Women and Religion in Contemporary Brazil

chapter 24 Women and Religion in Contemporary Brazil

Kelly E. Hayes

Introduction

Although census data and sociological studies consistently indicate that Brazilian women participate in organized religions at a greater rate than men, we know surprisingly little about women’s religious lives in contemporary Brazil. With some notable exceptions, the scholarship on religion in Brazil has not focused on women as a specific class of religious practitioners nor has it included much systematic reflection on gender and the impact of gendered differences on religious practice (Souza 2004).1 This situation is not unique to Brazil, however: much of the scholarship on religion in general ignores gender as an important variable, a blind spot all the more notable since few social distinctions shape human behavior more than those that differentiate women from men, and few social institutions have the power of religion to sanctify such distinctions as part of the necessary order of the world. Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this chapter, scholars of religion have been slow to take what Randi Warne referred to as the “gender-critical turn” (Warne 2000).2 In Brazil, the influence of feminism in the 1980s and 1990s prompted several studies of Brazilian women’s involvement in the ecclesiastical base communities (comunidades eclesiais de base, henceforth cebs) associated with Catholic Liberation Theology, but much of this research is now several de- cades old.3 Other forms of Catholic practice in which women predominate, such as devotionalism, have not received comparable attention, despite a rela- tively sizeable literature on Catholicism in Brazil.4 Nor have women attracted

1 Judging by the number of journals, conferences, and research centers explicitly focused on gender and religion, this situation is changing rapidly. 2 For a discussion of the development of feminist and gender-sensitive analyses within the field of religious studies, see Warne (2001) and King (2004). 3 For example, Drogus (1997), Guider (1995), and van den Hoogen (1990). The bulk of the literature on the ceb movement produced in the 1980s and 1990s reflected the influence of Marxist social theory and was interested primarily in issues of class struggle, land reform, and political activism, not gender. 4 Women’s devotion to the Virgin Mary has attracted some attention but aside from Burdick (1998), I found little research that examines women’s devotions to popular saints.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi 10.1163/9789004322134_026 396 Hayes much interest among scholars studying the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, the only segment of Catholicism not currently on the wane in Bra- zil, and one in which women comprise up to 70% of participants (Pierucci and Prandi 2000: 631).5 One of the richest sources of data on Brazilian women’s religious lives is the literature on Candomblé and other Afro-Brazilian religions—traditions that, unlike the Catholic Church, recognize women’s sacerdotal authority. Since Ruth Landes first described Candomblé as a matriarchy in the 1940s, scholars studying Afro-Brazilian religions have attended more systematically to gender and the ways that religious beliefs and practices reinforce gendered differences (Landes 1994).6 The literature on evangelical Protestantism, whose recent and rapid expansion throughout Brazil and Latin America more gen- erally has attracted a great deal of academic attention, includes a number of detailed descriptions of women’s involvement in Evangelical, particularly Pentecostal, churches (Burdick 1993; Chesnut 1997; Chesnut 2003a; Chesnut 2003b; Machado 1996, 2005; Machado and Mariz 1997; Mariz 1994). Outside of these examples, however, we know little about women within the numerous other religious communities present in contemporary Brazil, like the many forms of Espiritismo, the ayahuasca traditions of Santo Daime, União do Vegetal, and Barquinho, the various Japanese-Brazilian religions, or the di- verse expressions of the so-called New Age movement. Apart from data gener- ated by the Brazilian census, which breaks down religious affiliation by gender, I found no general studies of women and religion in contemporary Brazil. And while recent sociological studies indicate that women switch their religious affiliation more than men, few scholars have looked at women’s religious participation comparatively or examined the dynamics of women’s religious behavior within Brazil’s ever-more pluralistic religious landscape.7

5 Although Pierucci and Prandi say that the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement ac- counts for only 4% of the Brazilian population, a 2006 survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that about half of Brazilian Catholics identified as Charis- matic (by which they included Catholics as well as Pentecostals) (Pew Forum 2006: 76). The only study that I found about women and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement is by Machado (1996). 6 Landes’s emphasis on the intersections of race, gender, and class in Candomblé went against the grain of the scholarship at the time, which focused on the African roots of Candomblé. For discussions of this fact and its consequences, see Carneiro (1964), Cole (1994; 1995; 2003), Corrêa (2000), Cunha (2000), Healey (1996; 1998), Landes (1986). 7 References to women who have switched their religious affiliation are scattered throughout the literature, but I found no comprehensive, countrywide studies of this phenomenon. A general discussion of religious change and movement among different religions based on