RECIFE, Brazil — Drizzle fell steadily as a crowd of a few hundred practitioners of Candomblé — a syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion often compared to Santería or Haitian Voodoo — gathered under enormous white tents in front of the Basílica de Nossa Senhora do Carmo in one of Brazil’s oldest cities in late June.

“Prejudice is the deformed child of ignorance,” Pedro Henrique, a member of the Order of Lawyers, declared to the crowd, his measured words booming through the speakers. He was among roughly a dozen speakers present to defend Afro-Brazilian religious practices.

While Candomblé (pejoratively referred to in Portuguese as Macumba) and its indigenous parallel, Umbanda, have long been persecuted by Catholic and lay authorities, practitioners say the phenomenal growth of the evangelical movement in Brazil seems to have increased prejudice against them.

The number of evangelical Christians in Brazil grew 61 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. While Brazil still has the largest population of Catholics in the world — 123 million — Catholics saw their percentage decrease from 74 percent to 65 percent of the population in the same period. The evangelical population now accounts for roughly a quarter of the population, including presidential hopeful Marina Silva.

In the wake of Brazil’s changing religious demographics, intimidation of and violence toward Candomblé and Umbanda worshippers have increased.

One of the central figures in the conflict between evangelicals and Afro-Brazilian worshippers is Edir Macedo, the controversial founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, the largest neo-Pentecostal congregation in Brazil. This church has 8 million followers in more than 200 countries across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. Forbes called Macedo “one of the world’s richest religious leaders and a prominent media baron.” He heads the Rede Record television network and a communication group that includes newspapers, radios and TV stations.

Macedo has sent preachers to the poor outskirts of Brazil's major cities to gain followers and combat Afro-Brazilian religions, which he describes as “diabolical.”

In Bahia, Macedo’s church was ordered to pay roughly 1.3 million reals ($555,000) to Mother Gilda, a local Afro-Brazilian religious leader, for moral damages. In 1999 the church’s paper published a photo of her on its front page with the caption “Charlatan Macumbeiros damage the wallets and the lives of their clients.”

While evangelical politicians have been steering Brazil's policies away from legalizing abortion or increasing protections for LGBT people, positions such as Macedo’s are also affecting the lives of Candomblé worshippers by fomenting intolerance.

In 2011 the state of Rio de Janeiro created a special agency to deal with the growing number of hate crimes. According to the secretary of human rights, the number of calls made to a federal religious intolerance hotline jumped from 109 in 2012 to 231 in 2013. It began recording such incidents in 2011.

While it’s unclear how many of those victims were practioners of Afro-Brazilian religions, Marta Almeida Filha, an activist for Afro-Brazilian rights, said attacks against Candomblé are often perpetrated by “fundamentalist evangelicals.”

Earlier this year a terreiro — a meeting space dedicated to a particular orixá (or saint) — was burned near the city of Goiana. In May a judge in Rio de Janeiro ruled that Candomblé and Umbanda were not religions. He was forced to retract that decision when it caused an uproar, but the sentence revealed that hostility to Afro-Brazilian religions permeates all levels of society.