Religious Syncretism and Slavery in Brazil

The phenomenon of different elements from various areas of discourse conversing with one another is known as syncretism. As a result, these elements engage in dialogue and create relationships that often involve power dynamics that are antagonistic while still maintaining their unique identities. Although syncretism is not exclusively a part of faith, it is heavily utilized in this area. As a result, this phrase originates from early encounters between Africans and Portuguese in Brazil. The interaction of these two groups’ cultures, religions, and languages led to the fusion. In the same vein, the power shift that syncretism creates is based on a status struggle brought about by a conflict situation that is cultural in characteristic.

In Brazil’s modern cultural and societal landscape today, there rests evidence of a multiplicity of religions with the hegemonic Roman Catholic surprising the rest. The other unmentioned and less dominant religions include the Methodists, Pentecostals, Episcopal, Lutheran and the Baptists. Furthermore, the very much low key Spiritists still exist in modern Brazil. The minority religions include the Buddists, Moslems, Jews, Candomble and Macumba sects. The slaves that were brought to Brazil through the Transatlantic slave trade managed to practice their religions despite the banning by colonialists and managed to do so by using Roman Catholic symbolism as a mask for their beliefs (Turner, 1).

The Candomble religion is not native to Brazil but was brought by slaves originating from Nigeria which is still being practiced today in Bahia. There is not more accurate depiction of religious syncretism than the modern Brazil where both Catholicism and Candomble religions exists harmoniously side by side, a clear evidence of the plural nature of Brazil’s religions.

One critical aspect of the religious syncretism that exist in Brazil has a lot to do with the Atlantic slavery. The Candomble, Umband and Xango religions are of African descent that found their way into Brazil through the slave trade. In the same thought, the Hausa, Yoruba and Fulani initially practiced Islam before their shipment to Brazil during the time of the slavery period (Harvard Divinity School). The dominance displayed by the Catholic religion cannot be understated in colonial Brazil and the modern state.

Roman Catholicism religion dug its roots in Brazil through the introduction of the religion by Jesuit missionaries through the help of the Portuguese. The law at that time was a preserve of the colonial masters who demanded that no other religion should be practiced with the indigenous people being forced to practice the Roman Catholic religion and had further obligations to pay taxed to the church. Later on when Brazil gained independence, the law gave the indigenous people the leeway to practice their religion through the enactment of their first constitution in 1824. Despite the newfound freedom of religion, they still had to cope with the fact that the Roman Catholic religion would still remain as the dominant and most practiced religion in the country. In today’s Brazil, Roman Catholicism has taken on a more political twist with church leaders being urged to take on the role of social activism in order to form some sort of liberal emancipation from the scourge of oppression and poverty. As such, what is seen in Brazil is a domination of a colonialist’s religion over the natives’ and slaves’ who have faced ridicule for the practice of their religion.

Afro-Brazilian Religions

These religions have their origins from Africa taking root in Brazil especially in areas considered as having a rich history of the slave trade. Examples of such places include plantations that have huge populations of workers who had been enslaved, slave markets, community of maroons and the slave escapees. The Candomble religion has links to the Bahia do Salvador and practiced mostly by people of West African Yoruba ethnic populace. On other hand, the Recife take credit for establishing the Xango religion, which has its name given after a Yoruba deity.

Other religions including the Tambor de Mina, which has a strong sway on the Dahomey and the Tereco had its establishment realized in the state of Maranhao (Schmidt, 12). In the twentieth century, there has been an increase in the spread of the Afro-Brazilian religions resulting in the formation of another syncretic religion known as the Umbanda religion, which shares some aspects of Spirtisism with Candomble. It became hard for the Umbanda religion faithful to let go of the symbolic artefacts they shared with Roman Catholicism during the end of the twentieth century, a time when the Candomble priests were re-Africanizing their religions and cultures. They did this to sort of cleanse their traditions from the sway and impact the Catholic religion had on theirs by getting rid of objects like crosses and painting images of the Catholic saints

Overall, these religions are characterized by deity worship of African descent, primarily associated with the elements present in nature, that is, wind, fire, water amongst many others. The religions of this nature also demonstrate a form of order through the hierarchical structure it has employed with a priest or a priestess being the sole leader and head of the group with the ultimate power with regards the faith composition of the religion.

Islam and Judaism

The spread of Islam and Judaism is said to have been aided by a person called Alvares Cabral with the assistance of the Portuguese conquest of Brazil as far back in the sixteenth century. At that time, Muslims and Jews had to choice but to flee the persecution brought on them in the Middle East, a term they called the Inquisition. The persecution involved the process of converting and further renaming them in a bid to make them unidentifiable from historical records (Ehrlich, 460).

However, there exist a part in Brazil that was partly controlled by the Dutch where the Inquisitions initiated by the Portuguese did not take place and took in Jewish immigrants. As such, the area called Recife became the hallmark for the engendering of the Jewish people in Brazil and the Americas at large. The Jewish stay at Recife did not last long since the Portuguese later concurred the city and forced the Jews to move to other places, further scattering and spreading them all over the country.

However, the debate as to whether people practicing the Muslim religion existed in the colonial day Brazil has confirmation. In fact, it is established as a fact that these Muslim immigrants settled amongst the African slaves. At the beginning, these Muslim slaves were sent to a place called Bahia but later the state had to change strategy after they were responsible for a break out strike in the state. From that time going forward, the religion of Islam was branded as dangerous with the colonial power opting to scatter the Muslim population across the country to dissipate the threat posed by them, an advantage for the slave owners. By the end of the nineteenth century, it is believed that almost twenty thousand Muslims resided in Brazil with a huge portion of this population being settled in Salvador of Bahia.

Many of the Africans imported from Africa landed in Brazil, accounting for around 40% of all slave moved to the Americas between 1650 and 1850. Slavery was not abolished in Brazil until the year 1888 at a time when the Protestant evangelical branch was not present. Also, the dominant religion at that time was Roman Catholicism (Ehrlich, 23).

Early forms of evangelical Christianity in Brazil was mainly started by the American missionaries. It was founded by an Italian called Louis who later became the leader of the fast growing evangelical church during that time. As such, the Brazilian Assemblies of God Pentecostal Movement had grown to point it had around three million members with around five hundred thousand followers in Sao Paulo and almost seventeen thousand temples that existed thought out the country.

In the colonial days of Brazil, the religion of Christianity was practiced with a sense of syncretism present. In essence, this was achieved through the fusion of this religion with other religions such as medieval Portuguese Christianity, beliefs that demonstrated characteristics of the indigenous kind and African religions. In this same thought, Catholicism formed a central identity amongst the citizens of Brazil with the evidence today of Brazilians being the country with the most Catholics in the world.

Even though the previous power that the Roman Catholic Church has waned in political and economic power over the centuries, it still maintains a special and crucial significance for the people of Brazil. A good example of this is a Catholic patron, Nossa Senhora Aparecida, which is a translation for “our lady appeared” where she is seen as a prominent patron of the faith. In this sense, the Roman Catholicism can be classified as a kind of folk religion which has layers is of interpersonal relations, a collection of cult saints and lay agents for the religion.

It is therefore folk Catholicism with its main features (the cult of saints, interpersonal relations, and a diffuse body of lay religious agents according to Steil) that continues to capture the imagination of Brazilians (Steil 2016; see also Ribeiro de Oliveira 1972 and Maués 1995). Nonetheless, the Catholic Church remains important until today though its influence is constantly declining in favor of so-called Evangélicos since the 1970s.

Works Cited

Turner, Neil. ”Religious Syncretism in Brazil: Catholicism, Evangelicalism and Candomblé.“ (2011).

Schmidt, Bettina E. Caribbean Diaspora in the Usa Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2008.

Ehrlich, Mark Avrum. Encyclopedia of the Jewish diaspora: origins, experiences, and culture. Vol. 1. Abc-clio, 2009.