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TWO The Future of Pentecostalism in Brazil: The Limits to Growth PAUL FRESTON Developmental Tensions, Transitions, and Historicization Brazil can claim to be the world capital of Pentecostalism.It has about 25 million members, nearly one in seven of the population, comprising numerous small denominations but also some huge and highly influential ones. It has high-profile Pentecostal televangelists and members of congress; indeed, the third-placed candidate in the 2010 presidential election, with almost 20 percent of the vote, is Pentecostal. Its missionaries are in over a hundred countries, evangelizing the native populations. In the period between the censuses of 1991 and 2000, Brazilian Pentecostals more than doubled in number. Brazil would seem, therefore, to be at the forefront of the global Pentecostal advance that has attracted so much recent academic and journalistic attention. Yet there are reasons for doubting Brazilian Pentecostalism’s ability to continue its headlong growth, or even perhaps, in a while, to continue growing at all; and also grounds for wondering whether it will ever be able to achieve the sort of social and political influence that its size might lead us to expect, let alone that which it fondly imagines for itself. There are even signs that it might not only be losing numerical steam but also floundering in its attempts to transition to new ways of being in Brazilian society. Ecclesiastical institutions, like all others, are subject to what might be called developmental tensions. The largest Brazilian Pentecostal denominations date from 1910 (the Congregação Cristã) and 1911 (the Assembleia de Deus), with Italian and Swedish founders respectively. There are, of course, other large denominations (nearly all founded by Brazilians) with shorter histories and at different stages in their development; but there is also such a thing as an established “Pentecostal field” into which they have to insert themselves. The century of history is not irrelevant, therefore, even for 64 Paul Freston­ understanding a more recent denomination such as (to mention the bestknown ) the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus. But we should not think of Brazilian Pentecostalism only in terms of developmental tensions (emphasizing internal factors); rather,it is approaching a fundamental transition,where the emphasis is on external factors deriving from society and the broader religious field. Its future, therefore, depends largely on the interplay of this transition with the developmental tensions and even,I would suggest,developmental limitations. The latter threaten to make the former more dramatic than it might otherwise be. Whether Brazilian Pentecostalism can successfully navigate the simultaneous approach of numerical stabilization,the entry into its second century of history, the social and educational changes within its constituency, and the country’s rise to economic respectability—this is an open question.Will it manage to learn how to behave in a context where there is no longer the same possibility of rapid numerical growth? Some of its wounds (the scandals, authoritarian leadership, and poor political performance that have severely affected its public image) are self-inflicted, and there may be time to heal them sufficiently before irreparable damage is done. But other problems may actually (as some internal critics are starting to say) lie deeper, representing fundamental limitations that, in the long run, will lead either to decline or to a personal or institutional mutation into something that is not really, any more, Pentecostalism. For all these reasons, it seems appropriate, on the fortieth anniversary of the Club of Rome’s report, to apply to Pentecostalism the title it used for the global economic predicament :“the limits to growth.” All this is not to swell the chorus of those who see Pentecostalism fundamentally in terms of benightedness,authoritarianism,and unscrupulousness. Yet,in all the efforts to explain Pentecostalism’s success in very varied contexts, it is easy to forget the holes on its global map and its limitations even where it has done well numerically.Indeed,a frontier of Pentecostal research today is precisely about what one might call the historicization of Pentecostalism,that is,the move toward non-Pentecostal (though usually Evangelical) Protestant forms. (I use the term historicization because the Portuguese-language academic literature usually divides up the Brazilian Protestant world, known generically as evangélicos, into pentecostais and históricos.) Historicization is therefore one form of de-Pentecostalization. The latter, of course, could take many forms,including a (re)turn to Catholicism,or to other religions on the Brazilian landscape such as Umbanda, or a drift into the amorphous census category of “no religion.” All...

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