In a reaction against the physical and moral violence of neo-Pentecostals, Candomblé and Umbanda priests organized themselves into a political front to promote “religious freedom”. What is very interesting in this case is that if their claim to a relevant space in the public sphere eventually became quite successful, it involved their alliance with the black movement, and was not restricted to the religious field. Their inscription in the discourse of racial political struggle resulted in a capricious mixture of demands connected to race and religion: in fact, the two major aims of the Brazilian National Plan for Racial Equality are the guarantee of secularism and the battle against religious intolerance.

Consequently, it is important to stress that religious meanings are always produced in relation to local perceptions. The public sphere is not an empty space; on the contrary, it is constituted by the sensibilities – memories and aspirations, fears and hopes – of speakers and listeners.

In Brazil, people tend to be eclectic in terms of religious practice. As has already been mentioned, they may attend the Catholic mass in the morning, a spiritism session in the afternoon, and an African cult meeting in the evening. It is possible to assert that this happens because there is a general understanding that every single religion has its particular kind of sacred/magic strength, and no one knows for sure which path is going to fulfill one’s needs or wishes. From this perspective, popular sensibility does not think it necessary to choose or exclude any form of religion from the public space. Rather, from the individual’s perspective, it is much more suitable to be able to manipulate a whole set of culturally prescribed strategies with which one can respond to a given situation. Thus, in a particular setting, one might be a Catholic, and in another one, a devotee of Candomblé: who knows what will work? As Leni Silverstein (1995, p. 138) remarks, “[i]n a constantly changing and insecure world – a world in which adroit manipulation of one’s available social network could mean the difference between having and not having a job, food, or medicine for one’s suffering children – all doors must remain open”.

In this sense, in order to better understand the dynamics of the religious field in a particular society, it is crucial to focus on the configurations of its particular public sphere – to search for its autonomy, sensibilities, memories, aspirations, fears, and hopes – rather than to choose the best model, or more adequate cultural pattern or practice in an abstract way, disconnected from the historical context. A single practice or belief can promote either violence or common understanding, depending on the meanings it puts into action in a particular setting.

When religious agents have to act in the public sphere, they have to learn, in each specific situation, the particular grammar and semantics according to which public culture is organized. They usually learn this in practice, by exposing themselves and challenging common sense. In the Brazilian public sphere it is acceptable to speak about the common good in terms of the preservation of communitarian links, tradition, solidarity, protection of the poor, natural rights, etc., because some Christian values are still very pervasive.

As has been recently stressed elsewhere (Montero 2009), the particularities that characterized the historical formation of the Brazilian public sphere have modeled the civic space according to the Christian city. In this sense, when African religions such as Candomblé, for instance, perform their rites publicly, they can only do so in an acceptable way if they articulate their ambitions of visibility either to the Catholic church or to the state’s hegemonic political interests at the symbolic level. That was the case, for example, with the celebration of the street festival of Our Lord of the Good End (Nosso Senhor do Bonfim) in Salvador, Bahia. As Leni Silverstein demonstrates in her article on this ceremony, “[t]he fulfillment of Candomblé obligations takes place in a setting very much conditioned by religion’s long years of religious persecution”, from 1890 until 1960. “[…] [B]oth the Catholic church and the state had instigated periodic destruction of ritual artifacts and incarceration of some of the more belligerent sacerdotes”, she affirms. As a result, many cult houses were “[…] remov[ed] […] to the underdeveloped outskirts of the city, accessible only to the initiated and the well informed” (all quotes from Silverstein 1995, p. 137). In this case, how can one explain the attendance of government officials, the Cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, and Candomblé priestesses at the annual Candomblé ceremony in 1976, in which people wash the steps of the Cathedral of Our Lord of the Good End?

In the domain of social norms and values, it is true that Afro-Brazilian religions do not promote any universal model of a common good; and yet, as has been demonstrated, at that very moment a new merging of Catholic popular beliefs, African rites, and a national syncretic identity became possible and desirable due to the shifting relations between the church and the dictatorial regime.

The devotion to Our Lord of the Good End is quite widespread in Bahia throughout all social classes. It has Portuguese roots and, in Brazil, goes back to the 18^th century, when a naval officer brought the saint’s image to Salvador/Bahia. He also brought the Portuguese devotional tradition of washing the church steps along with the image, and started a brotherhood to propagate the cult upon his arrival. During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, constant disputes concerning how this ceremonial cleansing of the cathedral should take place occurred between the priests and practitioners. The first ritual washing was recorded in 1889, the year in which slavery was abolished in Brazil. There was a symbolic association between the rite and the abolition, which was added by the priests in order to ban popular devotees from washing the interior of the church. As a consequence, Candomblé ceremonies progressively appropriated the devotion. From then to now, the ritual has been performed in many ways and has finally been restricted to the washing of the steps that lead to the Cathedral of Our Lord of the Good End. In 1976, national identity, popular Catholicism, and Afro-Brazilian tradition were mingled by the state officials’ inclusion of the ceremony in the tourist calendar of the city of Salvador.

These examples demonstrate that some cultural patterns or practices are able to promote this kind of merging of different religious universes better than others, depending on the context or political scenario. Due to their system of meaningful preferences, African patterns have probably been incorporated into Brazilian national culture less as religious values, and more as cultural and historical traditions.

It is impossible to decide in advance which symbolic elements make peaceful conviviality easier, without taking into account the political and historical traditions of a particular society. Some cultural patterns or practices are able to promote the merging of different religious universes better than others. In this sense, one might come to the conclusion that cultural patterns and religions are able to minimize violence whenever they succeed in binding local loyalties through a faithful allegiance to a universal imagined community.

Bibliography

Antunes, Henrique Fernandes (2012): “Droga, Religião e Cultura: um mapeamento da controvér-sia pública sobre o uso da ayahuasca no Brasil”. Master’s thesis, University of São Paulo.

Asad, Talal (2003): Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Montero, Paula (2009): “Secularização e Espaço Público: a re-invenção do pluralismo religioso no Brasil”. In: Etnográfica 13. No. 1, p. 7–16.

Scheliga, Eva L. (2011): “Educando sentidos, orientando uma práxis. Etnografia das práticas assistenciais dos Evangélicos Brasileiros”. PhD diss., University of São Paulo.

Silverstein, Leni M. (1995): “The Celebration of Our Lord of the Good End: Changing State, Church, and Afro-Brazilian Relations in Bahia”. In: David J. Hess/Roberto A. DaMatta (Eds.): The Brazilian Puzzle. Culture and the Borderlands of the Western World. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 134–151.

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