I think that the Brasilia cathedral looks like a standing rib roast or maybe one of those things Fred Flintstone used to eat. Ostensibly it is reminiscent of Jesus’ crown of thorns. No matter what you think it looks like, the building is attractive within its landscape. You go down through an underground entrance, which is supposed to remind you of the catacombs presuming you had memories of catacombs to recall, but the effect does work well as you come out of the darkness into the light. The glass roof gives the whole place an open sky, maybe heavenly, aspect as you see in the photos. With all due modesty, I like my photo more than many others I have seen because I took them near midday on a sunny day. You can see the intensity of light that you might not get on a cloudier day or a time of the day when the sun was not as intense. The photos in the guides I have make it look a little dull. It really is very bright or at least it can be.
The photo above shows workers fixing the stained glass. The cathedral was being repaired when I visited. I have noticed that monuments all over the world are almost always being restored when I visit. It is rare to get to see anyplace w/o some kind of scaffolding or work barriers. I have been riding my bike past the Jefferson Memorial for more than twenty-five years and I don’t think I have ever seen it entirely w/o some work being done. This creates a minor dilemma when I take pictures. Do I put in the renovation, which is omnipresent, or do I take pictures around the repairs and show the “spirit” of the place. I usually opt for the prettier picture. I justify philosophically that I am getting the essence of thing, the true nature, instead of its ephemeral & corrupted temporal state.
This picture shows some of our students as a “whispering wall”. The shape and the smooth hard surface create an acoustical anomaly. Sound follows the wall, so that a person whispering dozens of meters away can be heard clearly at other points along the wall.
Above is the presidential residence. It is a long way off in the distance behind the emu. They had a few of these birds grazing in the grass. A different angle below shows the Brasilia landscape and the sprinklers that keep everything green during the dry season. There is plenty of water in Brasilia, enough to keep everything lush and green the whole year, but it actually falls only during half of the year. There is no reason to “conserve” water, as you might need to do in a desert. In fact, for half of the year there is too much water. Half of the year it rains every day and the other half it doesn’t rain at all, so they have to manage water to make it available all year around. This land in its natural or semi-natural state is a very difficult place for to live. That is why it remained sparsely settled for so long. But with infrastructure and improvements, it is be very pleasant. I suppose it is like southern California or parts of the Mediterranean in that water way, except that here the water doesn’t need to be moved from a long way away, but rather has to be moved in time of availability.
Below is an arm of the man-made lake, Lake Paranoá. W/o this lake, life in Brasilia would be a lot harder. The lake supplies water for the city and electricity through its hydropower at the dam. So much standing water also changes the local climate, adding a little much needed humidity during the dry season. It still gets very dry, but near the lake it is less so. The lake also provides wildlife habitat in otherwise desolate seasons and it looks good, as you can see from the picture.
Twenty-five English language students from Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, Tocantins, and the Federal District came to Brasilia for a week of full time English immersion sponsored by the Casa Thomas Jefferson and the American Embassy in Brazil. Their kick-off event was an American style picnic at the home of the U.S. Marines. Here they ate typical American foods, like hamburgers and hot dogs, played basketball and volleyball, participated in contests such as sack races and generally got to know each other.Ambassador Thomas Shannon opened the program along with long-time Case Thomas Jefferson Director Anna Maria Assumpçaõ.
The American Embassy in Brazil has sponsored immersion courses like this since 2006 and hundreds of young Brazilians have enjoyed the benefits. This year five binational centers will participate, drawing participants from all the regions in Brazil. Besides the Casa Thomas Jefferson, ICBEU in Londrina, ALUMNI in Saõ Paulo, CCBEU in Belém and ABA in Recife will participate. The immersion programs are part of the now ten-year old youth Ambassadors program, which brings young Brazilians to the United States. On previous visits, they have toured the U.S. and met many Americans including First-Lady Michelle Obama. This year, for the first time, American students will come to Brazil on return visits.
In the pictures you can see the types of activities this year’s students experienced in Brasilia. We cannot take pictures of the learning taking place, the understanding being shared or the friends being made, but we are sure that these will be the best parts of the program.
The event was covered by a reporter from the Correio Braziliense and the local TV Globo affiliate.
The English immersion and the youth ambassadors programs are very competitive and require a high level of English-language ability going in. But they are all kids from Brazilian public schools and most are from interior small cities. It make you optimistic about the future to meet and talk to kids like this.
Lago Sul, where I live, is much nicer than the city of Brasilia. They say that the plan for Brasilia was a tribute to modernism. I think that says it all. The guy who is responsible for lots of the design is still alive. I think he is more than 100 years old. He defends his concept with vigor to this day, but he lives in Rio. In any case, the city is turning out better than he planned. Brazilian people are smarter than a few old planners.
But Lago Sul grew up more organically. It has sidewalks, trees, private houses & streets with corners. People prefer to live in places like this. Modernism is just not a human system. It reminds me of science fiction written in the 1950s and 1960s. They thought the future would be something like modernism, with a clear break from the past and a kind of rational collectivism. Fortunately, it didn’t happen. Of course, Lago Sul is not the inexpensive part of town, so there is no surprise it is pleasant.
The weather around here is perfect every day. I can well understand why it is easy to put things off. The old saying that “you have to make hay while the sun is shining” has no real meaning here.* In Virginia, I sometimes pushed myself out for a run on a nice day, anticipating a worsening of the weather later. In Brasilia I can be reasonably sure that tomorrow morning will be just like today. In a few months the rainy season will start. That means that we will get precipitation every day, but still very much predictable and while it will rain almost every day, it will not rain all day.
One of the great things about having a pleasant climate is the way people can mix outdoor and indoor space. Indoor space can extend out into the yard and if you have it covered against the rain and sun it can be essentially the same room, with what we might characterize as indoor furniture and activities. You cannot do this in Wisconsin because of the cold much of the years and the unpleasant humidity and/or legions of mosquitoes the rest. In Florida, they have the so-called “Florida rooms,” but they need to be screened in against the bugs and do not provide the real seamless interface. I saw some of the outdoor room concept in Arizona. It works there about half of the year, when it is not too hot. In Brasilia it is essentially a year-round option.
The picture that shows the straw roof is of a restaurant we went to for the going away party for one of the staff. It was a nice place with ostensibly indigenous food. It was good, but much of the charm came from the indoor, outdoor interface. If you ate “inside” you felt the influence of the outside and vice-versa.
I have to add a disclaimer, lest I annoy some colleagues. I like the Brasilia climate. I liked it last time I was here and I like it even more now. But my discussions with others indicate my opinion may not be universal. I am easy to please. I like most places. I even liked Iraq in many ways. You just had to get up early in the morning to enjoy it. People say, and I suppose they are right, that Brasilia suffers from an overly dry climate in the winter and an overly wet one in the summer. Some people can’t take it. They get asthma, nosebleeds & other respiratory troubles. I know that is true, but I cannot say I actually understand it at a personal level. It seems to me that you just have to adapt your activities to do most things in the early morning or evening, drink a lot of water and eat things like watermelon. It is not different from Arizona in that way, but I suppose the green surrounding create a deception. The dust and smoke can be annoying during the very dry-burning season. I don’t look forward to that, but it only lasts a few weeks. After that, we get rainbow season. Wait to see the pictures.
BTW -the picture of the beer cans just shows my task ahead of trying all Brazilian beers. It is a hard job, but somebody has to do it.
*It occurs to me that I have to explain that old saying to some readers. Making hay, means putting the hay up in bales. It is a job that must be done in sunny and dry weather because if the hay is wet it decays and the decaying process makes heat. Packed together closely enough in a barn, the heat can be enough to start a fire, spontaneous combustion. I don’t really know much about hay making. Chrissy used to do it on the farm, so most of my knowledge comes second hand from her, but I have seen piles of wet grass smolder. When you dig inside, the inner layers are black and hot. Hay is very tightly packed. I can well imagine that if you had enough of this packed together the inner core could get hot enough to burn. Anyway, the saying means that you have to do things when you have the opportunity and the time is right, not when you feel like it.
We hold the July 4th Celebration on various days because the Ambassador and others must attend various celebrations around the country. We held ours in Brasilia yesterday. I had nothing to do with the planning or implementation, so I think that I can say with some credibly that the planning and implementation were superb.
My future colleagues also prepared a poster exhibit showing photos from all the visits by American presidents to Brazil. Almost all the presidents of the twentieth century visited Brazil. The first was Theodore Roosevelt. He was no longer president at the time. He visited the Amazon rainforest (then called jungles) along with the Brazilian explorer and anthropologist Cândido Rondon, for whom the Brazilian state of Rondônia is named. Together the explored the “River of Doubt” now named the Rio Roosevelt, so both men contributed their names to the wild land. I didn’t know many people at the party. Next year I will. The most interesting discussion I had was with an old guy who had been an engineer in the construction of Brasilia, more than fifty years ago. It was really barren then and the big lake was just a marshy river. The old guy told me about the time when Eisenhower came to help inaugurate the new city and the U.S. Embassy here. That was also recorded on our poster show, but it was interesting to get the story from someone who could speak of it from living memory.
We had all sorts of interesting food, including little hamburgers, about the size of a silver dollar, and fries and little pepperoni pizzas. I stayed away from the booze (we are working at these things) and drank a lot of Guarana. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a sweet drink available mostly in Brazil. It is a precursor to some of the energy drinks. It is supposed to give you more vigor and I suppose it does, but no more than a Coca-Cola or a cup of coffee. It tastes good and kind of looks like beer in the twilight.
We had two bands playing. The first was a kind of rock band. The lead singer seemed to think he should channel Jethro Tull except with a harmonica; it was interesting, but not really my sort of music. We also had the Brazilian Marine Band. They played patriotic music, including the American & Brazilian national anthems as well as a lot of Sousa music. I liked this much better.
The Ambassador gave a good speech in Portuguese and English followed by recorded remarks by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. After that came the fireworks, while the Marine Band played the “Stars and Stripes Forever,” “The Thunderer” & “Semper Fideles”.
You can see the various pictures. They are very high resolution, since I didn’t shrink them because of the darker exposures. Click on them to look at the whole picture at a bigger size. I think they are very good and all taken with my little camera. Ain’t technology wonderful?
It was a great celebration. I am looking forward to the weekend when I can explore Brasilia a little more. Unfortunately, I have to wait for the technician to come and install my cable and Internet. I have a “window” of 12pm – 6pm on Saturday. It is a bit of a problem, but I will be really happy to have internet access at home.
I arrived in Brasilia after the overnight flight on American. I got to go through that new scanning machine. It really is not a good thing. I don’t mind if they see me in my natural form, but the machine is even more sensitive to stuff in your pockets. They gave me a hard time because I forgot to take my little notebook out of my back pocket. Maybe they should just install showers at the airport and make everybody do through them, as they used to do as municipal pools when I was a kid. I also found a note in my gear that they had opened my luggage and inspected it. I pity those guys. Everything in my luggage was reasonably clean, but it might have been a different story on a return trip.
The flight itself was not that uncomfortable because I got into the exit row, with a little more leg room, but discomfort is a matter of degrees when you are flying. The flight left Miami at 11:05 pm and arrived in Brasilia the next morning at 7:15 (losing one hour, since Brasilia in an hour ahead), so it almost exactly overlapped normal sleep time. I slept some, but not too much. But since today was a travel day, I didn’t have to go into work and had a chance to get some rest.
My house is nice with a big back yard. There are a few little good details. For example, some of the outlets are wired for 110, which means I could safely run American appliance. This is less crucial, since I currently to not have any American appliances, but it is nice to know it is there. The place comes with a microwave, but no dishwasher, which will be a bit of a problem. I am not fond of doing dishes and, besides, they are never as clean as the dishwasher makes them.
The neighborhood is very pleasant, as you can see from the pictures. All the things you see are within easy walking distance. It is also a safe area, since lots of important politicians live here about. We are protected by a guard both at the entrance to our area, which is also bounded in by Paranoá Lake, usually just called Lago Sul. I took most of the pictures as I walked along a running trail that literally goes right past my house down to the lake and back up the other side. It seems to be around two and a half kilometers round trip. This is less than I usually do, so I figure I can run to one end then turn around and do it backwards, this will get me to five kilometers, about three miles, which is good enough for the routine runs. I am not far from some larger parks, so there is ample room for longer runs.
The city is much as I remember it, although there are some very impressive new buildings and lots more cars. The cars are also much better. When we were here twenty-six years ago, there were lots of Volkswagen beetles, locally produced and called Fuscas. They seemed to have a propensity for flip over, much like a real-life beetle, and start on fire. It is good that they are gone. Biking may be a problem. Although there is not much traffic, the roads are narrow and built specifically to facilitate non-stop driving, so there are lots of ramps and turn around, and almost no left turns. These things make it hard for a bike. I saw some people riding and you can see there is a bike trail on the picture below. It doesn’t go everywhere and also notice the drive casually violating it. I will figure something out.
Brasilia was created for the car and still has not compromised very much with the fact that many people around here still do not have cars and others might prefer to walk sometimes. If you are on foot and want to cross the road, you have to wait by the roadside and then run across when there is a break in traffic. The city was designed in the 1950s, when architects and planners were still infected with that socialist planning paradox of flattening and specialization. Each area of the city was designed for a particular activity. There are residential areas, shopping areas, recreation areas, business areas, government areas etc. You are supposed to drive from one specialty areas to the other.
This kind of zoning was popular in the middle of the last century. We suffered from it in the U.S. too. It is the logic that gave us all those housing projects that became such problems. It makes some logical sense to concentrate activities, but it goes against human nature. Most of us do not compartmentalize our lives that way. As I wrote above, it as part of that early-middle 2oth Century belief in planning and perfecting human beings, even if they didn’t like it. Most people really don’t want to be “perfected” & fortunately, human nature has modified the plans, hence my running trail pushing through the residential area and restaurant/shopping that I can walk to, even if I have to make a run for it across the road.
Cities require some planning, otherwise chaos reigns. There are also many things that must be done in a city for the common good. If such things are not planned, they probably won’t get done. But a city is really a living human organism. Planners can and should set initial plans and condition, but after that a city will grow and develop in ways that no planner or group of planners can anticipate. The combined intelligence and information of the people living in the city will always be greater than that of the planners and administrators. I love history. I revere the past and seek to preserve much of its good. But the past is dead. We, the living, must decide which parts to keep and which to shed. We can revere the past w/o being in thrall to ideas and plans that were conceived when people, by necessity, didn’t know as much about what they called the future than what we know as the past. The best planners can do is help create conditions that allow people to make good decisions for themselves. Planners should do their work and then leave, maybe revel in the fact that the people have so much improved on the original design.
Well, I am finally here in Brazil, the country that some called the perpetual country of the future, but now seems to have created a good present. I look forward to exploring it.
The pictures are all from a walk I took this afternoon. This is my neighborhood, not bad. Everything is still green. As the dry season sets in, most of the natural places will dry out and turn brown. The weather will be monotonously pleasant, sunny with cool nights, warm days, lots of sunshine and no rain for the next couple of months. The cool, dry conditions are deceptive. We are still in the tropics and the sun is powerful. I was reminded of that today. Despite my floppy hat and a low dose sunscreen, I got a little burned walking about two and a half hours in the noon-day sun. I spend a lot of time outside in Virginia and I am moving from Virginia summer to what they call winter down here, but the sun is still stronger.
Above is what the place looks like absent improvements. This part of the country was mostly grass and scrub. The rainforests are farther north and the Atlantic forests were farther east. Those are termite mounds in the picture. I like the improved version better, the one you saw in the other pictures and below. I am not sure what kind of pines those are, but all true pines are introduced here from somewhere else. The lake, BTW, is also man made.
Brazil is becoming is an agricultural superpower and it is growing bigger all the time. I look forward to seeing the changes but until I get there I studying through the Brazilian media. I have been reading a lot about mechanization of Brazilian agriculture and the expansion of the agricultural frontier.
Some crops still need to be picked by hand and there is plenty of nasty, dirty work in the fields, but a lot less. For example, sugar cultivation & harvesting used to be one of the most difficult and sometime brutal parts of agriculture. The cane has sharp leaves that need to be burned off. There are snakes and lots of chances to get hurt or killed. (I read that plantation owners in the old South used to sometimes hire “free” labor, especially Irish immigrants, to do the dangerous work rather than risk slaves.) Those days are gone. Today most of cane is harvested mechanically. I saw the machines at work. They are like those big corn harvesters. The machines harvest and process the product, virtually eliminating the need for unskilled labor. On the other hand, it creates places for skilled labor and Brazil doesn’t have enough of it, according to press reports.
Brazilian government training programs, in cooperation with firms that make the new machines and chemicals such as Syngenta, John Deere e Case IH. The chemicals and seeds are complicated. The machines run with GPS and other electronics. The new techniques require more than just the ability to read and write.
An article read today about technologies in the farm field talked about all these things and pointed out the machines are getting bigger and bigger as farms in places like Mato Grosso are getting bigger and bigger. The new machines require much more sophisticated operators. Some even drive themselves using GPS. What the modern farm needs are workers who can plant the plantings & harvests and keep the machines running. These guys are a lot more likely to be or resemble technicians & scientists than they are like peasants of field workers of old.
Brazilian media reflects the ambiguous relationship that much of the world feels with China. China is now Brazil’s biggest trading partner. This has made a many Brazilians rich and the country as a whole richer. But China is after Brazil’s raw materials. The products it exports to Brazil are finished products, making the relationship look neocolonial. Chinese products are displacing Brazilian industrial products both at home and abroad. I wrote about the situation with shoes. Of course, agricultural products are raw material, but has that changed in the modern age?
An industrial product is intrinsically no better than primary product. The difference between industrial and primary production was really about value added and productivity. Countries wanted to move up value add & the productivity food chain to improve the quality of jobs. Farm labor was on the bottom in terms of skills and value. It was hard and dirty but easily learned, easily replaced and low paid. This was also the case with early industrial jobs. What changed was the introduction of technology, knowledge and capital, exactly what is now happening down on the farms. Modern farming is moving in that direction. Furthermore, it is riding on the MOST advanced technologies, including biotechnology and nanotechnologies.
There is an excellent chance that agriculture will be the high-tech industry of the next decades. The soybeans, other grain and fruit may be raw products, but the technologies that allow them to be produced in such quantities are hardly simple. Beyond that, the biotechnology aspects may soon mean the manufacture of chemicals, fuels and medicines by biological/agricultural ways. Now that is value added. Maybe the Chinese emphasize on essentially 19th Century machine manufacturing is the less intelligent bet.
Brazilian public schools are challenged. Denise Aguiar, director of the Bradesco Foundation, said that Brazil is essentially decades behind the United States, and who is happy with American schools? Finding qualified worker is one of the biggest challenges facing the country that has one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
The Brazilian media is full of stories about weaknesses in education and Brazilians are aware of the situation. Brazil is a big, diverse continental sized country, like the U.S. It cannot just copy the lessons of homogeneous boutique countries such as Finland, Singapore or South Korea. Like the U.S., Brazil has some excellent schools and many horrible ones. And as in the U.S., non-public schools seem to be one of the roads to improvement.
The Washington Post ran an article today about how Brazilian private firms and foundations are sponsoring schools. The article opens with a scene like one from the documentary “Waiting for Superman” with the parents of poor kids waiting in line to get into one of the private-charter style schools in an attempt to escape the ruined public system and get a better chance in life.
Education is important to a modern economy. Most people recognize this, but making it happen is a bigger problem. It clearly is not something government can handle alone. A response by the nation is required.
I have no feelings of accomplishment. I just feel uneasy. This always happens when I finish a big long-term task. For the last six months, I thought of little else but Portuguese. I never had to wonder what I should do. There was always something in Portuguese to read, watch or memorize. I carried my little book of Portuguese phrases to review whenever there was an extra minute. My thoughts were organized around Portuguese. People thought I was nuts, walking around & talking to myself, repeating phrases and strange words. I even did it while riding my bike. I dreamed about Portuguese. Now the voices have all gone silent. It is lonely. The same thing happened when I finished Polish or Norwegian. This too will pass, after a period of withdrawal.
Now I have to think of my own projects. Maybe I can finally read that biography of Hadrian that I bought a few months ago.
Brazil is the world leader in biofuels. The country started switching its cars from gasoline to ethanol nearly forty years ago. Most of the cars sold in Brazil today are “flex fuel” and when they say flex, they mean it, none of this E-85 stuff. Many Brazilian cars can run ENTIRELY on ethanol. Beyond that, Brazilian ethanol production is the most efficient in the world. They use sugar cane as a feedstock, with is several times more efficient than corn. Brazil has been hailed as the first large country with a sustainable biofuel system more or less in place. So what’s the problem?
Cheap oil, or shall we say more expensive sugar, is the challenge. A gallon of ethanol is only worth about 80% of a gallon of gas in terms of energy delivered. Put another way, you will only go about 80% as far on a tank of ethanol as you would on a tank of gasoline, so if/when the price of ethanol creeps up beyond 80% that of gasoline, a person with a flex-fuel car flex fuels over to gasoline, providing he/she can do simple math. This is happening in Brazil now.
In most Brazilian cities, a liter of ethanol currently costs around 85% as much as a liter of gasoline. People can do the math, and the consumption of gasoline has risen by 23% since February. link.
Brazil has everything it needs for a successful biofuel program. Most of its electricity comes from renewable hydro-power. It has the ideal biofuel crop in its sugar cane. The government favored and subsidized the biofuels industry. Brazil has a complete network of stations equipped to sell ethanol, along with a fleet of cars that run on ethanol and consumers with the habit of using it. It even has a uniformly warm climate, which makes a difference, since ethanol can gum up an engine when temperatures go down near freezing. But price still matters.
Analysts worry that it will get worse for the biofuel industry. The price of sugar is high on world markets and so it makes a lot more sense for Brazilian farmers to sell sugar for Frosted Flakes, Hershey bars or sweet tea than it does to turn it into fuel for cars. Beyond that, with the price of other agricultural products rising, maybe it makes more sense to plant soy or corn instead of cane. And if that was not enough, Brazil has recently discovered vast new oil reserves. Experts predict that there could be 80-110 billion barrels of oil in the so-called “pre-sal” deposits. This would give Brazil oil reserves about the size of Kuwait’s or Iraq’s. That’s a lot of oil. The Brazilians initially developed the ethanol program because they didn’t have enough oil of their own. How does this bonanza of the bubbling crude (black gold, Texas tea) affect the equation?
This demonstrates the fundamental weakness of all alternative fuels. Just when we think we reached “peak oil” we find we were just going up one of the foothills. We keep on finding new sources of oil and gas and fossil fuels stay cheap. I know it doesn’t seem like it just now, with gasoline prices hitting record levels (at least in nominal dollars) but the world is awash with fossil fuels. In the medium run (10-20 years), prices for gas and oil fuels will be relatively low (i.e. lower than alternatives) and alternative fuels will have a tough time competing.
The world should watch what happens in Brazil and take notes. For the past thirty years, we have had a laboratory for biofuels. The Brazilians have done everything advocates say should be done to encourage biofuels, as I mentioned above. And when the price of oil was high & the country did not have access to domestic oil supplies, we can called the program a success. What do we say if those conditions change?
My area studies today featured religion in Brazil. These are some notes and impressions.
Max Weber, one of the fathers of sociology, thought that religion would disappear and that Protestants would lead the way, since they embraced rationalism that would come to make religion redundant and expendable. Students of sociology and political science still study his ideas those they spawned & there are lots of good ideas. But embedded in the classic sociological system is the assumption, common in intellectual circles in at the turn of the last century, that religion was old-fashioned and in the future would atrophy. Max Weber died in 1920 from complications from the Spanish flu. Religion has shown no signs of dying out and among most dynamic and expanding types of religion are the charismatic protestant denominations. Maybe the reports of the death of religion have been exaggerated.
One of the most interesting places to watch the religious dynamic is Brazil. Brazil remains the world’s most populous Catholic country. This doesn’t surprise most people for a mostly Catholic country with a population of 190+ million. More surprising, perhaps, is that Brazil is also home to the world’s largest community of Pentecostal Christians. The numbers of protestants in Brazil is has been growing rapidly. A couple generations ago, there were almost no Protestants outside immigrant communities in the south. Today some surveys indicate that Protestants make up as much as 30% of the population and their numbers are growing rapidly.
The Protestants are also among the most active. As I mentioned above, Brazil has the world’s largest population of Pentecostals. They currently make up between 15-21% of the population, but they are very much involved in their religion. They attend church services in very large numbers and account for around 40% of all contributions to churches in Brazil.
Many of the new Protestants come from the poorer parts of society. The church gives them not only spiritual guidance, but also social benefits. The church provides social networks and encourages members to stop drinking, gambling and cheating on their spouses. All these things translate into generally better life outcomes on earth as, presumably, in heaven. Compared with others in similar social-economic circumstances, Brazilian evangelicals have higher incomes. Americans would recognize some of the methods Brazilian evangelicals use to reach potential converts and keep in touch with the flock. There are what we would recognize as mega-churches, but more often the secret of success is to be local and close to the customers, as illustrated above. The new churches know their communities and satisfy both their spiritual and social needs. Brazilian evangelicals were among the first to take advantage of television. One of the biggest denominations, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus) owns a television network, Rede Record. Brazilian evangelicals are having significant effects overseas, especially in Africa.
What marketers might call closeness to the customers is a big advantage that evangelicals have over the Catholic Church, which tends to be a little more distant. Catholic priests are also thin on the ground. There is only one priest for every 8600 Brazilians. With that kind of ratio, it is hard to get close and personal. This is exacerbated by the fact that many priests in Brazil are foreign born. Brazil doesn’t produce enough of its own. The Catholic Church is trying to counter the loss to the charismatic Protestant churches with its own version. The leader of this movement is a priest called Marcelo Rossi. Despite these efforts, the Protestant numbers continue to grow.
For now, it is the Protestant charismatics who are reaching the poor. They preach a personalized salvation, as opposed to the “liberation theology,” which was the largely unsuccessful attempt to reach the poor a generation ago. That does not mean that the Protestants stay out of politics, however. Leaders have learned to deploy their numbers as swing voters. In recent elections, they have supported the left leaning PT (Lula’s party) but not reliably (hence the swing vote status).
Those of us who graduated from secular-based programs in secular universities have a little trouble understanding the power of religion in motivating people. Our world view just doesn’t include the power of faith. We tend to look beyond the religion and seek secular explanation based in sociology or psychology. These factors probably have some validity, but maybe religion is a big part of some people’s lives because they really believe it is true. IMO, we need to respect that a little more than we do and treat beliefs as a goal in themselves, not merely a means to achieve some material goal.
BTW – I have sometimes used the term evangelicals. This does not mean exactly the same thing to Brazilians as it does to us. In its Portuguese version, it is more inclusive of all Protestants, but it is true that the fastest growing portions are those that might fit in well with our connotations.
