Religion and Power in the Brazil of the Military (1964-1985)

Since the mid-1950s, some Protestant evangelical churches and sectors of the Catholic Church started a movement of renovation and opening towards the problems of Brazilian realities. Yet in April 1964, all the Christian churches accepted the new order that emerged from the military coup d'Etat before strongly diverging later on. While the Brazilian Bishops' Conference came to embody the entire society's resistance to the regime, the evangelical churches continued to support it. The reasons for such opposing positions are to be found more in the history and power relationships in the religious field than in a profound difference in the nature of the two religious cultures.