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Brazil’s Religious Revolution: What a Huge New Survey Shows

Brazil’s Religious Revolution: What a Huge New Survey Shows

Last updated on: September 27, 2026 at 11:20 am by Andrew Chesnut

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Brazil’s Religious Revolution: What a Huge New Survey Shows 2026-09-27T11:20:33-04:00 Andrew Chesnut

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Is Brazil Still a Catholic Country?

Brazil’s religious marketplace has been undergoing one of the most dramatic transformations anywhere in the Christian world, and a massive new survey offers perhaps our best snapshot yet of where things stand. Religião e Vida Pública no Brasil (Religion and Public Life in Brazil), coordinated by the Instituto de Estudos da Religião (ISER), with fieldwork conducted by Quaest, surveyed an impressive 15,000 Brazilians in 412 municipalities across every region of the country. With 184 questions and a margin of error of just 0.8 percentage points, the study goes far beyond simply asking Brazilians which religion they belong to. It explores how they practice religion, what they believe, how often they change faiths, and how religion intersects with culture and public life.

The headline finding is simultaneously unsurprising and historic: Brazil remains the country with the largest Catholic population in the world, but Catholicism’s once hegemonic dominance continues to erode. 50

Infographic created in Claude for Patheos.

percent of respondents identify as Catholic, compared with 29 percent who identify as evangelical and 14 percent who claim no religion (Religious Nones). Another 3 percent identify with Afro-Brazilian religions (mainly Umbanda and Candomblé), and 2 percent with Spiritism. Even the Catholic number, however, conceals an important division. Only 31 percent of Brazilians describe themselves as practicing Catholics, while another 19 percent identify as non-practicing Catholics.

The evangelical figure is equally revealing. Pentecostals alone account for 21 percent of Brazil’s total population, compared with 5 percent identifying with mainline Protestant traditions and another 3 percent describing themselves as evangelical but without a church. Pentecostalism, then, remains the bedrock of Brazilian Protestantism. Anyone who has traveled through Brazil has seen the physical evidence of this transformation: Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches occupy everything from enormous temples to converted storefronts and modest neighborhood sanctuaries.

A Generational Shift

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns age groups. Among Brazilians aged 60 and older, an impressive 65 percent remain Catholic. Among those between 16 and 34, however, the Catholic share plummets to just 39 percent. Evangelicals comprise 33 percent of this younger cohort. Put another way, six out of every ten Brazilians under 35 no longer identify as Catholic. Afro-Brazilian religions also register proportionally greater identification among younger Brazilians.

These generational numbers suggest that the transformation of Brazilian religion is far from finished. The 2022 national census already documented the long-term decline of Catholic predominance: Catholics constituted 57 percent of the population, while evangelicals represented 27 percent and those without religion 9 percent. The new ISER survey uses a different methodology and therefore shouldn’t simply be treated as a continuation of the census series, but both sources depict an increasingly plural Brazilian religious landscape.

Brazil’s Religious Marketplace

Equally fascinating is the extraordinary amount of religious mobility. Nearly one-quarter – 23 percent – of Brazilians tell ISER that they have changed religions at least once. And the traffic no longer runs exclusively down the familiar Catholic-to-evangelical highway. Brazilians also move from evangelical churches into the religiously unaffiliated category, from evangelicalism into Afro-Brazilian religions, and even from evangelicalism back into Catholicism.

This is precisely why the concept of a religious marketplace is useful. Brazilians increasingly behave as active religious consumers rather than simply inheriting the faith of their parents and remaining there for life. Conversion, experimentation, disaffiliation and return have become ordinary features of the religious landscape.

Disaffiliated but Not Secular

Yet declining Catholic affiliation should not be confused with secularization in the European sense. Brazil remains intensely religious. Consider participation in religious services. 67 percent of evangelicals attend worship or other religious activities at least weekly. Surprisingly, 40 percent of Catholics and 39 percent of adherents of Afro-Brazilian religions also report weekly participation. And religion extends far beyond churches and terreiros. 73 percent of Brazilians regard the Bible or biblical verses as a source of life instruction.

Religion has also thoroughly permeated Brazilian popular culture. An extraordinary 67 percent of Brazilians listen to gospel music, which of course originated in the U.S.. Religious films and television series reach 59 percent, Christian radio and religious books 55 percent, and biblical telenovelas 45 percent. Most strikingly, even 55 percent of Brazilians who identify as Religious Nones listen to gospel music.

That last figure should make us cautious about translating the Brazilian category “without religion*”* simply as “atheist” or even “secular.” Having no institutional religious affiliation does not necessarily mean abandoning Christian culture, supernatural belief, religious music or private spirituality. Brazil’s religious transformation involves both disaffiliation and recombination.

Politics and Religious Racism

The survey also complicates easy assumptions about religion and politics. 54 percent of respondents describe themselves as conservative and 24 percent as progressive, yet those labels don’t translate neatly into predictable positions on individual public issues. 78 percent support protection for Indigenous peoples, 75 percent support government welfare for the poor, and 66 percent favor taxing the wealthy. On abortion, 45 percent oppose punishing and imprisoning women who have them. ISER consequently cautions against assuming a direct correspondence between religious identity and positions on controversial social questions.

One of the survey’s most troubling findings concerns attitudes toward Afro-Brazilian religions, mainly Umbanda and Candomble. 36 percent of evangelicals describe Afro-Brazilian religions as “evil” or “demonic.” The figure falls to 17 percent among Catholics, 14 percent among Religious Nones, and 9 percent among Spiritists.

These numbers illuminate one of the central paradoxes of contemporary Brazilian religion. The country is becoming more religiously diverse at precisely the same moment that some minority traditions continue to face demonization. Candomblé and Umbanda have profoundly shaped Brazilian culture, but their practitioners have also confronted what Brazilian scholars and activists describe as religious racism, particularly when African-derived religious practices are portrayed as demonic.

Taken together, the ISER-Quaest findings reveal something more complicated than the familiar story of Catholic decline and evangelical ascent. Brazil is not simply exchanging one Christian monopoly for another. It is becoming a much more diverse religious landscape.

Catholicism remains the dominant religious group but is increasingly divided between practicing and cultural Catholics. Pentecostalism has become a permanent pillar of Brazilian Christianity. Younger Brazilians are considerably less Catholic than their grandparents. Afro-Brazilian traditions are more visible. Religious Nones are expanding. Nearly one-quarter of Brazilians have already switched religions. And even Religious Nones continue listening to gospel music and participating in a cultural world saturated with Christianity.

Brazil, in other words, is not becoming irreligious. It is becoming religiously plural, fluid and increasingly difficult to fit into the neat denominational boxes inherited from the twentieth century.

And that may be the most important finding of all. The future of religion in Brazil will probably be defined less by the disappearance of faith than by competition and hybridization among an expanding range of religious identities. In the country that has long served as the global epicenter of Catholicism and more recently as ground zero of Pentecostalism, the religious revolution is still very much underway.

About Andrew Chesnut

Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut earned his Ph.D degree in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and joined the History Department faculty at the University of Houston in 1997. He quickly became an internationally recognized expert on Latin American religious history Professor Chesnut was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at VCU in 2008. The chair was established as the Most Rev. Walter F. Sullivan was nearing retirement as the 11th bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond to honor his nearly thirty years of service. For Professor Chesnut the chair became a unique opportunity to develop Catholic studies in a global context and at a large public university. Professor Chesnut’s early work, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 1997), traces the meteroric rise of Pentecostalism among the popular classes in Brazil following the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church. His second book, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford University Press, 2003) focuses on the three groups that have prospered most in the region’s pluralist landscape, Protestant Pentecostalism, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and African disasporic religions (e.g., Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Vodou). Professor Chesnut's most recent book is Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford University Press, 2025). It is the first in-depth study of the Mexican folk saint in English and has received widespread media coverage. You can read more about the author here.

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