Description: A spiritual revolution is transforming the religious landscape of Latin America. Evangelical Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, has replaced Catholicism as the leading religion in thousands of barrios on the urban periphery. But in few Latin American nations have Protestants multiplied as rapidly as in Brazil. What accounts for this rise? Combining historical, political, and ethnographic research, R. Andrew Chestnut shows that the relationship between faith healing and illness in the conversion process is integral to the popularity of Pentecostalism among Brazil's poor.
Review Quotes: Professor Chesnut's succinct study should be required reading for all scholars of comparative religion, intellectual and social history, and Latin American culture. The fruit of an intensive field period of field research in the early 1990s...this volume manages in clear, unredundant, and highly readable style to synthesize the twentieth century history of four of the main Pentecostal denominations...of Brazil as well as exploring in depth the infrastructure and external politics of the largest of these denominations.-- "Luso-Brazilian Review"