Minority religions include Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.
An interesting and significant fact attached to Roman Catholicism is that it was not only used as a form of control over the poverty-stricken masses of the country, but also later as a vehicle of liberation from these circumstances. The Church organized communities around the concept of militant liberation from the oppressive forces of government and class. However, these communities are diminishing rapidly, together with the decline of the Roman Catholic Church.
The greatest change in the religious demographic of Brazil is ascribed to the movement away from Roman Catholicism to the more charismatic forms of Christianity, and specifically to the Pentecostal churches. The reasons for this are both personal and collective. On a personal basis, Brazilians are experiencing a need for a more democratic form of religion than the rigid rules and regulations imposed by Roman Catholicism. Many are beginning to find the rigid Catholic view of issues such as birth control and abortion unacceptable and outdated. As a result, the faithful have begun to search for new ways to worship, and found these within Pentecostalism.
Collectively, those stricken by poverty have found Catholicism inadequate to provide in either their physical or spiritual needs. The type of worship offered by...
Furthermore, the Pentecostal church tends to be more in touch with the reality of society and its evolution since the eighteenth century. There is a greater general understanding of the circumstances in which people find themselves everyday. In this way, the Pentecostal religion offers not only respite, but also understanding and comfort in a way that Roman Catholicism, because if its rigidity, cannot.
Another interesting phenomenon in the country is that citizens often follow more than one religion, or a combination of religions. The reason for this is mostly demographic. Rural Roman Catholics for example make use of Spiritualist services such as spiritual healers. They do so as part of their culture, combined with the fact that any formal Roman Catholic gatherings are too remote to attend on a regular basis. Hence a type of hybrid religion evolves that includes both a type of Roman Catholicism and spiritualism.
With the current paradigm of religious freedom, citizens are free to choose their own spiritual paths. The combination of politics with religion remains evident in terms of political parties attempting to use religion to gain votes. In this way, religion has been and remains both a weapons of the weak, and an opiate for the masses.
