Brazil remains majority Catholic, around 50 percent per most recent estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, though the share has fallen sharply from over 90 percent a few decades ago as Protestant, especially Pentecostal, communities have grown dramatically to roughly 25 to 30 percent, making Brazil home to one of the world's largest Pentecostal populations by absolute numbers, alongside religiously unaffiliated Brazilians and practitioners of Afro-Brazilian traditions including Candomble and Umbanda. Portuguese colonization from 1500 brought Catholic missionary activity, particularly through Jesuit missions among indigenous peoples, while the transatlantic slave trade brought millions of enslaved West and Central Africans whose Yoruba, Bantu and other traditional religions survived through syncretism with Catholic saints, producing Candomble, a religion centered on orixa deities that has remained closest to its African roots, and Umbanda, a twentieth-century Brazilian synthesis blending Candomble, Spiritism and Catholic elements.
Brazilian Spiritism, following the nineteenth-century French writer Allan Kardec's codification of communication with spirits and reincarnation doctrine, gained a uniquely large following in Brazil unmatched anywhere else in the world, and Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue, completed in 1931, stands as one of Christianity's most recognizable modern monuments.