Brazil

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.

Brazil's evangelical Protestant, chiefly Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal, population has grown from a small minority in the mid-twentieth century to a major political and cultural force today, driven substantially by churches such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, founded in 1977 by Edir Macedo, which built a large media empire including television networks and has translated religious growth directly into organized political representation through the evangelical caucus, one of the Brazilian Congress's largest and most disciplined voting blocs on questions of sexuality, family law and religious liberty. This evangelical political rise contributed significantly to the 2018 election of President Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned explicitly on evangelical-aligned social positions despite his own nominal Catholic background, cementing an alliance between conservative evangelical leadership and right-wing politics that reshaped Brazilian electoral coalitions built for decades around Catholic-linked liberation theology and labor movements.

Brazil's constitution guarantees religious freedom and maintains separation of church and state since a republican 1891 constitution ended the Catholic Church's colonial and imperial-era establishment, though Afro-Brazilian religious communities, including Candomble terreiros, report continuing incidents of vandalism and violence, often linked to a subset of evangelical actors who characterize these traditions as demonic.