This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
From the 1960s onward, Pentecostal and evangelical Protestant Christianity grew explosively across Latin America, a region Roman Catholicism had held as the near uncontested majority faith for four centuries since Iberian colonisation. Brazil holds the largest Pentecostal population of any country in the region and anchors this event, though the growth reached across the whole of Latin America, with Guatemala and Chile among the other prominent cases.
The sociologist David Martin's foundational study of the movement traced its appeal chiefly among the urban poor, the communities least served by an often distant institutional Catholic Church. Martin argued the single greatest social consequence of conversion was not doctrinal but domestic, a taming of machismo and the emergence of a gentler model of masculinity within households that turned Pentecostal, as husbands and fathers took up a strict personal morality that reordered their relationships at home.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the end of Catholicism's four century near monopoly on Latin American religious life. A movement that began among some of the region's poorest urban communities grew, within a few decades, into a demographic force reshaping both the religious map of an entire continent and the texture of family life inside its converting households.