I have never been able to witness Brazil’s super-charged Pentecostal scene but I am still remembering how, 40 years back, no one ever thought that the world’s largest Catholic country would pivot so quickly toward Protestantism.

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, we thought all of South America was a Catholic monolith.

We found out later that folks there were listening to radio broadcasts from the likes of the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and other evangelists and finding out they actually had a choice when it came to churches. As this Washington Post article says:

In the past generation, Brazil has undergone a spiritual transformation like few other places on the planet. As recently as 1980, about 9 in 10 people here identified as Catholic. But that proportion has cratered to 50 percent, and will soon be overtaken by evangelicalism, which now accounts for one-third of the population.

The Post story isn’t about statistics, actually. It begins by retelling how a radical Pentecostal group called the “Soldiers of Jesus” visit a spiritualist priest belonging to the Candomblé sect and orders him to either stop practicing macumba (his beliefs) or be killed.

It’s a decision more Brazilians are being forced to make. As evangelicalism reconfigures the spiritual map in Latin America’s largest country, attracting tens of millions of adherents, winning political power and threatening Catholicism’s long-held dominance, its most extreme adherents — often affiliated with gangs — are increasingly targeting Brazil’s non-Christian religious minorities. Priests have been killed. Children have been stoned. An elderly woman was seriously injured. Death threats and taunts are common. Gangs are unfurling the flag of Israel, a nation seen by some evangelicals as necessary to bringing about the return of Christ. Candomblé — like Santería and Voodoo, rooted in the belief systems brought to Latin America by enslaved people from West Africa — is vanishing from entire communities.

Not every Christian backs this radicalized brand of Pentecostalism, the article says.

The mounting violence has horrified mainstream evangelicals. “When I see these [temples], I pray against it because there’s a demonic influence there,” said David Bledsoe, an American missionary who has spent two decades here. “But I would condemn such actions.” The global ascent of evangelicalism and particularly Pentecostalism, its fastest-growing movement, has led to violence against indigenous and African religions from countries such as Haiti, Nigeria and Australia. But analysts say the forces fueling the prejudice here — the historic presence of religious minorities, newly emboldened evangelicalism and lax state oversight — are particularly acute.

I wish the writer had unpacked what Bledsoe meant by “demonic influence.”

In short, Candomblé isn’t just any old hocus pocus. It involves multiple gods, animal sacrifices, trances, divination; in short, a lot of practices forbidden by the Bible. Theologically, one can see why the Pentecostal Christians wouldn’t like this stuff.

Rio de Janeiro, long home to a diverse collection of Afro-Brazilian religions, is also now the center of Brazilian neo-Pentecostalism, a zealous strain of evangelicalism more frequently linked to intolerance.

What? Well, maybe in the reporter’s mind, it is. And why ‘neo’ Pentecostal? That’s a term borrowed from the 1960s to describe American charismatics. Seems odd to transpose it to a Brazilian context.

It’s possible that the Post team was trying to draw a line between mainstream Pentecostals and this radicalized brand of the faith. If “neo-Pentecostalism” has become a familiar term in Brazil, if would have been good to have explained that.

As it turns out, separating the mainstream from the gangs is a major challenge in this story.

The mayor is a bishop in a Pentecostal church. The city is home to President Jair Bolsonaro, baptized in the River Jordan and carried to office by the Pentecostal vote. And it’s the birthplace of the powerful Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, founded by Edir Macedo, a close Bolsonaro ally who wrote a book that condemns Afro-Brazilian religions as “diabolical” and “philosophies used by demons.” The book was briefly banned by a judge who deemed it “abusive and prejudicial.” Those beliefs, espoused frequently by Brazilian Pentecostal pastors, now echo through Rio’s favelas, where evangelicalism is exploding and where authorities have largely relinquished control to gangs. The combination of religious prejudice and criminal impunity has enabled the coordinated targeting of practitioners of minority religions.

I can see how these gangs are totally out of hand. But the article makes sweeping generalizations about all Pentecostals, concluding that what’s to come is a theocracy. If these gangs are the storm troops, who are the high priests? The article doesn’t link the Pentecostal thugs to any legit church.

This 2017 piece in an academic journal shows that the problem is a longstanding one that doesn’t particularly bother anyone in Brazil’s current government, meaning there’s little desire to stop the rampaging.

But it’s unclear as to which gangs are just criminals and which gangs believe that the syncretists are in fact demonic and need to be destroyed. This YouTube video about Rio’s gangs says they’re all crime syndicates with no religious connection.

So I’m confused about these folks. Are the Christian gangs, so to speak, carrying assault weapons and dealing drugs just like the secular ones are?

I would have liked to have read something from at least one source speaking on the side of the gangs. Why not ask one of these radical Pentecostals why they feel that religious tolerance doesn’t apply to them? Those quotes could be illuminating, and damning at the same time. All we get from the article is quotes from scholars and Candomblé followers.

I understand how these Pentecostals may not seem like sympathetic personalities, but the writer should at least get a representative statement or, failing that, a quote from a Pentecostal pastor familiar with the teachings inside these gangs. No matter how at fault they may be, everyone deserves his or her day in court.

FIRST IMAGE: Screenshot from BBC report on gangs in Rio.