The Brazilians evangelizing the Middle East

Pentecostalism evolved from a small group in California in the beginning of the 20th century to becoming a worldwide movement with an estimated 300 million followers. That makes it the fastest-growing religious sect in history. And Latin America has played a major part in this expansion, particularly Brazil. By 2040, for instance, Brazil is expected to be home to more Protestants than the U.S. 

Brazil’s evangelical Protestants already wield significant political strength in the country, being crucial in the 2018 election of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, for instance — even though the evangelical electorate is very heterogeneous. 

The evangelical caucus in Brazil’s lower house of Congress accounts for more than 200 of the 513 total lawmakers. Most of them oppose the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva government.

The affair between religion and power goes far beyond domestic politics, though. Since American pastors began to suffer a lot of resistance in their evangelizing missions in the Middle East, they delegated this role to religious people in other countries.

By 2021, the Global South had deployed more than 200,000 foreign missionaries, almost half of the world’s total. Brazil became the biggest sender. 

That is the panorama the reporter Adriana Carranca makes in her book “Soul By Soul – The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims,” recently published by Columbia Global Reports. 

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The work tells the story of an evangelical missionary family that moved from Brazil to Afghanistan a few years after the U.S. invasion in 2001, to spread the gospel to Muslims. 

From 2012 to 2022, she followed their life and traveled with them and their colleagues to 12 countries. Ms. Carranca explains that their Christian expansion strategy targets latitudes between 10 degrees north and 40 degrees north, a region they call the “10/40 window.”

“Most of these places were torn apart by war; there were places in extreme poverty, like Afghanistan — and the way evangelicals see that is that they are in that situation because they don’t know Jesus,” she said.

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