<i>Propagandists of the Book: Protestant Missions, Christian Literacy, and the Making of Brazilian Evangelicalism</i>, by Pedro Feitoza

While in years past, scholarship on Latin America has been scant in the overall discussion of World Christianity, new works such as Propagandists of the Book: Protestant Missions, Christian Literacy, and the Making of Brazilian Evangelicalism could create a new synergy and open doors to questions relating to Protestantism in the region. The author Pedro Feitoza illuminates the manifold ways Protestantism arrived in Brazil in the nineteenth century and disrupted the religious field through questions of secularity, contesting the present Catholic hegemony and situating itself as a constitutive presence in the early twentieth century. His book explores particular instances of the religious life of early protestants from Colporteurs to an emerging Brazilian evangelical intelligentsia. Its chronological sequence, from the 1850s to roughly the 1930s, helps readers trace how Protestant Christianity evolved and was shaped by the transition from the Imperial period into the nascent Brazilian democracy.Each section functions as an entry point to analyze the multidirectionality of Protestantism in Brazil and the effects across the various periods, characters, and contexts. One of the frameworks that Feitoza employs to make his arguments is looking at Protestantism broadly through an archival approach. Various textual “interlocutors” such as books, tracts, pamphlets, and other documents point to these Christian debates, concerns, and preoccupations. This archival and literary approach does much to illuminate the arguments and social world of Protestants in these periods.The first chapter situates the arrival of missionaries from Portugal and Anglophone countries, who began to develop a new form of localized Protestantism while tethered to global networks. Feitoza aptly traces how, amidst the institutional crisis of the Catholic church, Protestants began to flourish through the arrival of immigrants from Europe and the United States. Through the education and preparation of local leaders alongside missionaries, early Protestants started new congregations, missionary schools, and publishing efforts, which would have a lasting impact on the shape of religious life in the country.In thinking about the importance of Protestant print culture in the country, the second chapter shows how Brazil became a rich site for spreading Protestant works, whether printed locally or internationally. Through the efforts of Bible and tracts societies, Feitoza maps out the circulation of evangelistic literature and the vital role of colporteurs. These “vendors of the Protestant Bible” (58) were the first to begin disseminating Bibles, starting in the growing urban hubs of Brazil and moving to its rural hinterland, often at great economic and physical expense. While many of them were illiterate, they functioned under a logic that emphasized the literary and evangelistic importance of getting the Bible into the hands of all people. This proliferation of the Bible garnered early Protestants the nickname of os bíblias (the Bible people) by their detractors.The research then focuses on how Protestants began to establish churches and networks of communication through various literary devices, mainly focusing on the conflict with Catholics amidst their own revival period. In the aftermath of Vatican I, Catholic elements in Brazil went on the offensive to reposition themselves in a social context of institutional decay. The third chapter centers on the battle around questions of politics, ethics, and the role of Christianity in society. Growing sectors of Evangelicals in Brazil would pin their counterposition on the Catholic church as rooted in “modern liberalism and the Enlightenment as grounded on the scriptures and Christian traditions, not on secular philosophies” (122). It was out of their affiliation to the Reformation that Protestants in Brazil sought to reshape the social and political future of the country against Ultramontane strains of Catholic influence.Feitoza, in chapter 4, after spending time on the larger context of the country, zooms in on how “conversion” and its “political consequences” (136) played out for these new believers. In various cases and through the narratives of personal conversion, he shows how Protestantism reconstituted and reshaped Brazilian life. Exploring the continuities and discontinuities of conversion illustrates how rural Protestant converts left behind aspects of social life tied to Brazilian practices and, at other times, reimagined themselves as “counterpoints to the corrupted vices of urban elites” (161). Through their Christian theology of hard work and honesty, these converts saw themselves as a solution to the moral ills and the vanguard of a new Brazilian society.Moving out to the larger picture in the aftermath of the 1910 Edinburgh Conference, the fifth chapter seeks to situate the Brazilian Protestant ecosystem within a larger transnational conversation around cooperation, missionization, and pan-Americanism. Here, Feitoza zooms out even further to show the imbricated nature of Brazilian Protestants transnationally in efforts around cooperation with international denominations emerging from the Panama Conference of 1916. The section shows the oscillation of various Protestant denominations working together for evangelization and others in open conflict for breaking mission treaties due to theological debates. Additionally, it shows how North American Protestants and Latin American actors re-signified the region’s overwhelming Catholic presence as the “enemy” (181), thus validating increased missionary efforts across Latin America, but in this case, Brazil.The sixth chapter, focusing on the twentieth-century interwar period, gives many examples in which Protestants, through education and their preparation, emerged as part of the intellectual and social elite of the nation. Protestant leaders began to envision theological responses to this period’s social and political problems. They confected their own sense of national theological orthodoxy in relation to the global context grappling with higher criticism and theological questions germane to the times. Evangelical leaders saw themselves as promoting a contextualized version of Protestantism to combat superstition and as heirs of the “civilizing” national project that could reconstitute a new social imaginary for Brazil as the fruits of the Reformation.In relation to the discussion of World Christianity, Propagandists of the Book wrestles at different points with the social effect of conversion, indigeneity, missionary and evangelistic activities (foreign and local), autochthonous institutions, and transnational religious networks. This text engages with these themes and shows how these ideas can be seen in Brazil and how they become particular and unique in each context. Feitoza exemplifies a way of thinking about a historical case study through the resources of a World Christianity perspective. The possibility of comparative studies emerging from Feitoza’s work and other national contexts in Latin America in the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth century is something I hope to see, as research on Protestantism in Latin America continues to broaden and deepen.