Letter from Rio de Janeiro

The growth of evangelicals in Brazil had previously been described as unstoppable, exponential and inexorable. And yet, the expansion of evangelical groups in the country has turned out to be much less spectacular than predicted. According to the census conducted in 2022 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), whose results were made public on June 6, evangelicals represent only 26.9% of the population – a level well below what specialists had expected.

Evangelicals did gain 5.2 percentage points over 12 years and now number 47.4 million followers, while the Catholic Church brings together just 56.7% of the population (100.2 million people), down from 65.1% in 2010. But these figures are still far from the forecasts made by experts and media, who had predicted that more than a third of Brazilians had already converted to Protestantism.

The Amazon region remains the most fertile ground for Pentecostalism. Four out of the five states with the highest proportion of evangelicals are in the Amazon, including Acre, which tops the list and where evangelicals (44.4%) now outnumber adherents of the Roman Catholic Church (38.9%). By contrast, the Northeast remains the stronghold of Catholicism, led by Piaui, where 77.4% of the population identifies as Catholic, compared to 15.6% evangelical.

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