Religious transition in Brazil

Abstract

The chapter describes the long path of changes in the religious distribution of the Brazilian population over 50 years between 1960 and 2010, analyzing how such changes correlate to broader socioeconomic transformations. We call “religious transition” the sum of these three trends: (i) the major change in the country’s religious landscape, from being predominantly Catholic to increasingly Evangelical, (ii) the Christianity’s tendency to boost its internal segmentation (especially among the Evangelicals) and to foster different ways of being a participant/believer, and (iii) the substantive pluralization and growth of non-Christians (people of other religions and also without religion). The analysis is divided into four parts. First, a basic descriptive overview indicates tendencies of growth, decline, continuity, and points of inflection. Then, the socioeconomic characteristics of major religious groups are presented. Afterward, an age-period-cohort analysis proceeds in order to identify how the probabilities of being part of each religious group changes for each person across the life course and for the whole population through the decades and generations. Lastly, religion reproduction within families through the transmission from parents to child is analyzed along with how this changed in the last decades. The religious transition is not just the differential growth between denominations - it is deeply rooted in changes in the socioeconomic characteristics and in the probabilities of reproduction inside the households, and it is taking place for a long time.