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This World Cup was the first to feature automatic translation on Twitter, and through it, the world discovered that Brazilians love making jokes about absolutely everything. The world also witnessed Brazil’s bar-stool sociology, and a particular hypothesis went viral: that the scarcity of Catholics in the national squad explains the team’s decline. Shortly thereafter, Colombians made the same calculations; despite lacking a glorious footballing past, they decided to confirm a causal link between the decline of football and the decline of Catholicism. A story even appeared in the English-language media about “disappointed Brazilians” tweeting: “If we pray like gringos, we play like gringos.”
I believe the source of this viral idea was an article in the Brazilian magazine Veja titled “The exception among the evangelical majority in Carlo Ancelotti’s World Cup squad,” which identified Marquinhos as the national team’s only practicing Catholic. Right there, we see that the issue is more complex than it appears; once you distinguish between practicing and non-practicing Catholics, the notion of a decline in Brazilian Catholicism becomes highly questionable. Although officially Catholic from its founding until the proclamation of the Republic (1889), Brazil has a long history of informality and institutional gaps. It is worth highlighting the Patronage system, in effect until the 1889 Republic, which placed the Brazilian church in a political position similar to that of the Chinese church. It worked well while the Portuguese Crown remained staunchly Catholic, but things began to unravel with the rise of liberalism, driven by the Enlightenment and Freemasonry. In this spirit, the Marquis of Pombal expelled the Jesuits from Brazil in the 18th century, exacerbating a problem the church had always faced: a large population spread across a vast territory where no number of priests ever seemed sufficient. And the Jesuits have always been masters at venturing into remote areas inhabited by pagans.
Thus, it is hardly surprising that the figure of the “non-practicing Catholic” was common in Brazil throughout the twentieth century, regardless of the growth of Protestantism. In fact, these gaps created an opening for Protestant missions to proselytize and convert religiously inclined Brazilians whom the Catholic Church failed to reach.
Despite this fertile ground, Brazilians offer a variety of explanations for the growth of Protestantism, ranging from pointing fingers at the CIA to Catholic self-criticism. Personally, I am not familiar with historical research that convincingly explains CIA involvement. Even so, it is worth noting that neo-Pentecostal churches took advantage of the same loosening of Brazilian laws—occurring in the 1970s and 80s—that benefited the pornography industry. Had Brazil continued to enforce its laws against charlatanism, quackery, and pornography, there would have been no room for either Edir Macedo or Hugh Hefner. With Brazil’s liberalization, everything became a matter of religious freedom, and no one arrests a pastor for selling miraculous trinkets.
Catholic self-criticism comes in both right-wing and left-wing versions. Right-wing Brazilian Catholics blame Liberation Theology, which imposed materialist agendas on the poor who were seeking spiritual guidance. If someone went to Mass and heard the priest talk about Lech Walesa, he might seek out a pastor to hear about Christ. Meanwhile, left-wing Brazilian Catholics blame the perceived right-leaning stance of John Paul II: by combating Liberation Theology, the Pope undermined the Base Ecclesial Communities maintained by its adherents in the urban periphery. It is possible that both right-wing and left-wing Catholics are right, as the two reasons are not mutually exclusive. The fight against Liberation Theology may have exacerbated the damage already caused by leftist politicking.
The reason that seems most decisive to me, however, is urban in nature: since the 1970s, chaotic migration has led the poor to crowd into slums that continue to grow to this day. The Church, as an institution that operates within bureaucratic constraints, is unable to build temples at the drop of a hat. On the other hand, establishing a neo-Pentecostal church requires neither training a competent theologian nor constructing a temple; all it takes is an individual with good oratorical skills to buy some plastic chairs and rent a room.
This helps explain why the Brazilian national team has a Protestant majority in a predominantly Catholic country: the demographic profile of religions in Brazil. The stereotype of the Brazilian professional player is a poor boy from the slum who views the sport as a chance to gain wealth and women. According to the questionable 2022 census (according to which there is no slum in the city I live), 8% of Brazilians live in slums. Areas with a particularly high concentration of slums include the state of Rio de Janeiro (which has grappled with chaotic urban sprawl since its days as the capital of the Empire in the 19th century) and the states of the Amazon region, where environmental NGOs constantly refrain both the state’s infrastructural presence and formal economic activities. According to the census, both areas have the lowest proportions of Catholics in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro, in particular, ranks second-lowest in the Catholic population, trailing only the highly troubled state of Roraima (which struggles with both Venezuelan immigration and the environmentalist crusade against legitimate economic activity). Slums also stand out for having a higher density of religious temples than the Brazilian average.
Proving that there is no direct link between low income and Protestantism, the most Catholic states are Piauí and Ceará—two poor, agrarian states from which many people emigrate. The correlation only holds water if social chaos is factored in: the uprooted poor, atomized within large cities, turns Evangelical, whereas the poor rooted in their own land remains Catholic.
A Brazilian Catholic might be someone enjoying a comfortable financial position in a major urban center, or a poor who has remained in Brazil’s most remote corners. The typical Brazilian Protestant, by contrast, is the uprooted slum dweller. The stereotype is that of a simple soul desperate for money, drawn in by “Prosperity Theology” charlatans who promise wealth through a form of white magic performed in Jesus’s name. Yet there are also Lutherans in areas of German immigration, as well as middle-class Protestants—some from families converted by missionaries (like Anísio Teixeira) and others who converted individually. Here, too, a stereotype applies to both the middle and lower classes: the wayward fellow—a heavy drinker, a womanizer, a criminal, or even gay—suddenly shocks his non-practicing Catholic family by announcing he has “become a believer.” In my family from Rio, the elders say a “believer” is an “ex-everything,” so one ought to be wary of them.
Now, let us address the question that stirred up the internet: is it reasonable to claim that Brazilian soccer has declined because of Protestantism? No, for that would require rewriting history to suggest that the Evangelical player Kaká played no part in the era of great Brazilian soccer. Nor do analyses based on the premise that Brazilian Evangelicals possess a Calvinist spirit of solemnity and hard work reflect reality. For those who prefer not to look at the history of Brazilian players’ partying, one need only turn to the political news to find Daniel Vorcaro, an evangelical banker who hosted orgies with Slavic prostitutes and invited the entire political class. It resembles the bunga-bunga parties of Italian politics—which is certainly not Protestant—yet this is a Brazilian affair starring an evangelical.
While it may not be true that neo-Pentecostalism caused the decline of Brazilian soccer, it is a fact that the rise of neo-Pentecostalism has coincided with that decline. Outside the Twitter bubble, it is safe to say that the national team’s mediocre performance has once again fostered a perception of widespread national decline. It makes perfect sense for these two phenomena to be linked, given that the rise of Protestantism in Brazil reflects, above all, social precariousness, and it is practically a New Republic phenomenon. This makes it all the more intriguing that Brazil—like France and the US—is experiencing a Catholic revival, evidenced by a record number of adult baptisms.
