Brazil is the case the author has personally researched most, and is therefore a convenient benchmark for developing comparative observations as we look at the three continents. However, there are other good reasons for starting with Brazil. It has the largest evangelical community, in absolute terms, in the Third World (with the possible exception of China) and the second largest in the world, behind the United States. Inasmuch as Third World evangelicalisms have common denominators, Brazil can be seen as a possible trendsetter, a test case where phenomena peculiar to the new mass Protestantism of the ‘South’ of the globe may first appear. This chapter is partly based on my existing studies in Portuguese and English (Freston 1993a, 1993b, 1994b, 1996). The idea is that the analysis should exemplify the sort of information we need on other countries, the questions to ask and the interpretations that might (or might not) be relevant.

Protestants are about 15 per cent of the Brazilian population, some twenty-three million people. (Protestantes and evangélicos are used interchangeably, and the vast majority would be evangelical in the Anglophone sense.) The social characteristics of this overwhelmingly practising community are illustrated in a survey of Greater Rio de Janeiro (Fernandes 1992): the rapid growth (a new church per day) is largely among the poor (the needier the district, the more churches per capita) and is popular (independent of the initiative of social elites).