Posted on 08/10/2018 7:29:53 AM PDT by C19fan
Even as the overall population of Christians in the United States declines, evangelicals have become an energetic right-wing voting base, helping President Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016.
In Brazil, where Pentecostal and other charismatic Christian churches are rapidly gaining members, evangelical voters are only beginning to flex their electoral muscle.
In 1970, 90 percent of Brazil’s population identified as Roman Catholic. By 2017 just under 65 percent did. Evangelicals now make up an estimated 27 percent of Brazil’s 208 million people.
As their numbers have grown, so has the evangelical influence over Brazilian politics. My demographic research in Brazil indicates that this constituency will be a formidable political force in Brazil’s October 2018 presidential election.
(Excerpt) Read more at theconversation.com ...
Friends from Brazil are backing this guy...but question if he is tough/savvy enough.
I have many Evangelical Brasilian friends.
They strongly favor Bolsonaro.
It’s sad for a Catholic to admit that the political scene would be much better off if we had more evangelical voters and fewer Catholics. But it’s true.
When you’re in the ultra Far Left for which socialism seems reasonable everything else looks like the Far Right.
There are a number of biblical TV series produced in Brazil (in Portuguese) and translated into Spanish. They take old testament stories like Joseph (of the many colored coat), Exodus, Josua and the promised land and turn them into a few hundred (per story) TV episodes.
I don’t see anything in the shows to indicate that they are Catholic or non-Catholic, but I imagine the production team to be fundamentalist Christian.
Anything this costly and long lasting indicates a Brazilian cultural phenomenon of importance.
“The overall population of Christians has declined” in the U S? Nay, it’s the main liners who are no longer recognizably Christian denominations who are decreasing.
The overall population of Bible believing Christians in the U S is increasing, is what I’ve read.
Candidate Jair Bolsonaro is pushing for some rights to guns for self defense in Brazil.
The murder rate in Brazil has skyrocketed since extreme gun control was put into effect.
Most Western countries saw a remarkable drop in homicides from the early 1990s to the middle 2010s. Both Australia and the United States saw their homicide rates drop in half, in spite of their opposite approach to gun ownership and self defense.
Brazil’s homicide rate nearly doubled. Brazil attempted Australia’s approach of extreme restrictions on gun ownership in 2003. It did not work. Homicides leveled off for a few years, then climbed dramatically to the current levels near 40 per 100,000.
Link to Brazil article here:
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2018/04/brazil-considers-easing-extreme-gun-law.html
But rather than admit that ,some defenders of Rome actually blamed evangelicals for Obama being elected, since many did not vote, and only 80% of those who did voted for Romney.
In the 2012 election (preliminary exit-poll analysis), white Evangelicals (23% of the electorate) voted 79%/20% Romney/Obama; Protestants overall (53% of the electorate) voted 57%/42%; black Protestants (9% of the electorate) and other Christian voted 5%/95%; Catholics overall (25% of the electorate) voted 48%/50%; white Catholics (18% of the electorate) voted 59%/40%; and Hispanic Catholics (5% of the electorate) voted 21%/75% Romney/Obama http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/How-the-Faithful-Voted-2012-Preliminary-Exit-Poll-Analysis.aspx
Meanwhile, the term "evangelical" has become watered down, to include many who are not fundamental Bible Christians, whose percentage is likely decreasing. Thus I prefer the term "traditional evangelicals."
Even evangelicalism need more Puritanical values injected into it.
Rather than the easy believism Catholics (with a church about half full of liberal members) associates with sola fide, in Puritan Protestantism there was often a tendency to make the way to the cross too narrow, perhaps in reaction against the Antinomian controversy, as described in an account (http://www.the-highway.com/Early_American_Bauckham.html) of Puritans during the early American period:
“They had, like most preachers of the Gospel, a certain difficulty in determining what we might call the ‘conversion level’, the level of difficulty above which the preacher may be said to be erecting barriers to the Gospel and below which he may be said to be encouraging men to enter too easily into a mere delusion of salvation. Contemporary critics, however, agree that the New England pastors set the level high. Nathaniel Ward, who was step-son to Richard Rogers and a distinguished Puritan preacher himself, is recorded as responding to Thomas Hooker’s sermons on preparation for receiving Christ in conversion with, ‘Mr. Hooker, you make as good Christians before men are in Christ as ever they are after’, and wishing, ‘Would I were but as good a Christian now as you make men while they are preparing for Christ.’”
GOOD!
It’s encouraging to see things turn around.
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