I don't know if you're aware of how these things are connected, but they are - specifically, by New York's Hudson River valley and the "burned over districts" of the 19th century.
Throughout the 1800s, numerous revivals swept through the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York. Charles Finney, perhaps the most famous of the "Second Great Awakening" evangelists who repeatedly worked that area, coined the term "burned over district" because the residents had grown increasingly calloused and resistant to his methodical revival methods. He likened them to the charcoal remains left behind by multiple forest fires (the fires being his revivals).
Here's where your connection comes in. Numerous religious movements were spawned in the Hudson River Valley, following those revivals. Adventism, Unitarianism, Mormonism, Restorationism, and scores of other movements Christian and not sprang up or hit the area within the span of a few decades. A common theme among them was that the Catholic Church was to blame for a "great apostasy" in Christianity, and that [fill in the new group's name] was "restoring" the gospel and the "true church" to the world. A lesser theme for many was supernaturalism and prophetism.
Thanks... I’ve never tied those ends together that way, but for each factual point I know anything about, I know you’re right. Excellent analysis. (Or, more correctly, synthesis.)
Now what do upstate New York and Brazil have in common? In Brazil, the anti-Catholicism seems to me to be a marketing angle combined with a scapegoat: if you attack only the paganism, you’ll get good Catholics, so if you want people to join your corpor — I mean church — you have to attack the Catholic church with equal vehemence and tie the two together. It’s like Mac has to do more than convince people how wonderful it is to buy a new, more powerful operating system; they also have to say what’s wrong with Vista. Of is there something more?