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revista ANTHROPOLÓGICAS
Ano 28, 35(2): 195-220, 2024
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
https://doi.org/10.51359/2525-5223.2024.265861
Might there Be an Inextricable Relationship Between
Economics and Religion in the Way Countries like in Brazil
Were Offered a Path to Modernization and Development?
Sidney M. Greenfielda
Abstract: Contributions to the study of economic develop-
ment and modernization in the second half of the twentieth
century included little on the role of religion. This paper
begins with a statement by the campus director of an Amer-
ican university development project in Brazil making what,
at the time, was a shocking statement: that no nation could
develop economically, lest their people become Protestant.
Six decades later Brazil has a modern economy and is well on
its way to becoming a Protestant nation. In addition, Protes-
tants, especially Pentecostals and other evangelicals, have an
influence in electoral politics supporting conservative candi-
dates and their policies far beyond their numbers. The paper
asks the question, was the statement by the campus director
of the development program in Brazil simply his conjecture
based on his personal beliefs, or might there be a relation-
ship between the economics and politics of modernity that
includes Protestantism as a functionally interdependent part?
Keywords: Brazil, Economic development, Modernization,
Religion, Evangelical protestantism.
Part I
Contributions to the study of economic development and mod-
ernization in the second half of the twentieth century included little
a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Professor Emeritus of Anthropology.
Email: sidneygreenfield@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0009-0003-9800-6522
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ANTHROPOLÓGICAS 35(2):195-220, 2024
on the role of religion. This paper begins with a statement by the
campus director of an American university development project in
Brazil making what, at the time, was a shocking statement: that no
nation could develop economically, lest their people become Protes-
tant. Six decades later Brazil has a modern economy and is well on
its way to becoming a Protestant nation. In addition, Protestants,
especially Pentecostals and other evangelicals, have an influence in
electoral politics supporting conservative candidates and their poli-
cies far beyond their numbers.
A Christmas party in Lafayette, Indiana
My first encounter with the interrelationship between Protestant-
ism, economics and politics was at a Christmas party in 1960. I had
recently returned after a summer in Brazil where I was collaborating
with a cooperative program between Purdue University, where I was
employed, and a rural university to bring the ‘land-grant’ philosophy
of teaching, research and extension to Brazil.
In Viçosa, a municipality in the state of Minas Gerais where the
host Brazilian university was located, I was surprised to find that the
project leaders, and many of the technical specialists in the Purdue
party were devoutly religious Protestants who openly expressed to
their Roman Catholic Brazilian colleagues and the people in the com-
munity their beliefs about both agricultural development and faith.
At the party a conversation with some of those involved in the
Brazil project that started with economic development surprisingly
turned to matters of faith. I found this strange because students of
development, at that time, rarely ventured into matters of religion. As
we were drawn deeper into the discussion, our host, the campus di-
rector of the program stated, with apparent total conviction, that “no
country could really develop unless its people became Protestant.”
Brazil, at the time, was the largest Roman Catholic country in the
world. It also was the home of a variety of African derived traditions
that had been syncretized with elements of Amerindian practices and
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Greenfield: Might there Be
‘folk’ or popular Catholicism. Kardecism and other smaller groups,
each of them with roughly as many followers as there were Protestants
in Brazil at the time. Was the Purdue University director of a devel-
opment project in Brazil simply expressing his personal convictions?
Or was he saying something about economic development of which I
was unaware? Could there be an intrinsic functional interrelationship
between the economic and political institutions of modernity, as they
were being brought to Brazil and other what at the time were called
under-developed nations that yet had not been examined by scholars?
Certainly, there had been critiques of a modernity and development
based on the model of the US, but I am unaware of it including con-
cerns about Protestantism replacing already existing religious belief
systems. I was familiar with Max Weber’s (1958) writings about the
relationship between Protestantism and the rise of Capitalism. That
book established the importance of Reformation thought, particularly
Calvinism, for understanding the development of modern economic
behavior. It was not, however, about the establishment of Protestant-
ism as an integral part of the economic development of underdevel-
oped nations. Here, in the second half of the twentieth century, I was
being told that in order for a nation to develop, which is to say to
adopt the economic and perhaps other social forms that characterized
the most ‘advanced’ industrialized, market-oriented, modern nations
the peoples of the so-called developing countries would have to be-
come Protestant.
I understood that economists and political scientists accepted
the evolutionary vision implicit in Enlightenment and the Nine-
teenth-Century view of progress that postulated societies across the
globe inevitably would modernize and develop in almost linear fashion
to eventually approximate the cultural and institutional forms of the
nations of Europe and North America1. This was the underlying prem-
ise of the development theory accepted by the US government – and
international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) –
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ANTHROPOLÓGICAS 35(2):195-220, 2024
and implemented in foreign policy by successive U.S. administrations.
Rostow (1960) invoked the concept of aerodynamics as it applied to
five successive stages in the flight of airplanes, and applied this im-
agery to the developmental process. Most mainstream economists to
this day assume, at least implicitly, that developing economies would
proceed in stages in a progressive direction (Sachs 2005). Political sci-
entists added that with modernization and economic development,
electoral democracies would emerge worldwide. These studies rarely
included discussions of religion; nor the premise that Protestantism
was as inevitable on the global scene as market capitalism and elector-
al democracy; but here was the director of a USAID supported project
in Brazil stating this clearly and without equivocation.
More than sixty years have passed since that evening in West La-
fayette. Since then, Brazil, including its agricultural sector, has devel-
oped economically to become one of the world’s largest economies.
Furthermore, after several decades of dictatorial rule, since 1985 it
has been an electoral democracy. In marked contrast with the situa-
tion when I first went to Brazil, nearly a third of its people are now
Protestant and overwhelmingly evangelicals. There are almost as many
Protestants in Brazil today as there were people in 1960. As Freston
(2001:11) noted several years ago, Brazil “has the largest evangelical
community, in absolute terms in the Third World (with the possible
exception of China) and the second largest in the world behind the
United States.” Like their North American counterparts, they are ac-
tively involved and eminently influential in electoral politics. In 2018
their campaigning and votes contributed, disproportionately to their
numbers, to electing Jair Bolsonaro president of Brazil. They voted for
him again in 2022 when he lost in an exceptionally close election and
continue to support him as he maneuvers to run in 2026.
Were the questionable words of the campus director of the Pur-
due-Rural University of Minas Gerais project a statement of personal
conviction, a premonition, a prediction, or a prophecy? Or was he
simply stating something that, although never made explicit in aca-
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Greenfield: Might there Be
demic discussions, or by the political leaders who made and imple-
mented American foreign policy based on it, that it was an inextrica-
ble part of the economic development strategies they were advancing?
Could there be an unexamined functional interdependence between
more than just the economic and political institutions of modernity,
but one that helps to explain the spread and surprising growth of
Protestantism, not just in Brazil but also across the globe? (Anderson
2013; Jenkins 2002).
Protestantism in Brazil
Portugal settled Brazil as a Roman Catholic colony and so it
remained with but transitory exceptions through independence and
the founding of the Republic in 1889; the constitution of 1891 es-
tablished the separation of church and state and the free exercise of
religious worship that continues, in theory at least, to be national
policy today.
Protestants entered the country in small numbers first from
Great Britain following their aiding the flight of the Portuguese royal
family to Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the nineteenth centu-
ry to escape Napoleon’s advancing armies. Two years after indepen-
dence in 1822, the emperor arranged for German Lutherans to settle
in the contested southern borderlands with Spain. Pastors, brought
from Europe, ministered to the recently settled Protestant subjects. In
1835 the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States sent its
first missionary to Rio de Janeiro, followed in 1850 by others from the
Southern Baptist Convention. White Protestant slave owning south-
ern Americans, fearing the loss of their way of life after the Civil War,
relocated to Brazil and petitioned their homeland for pastors.
Pentecostalism, the first and largest of the evangelical groups in
Brazil today, arrived differently. Unaffiliated missionaries came from
the United States to disseminate a revitalized form of Protestantism2
In 1906 William Joseph Seymour, an itinerant African American
pastor brought the revised vision of Christianity to a church in Los
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Angeles where he was invited to officiate (Anderson 2004: Chapter 2;
Dochuk 2019:115-16; Chesnut 1997:25). Seymour’s teaching derived
from an event in the Book of Acts “in which the Holy Spirit descended
on the apostles in tongues of fire, causing them to preach in languages
previously unknown to them” – a practice known as glossolalia. Sey-
mour claimed that the Holy Spirit would possess those who accepted
the faith during spiritual baptism (Chesnut 1997:176). Furthermore,
“as the prophet Joel had foretold, the gifts of healing, ecstasy, tongues,
and prophecy, enjoyed by the Primitive Church would be restored
to the people of God immediately before the Last Days” (Armstrong
2000:179). “All held the conviction that the second coming of Christ
was imminent and that a worldwide revival would usher it in” ‘(An-
derson 2013:16). Given this, it became incumbent on believers to “go
into the world,” as one member of the evangelical caucus in the Bra-
zilian congress stated, “and preach the Gospel so that all people know
the truth” (Duarte 2020:18); and that they should “‘occupy’ the earth
and spread the gospel before the Lord’s return” (Dochuk 2019:531).
Seymour further preached that Christians should read and love what
was written in the bible and accept it literally (Westmeier 2000:20).
In 1911 two Swedish immigrants, Gunnar Vingren and Dan-
iel Berg departed for Brazil from South Bend, Indiana, to fulfill the
prophecy they had received when they were baptized in the tradition
in Chicago. Landing in the city of Belém at the mouth of the Amazon
River, they attempted to work in harmony with a local Baptist pastor.
When their first convert spoke in tongues, after being baptized in the
Holy Spirit following an act of faith healing, a chain of events began
“that culminated in a church schism and the birth of what was to
become the Western Hemisphere’s largest Pentecostal denomination,
the Assembléia de Deus (the Assembly of God)” (Chesnut 1997:27).
A year before Vingren and Berg went to Belém, Luis Fran-
cescon, who had emigrated from Italy to the United States where he
converted to Pentecostalism, arrived in São Paulo to fulfill his own
prophecy. Invited to preach at a Presbyterian Church in a neigh-
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borhood of working-class Italian immigrants, he, too, was forced to
leave when his converts began to speak in tongues. Francescon es-
tablished his own church that he called the Congregação Christã (the
Christian Congregation).
The population of Brazil at the time Pentecostalism arrived was
about 17 million and located mostly in the interior of the nation.
Converts of the missionaries carried the new faith from the coastal
provincial capitals of Pará and São Paulo inland. From these inauspi-
cious beginnings, Pentecostalism spread slowly. By 1936, the Assem-
bléia de Deus (AD) and the Congregação Christã (CC), had more con-
verts than the other Protestant groups, although this represented but
a tiny fragment of Brazilian religious believers.
In the 1950s, as Brazil was beginning to develop its own indus-
tries and to urbanize, a second wave of Pentecostal missionary activity
came to the country, once again from the United States. It represent-
ed an expansion of the movement as mainline Protestant churches
and Roman Catholic believers took up aspects of the original Pente-
costal message. The term charismatic is used to refer to this more gen-
eral Christian movement. Meanwhile, modifications that aligned the
movement with business and political interests in the United States
(Poloma 1982:11-18) correlated with another missionary wave bring-
ing what is known as neo-Pentecostalism to Brazil.
In 1953, Harold Williams, a film actor turned missionary, who
was a disciple of Aimee Semple McPherson, brought the Four-Square
Gospel to Brazil. McPherson, who had integrated Hollywood show-
manship into evangelistic campaigns in both Canada and the United
States, had pioneered the use of radio and owned her own station.
With Raymond Boatright, another American actor turned preacher
belting out gospel hymns to rock rhythms on the electric guitar, Wil-
liams launched a National Evangelization Crusade in São Paulo using
the quintessentially North American tent revival. Opposition by lo-
cal Pentecostal leaders brought the crusade to a premature end, but
Williams founded the Igreja Cruzada (Crusade Church), which was
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reorganized the following year as the Igreja do Evangelho Quadran-
gular (The Evangelical Four-Square Church or IEQ), but this time,
under primarily Brazilian leadership. While acquiring few converts
until the 1970s, the IEQ provided a modern sheen to the Pentecos-
tal message for Brazilians. Collective faith healing sessions, of both
mind and body, that formed the core of Seymour and McPherson’s
ministries in the United States and were at the heart of Williams
and Boatright’s crusade, were the primary recruiting technique of
the IEQ (Chesnut 1997:35).
Brazil’s industrialization began in the 1960s when the federal
government orchestrated the creation of, and investment in modern
manufacturing, primarily to replace the nation’s dependence on im-
ported goods. Previously, the economy had been based on agriculture
and mining, which left Brazil as an exporter of raw materials and an
importer of consumer goods.3 The years following, with greater em-
phasis after the military coup of 1964, are referred to as the period of
development and modernization. Relying on the orientation provid-
ed by Washington, the military government, collaborating with North
America’s fight against communism, provided incentives to bring to-
gether capital from foreign and domestic sources to build factories
that were located primarily within the triangle formed by the cities
of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte. When the federal
government simultaneously reduced support for agriculture, workers
from the interior flocked to these cities.
This migration, in which rural inhabitants formerly marginal to
the market economy were adapting to and learning a new set of expec-
tations and behaviors, led to a proliferation of favelas (slums) growing
up at the margins of most Brazilian cities.4 This was followed by a con-
siderable increase in the national population and a shift from Brazil
being a rural nation to one that was overwhelmingly urban.
In 1940, for example, the national population was approximately
forty-one million with almost 87 percent living in the countryside. As
large numbers flocked into the cities the national population grew
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from 52 to more than 70 million between 1950 and 1960. By 1990
almost 80 percent of the nation’s 150 million people resided in met-
ropolitan centers (Santos 1993).
As the country industrialized, Pentecostals and other evangelicals
directed their proselytizing to the places where there were increasing
numbers of people who were having difficulty adjusting. There they
entered a vibrant – and at times bitter – competition, not only with
Roman Catholicism, but also with the syncretized Afro-Brazilian and
Spiritist groups.
Unlike the other religions, the Pentecostals became active po-
litically. In 1955, for example, Manoel de Mello, a charismatic lay
preacher from Pernambuco, left the Assembléia de Deus (AD) church to
join the National Evangelization Crusade in São Paulo. De Mello rose
quickly to national prominence by performing miraculous healings.
His great popularity quickly transcended the crusade, leading him to
establish his own church, Brasil para Cristo (BPC) (Read 1965:144-
145). On the model of the crusade, he and the BPC took the message
to rented stadiums, theaters, auditoriums and gymnasiums (Freston
1993:87). Mello started a radio program on which he sang hymns set
to the rhythms of the Northeast that proved to be very popular with
the many migrants from that region who were to relocate in São Paulo
in the years to follow.
Pentecostals, as Donald Curry (1967) observed in his study of a
community in the eastern highlands of Minas Gerais, and Chesnut
(1997) tells us for Belém, became active participants in Brazilian elec-
toral politics soon after they formed their own communities. Through
the period of the military dictatorship (1964 to 1985) they voted as
blocs, under the direction of their pastor, but mostly in local elections.
Consistent with the patron-client exchanges that permeated Brazilian
politics, the pastor offered the votes of his parishioners for material
favors from candidates for office. It was only after Brazil returned to
electoral democracy in 1985 that Protestants began to run for offices
themselves and elect their own at the national and local levels.
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By 1970 the number of evangelicals in Brazil had risen to 5.2
percent of the national population. A decade later it was up to 6.6
percent.
In 1977, Edir Macedo, a Brazilian lottery employee founded the
quintessential example of a Brazilian Pentecostal church. It also be-
came one of Brazil’s first multinational corporations. Macedo moved
to Rio de Janeiro from the interior of the state where he had partici-
pated in Umbanda, a syncretism of the Afro-Brazilian traditions and
Kardecism.5 After converting to Protestantism, he and some relatives
started the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (The Universal Church of
the Reign of God, or IURD).
Incorporating the beliefs shared by other Pentecostal churches,
Macedo moved in two different directions. First, he declared the Af-
ro-Brazilians, whose beliefs he had learned before switching to Pen-
tecostalism, to be his sworn enemies (Macedo 1990). He taught his
followers that they should participate in the exorcisms performed on
those who came to the IURD’s healing sessions. Before turning to
those seeking aid, the IURD pastor leading the services would “drive
the devils” out of those that had come for help.6 The devils referred
to the deities that were brought from the places where their ancestors
had been captured and who they continued to venerate. Once the
demons were driven out, those who felt that Jesus had helped them,
as the supernatural(s) of their previous faith had not, converted to a
new faith.
Macedo turned to radio and television to expand his following,
using funds donated by his followers. Unlike other Protestant groups,
Macedo established a centralized hierarchical administration into
which all collections were funneled. Only he and his closest associ-
ates – who served as a board of directors – had access to and control
over IURDs funds, as they had over the properties purchased in the
church’s name (Mariano 2004). In addition, this group selected pa-
rishioners to serve as missionaries to carry the message to other cities
and states with some being sent overseas to countries – including the
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United States – where they established branches of the IURD. To
reinforce the control of their centralized administration, local IURD
pastors were rotated and brought back to Rio periodically so the lead-
ership could better supervise their activities. Macedo’s managerial
group selected the candidates that were to run for public office under
the egis of the IURD.
In 1986 the church’s faithful elected their first federal deputy. In
the next election cycle in 1990 four federal deputies represented the
IURD with the number climbing to six in 1994, fourteen in 1998 and
twenty-two in 2002 when they elected their first federal senator – who
then ran for mayor of the city of Rio de Janeiro in 2004. This was in
addition to electing dozens of members of state assemblies and mem-
bers of city councils across the country (Mariano 2004).
The electoral success of the Workers Party (the Partido dos Tra-
balhadores, or PT) caused great consternation for the IURD and other
evangelical groups who saw them as the “devil incarnate.” They told
their followers that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the PT candidate elected
President in 2002, was going to close all evangelical churches and pass
laws prejudicial to them. This helped evangelical leaders to mobilize
their parishioners to go to the polls and elect their own candidates to
oppose the PT in congress and state assemblies.
This opposition intensified in the first and second decades of the
present century as the PT strove to help the traditionally marginalized
to become more active citizens and participants in the national soci-
ety. In addition to programs such as the bolsa família (family stipend)
that helped millions of Brazilians out of poverty, the PT supported the
liberalization of the concept of human rights to enable the LGBTQ
community to be open about their sexual and gender preferences.
The evangelicals, in reaction, viewed this as an assault on what for
them were ‘traditional family values.’ They took aim at the PT and the
LGBTQ community while also doubling down on their opposition to
abortion. Unable to elect a president – or state governors – on their
own, they sought to broker the votes of their growing numbers with
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ANTHROPOLÓGICAS 35(2):195-220, 2024
candidates running against the PT. In the meantime, they continued
to increase their representation in congress, state legislatures and mu-
nicipal councils.
Evangelicals also expanded their proselytizing to the growing pris-
on population. Brazilian jails always have been grossly overcrowded.
This was exacerbated with the arrests and convictions of members of
drug cartels against whom in many areas, the state has been engaged
in what approaches being a civil war.7 Their success resulted in large
numbers of the drug gang members and their leaders converting to
evangelical Protestantism.
When Brazil went into an economic downturn and rates of un-
and underemployment increased in the second half of the 2010s,
evangelicals were able to gain an advantage over their religious com-
petitors. As Robbins (2004:136) explains more generally, evangelical
“asceticism renders members trustworthy and reliable workers who
employers often seek out. By hiring [them] to fill lightly supervised
positions in the postfordist service economy, employers can, in effect,
outsource the task of work discipline to the churches.” Robbins con-
tinues that within the church the prosperity gospel provides a way for
members to improve their lot. It holds “that health and wealth are the
believer’s due and that illness and poverty are caused by sin and de-
monic influence.” Their mostly poor congregants, many of whom are
newcomers to the capitalist market system, are told that God wants
them to be rich and successful, but first they must accept Jesus, be bap-
tized, and seek his assistance by tithing and contributing donations as
much as possible until Jesus reciprocates. Should a believer not obtain
the hoped for results, the pastor will tell them to try harder, meaning
to increase the amount of money they give the church.
As we entered the third decade of the twenty first century Prot-
estants constituted an estimated thirty percent of the Brazilian pop-
ulation; and their numbers continue to grow. Evangelicals also have
broadened their offensive against other religions. Gangs of their
young, “the ‘soldiers of Jesus,’ and groups of drug traffickers who
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adopt the religion…” openly attack and close down Afro-Brazilian and
Spiritist religious centers threatening their priesthood with their lives
should they reopen (Cuadros 2020). According to IBGE, “by 2040
the number of evangelical faithful will outnumber Roman Catholics”
(Fleischer 2020:5).
In retrospect it appears that the seemingly audacious claim of the
head of the campus Purdue-Rural University of Minas Gerias project
is well on its way to becoming reality. Brazil has developed econom-
ically, modernized, and is well on its way to becoming a Protestant
nation. Was this just a lucky guess, the expression of a deep-seated per-
sonal belief being hopefully projected, or might there be something
about the modernity and development the United States government
and the institutions of the United Nations it dominated were offering
to Brazil and developing nations that included Protestantism as an
inextricable part? Or could it be, in the words Philip Jenkins (2002:2)
attributes to unidentified “radical writers” who “have seen Christian-
ity” – and specifically Protestantism – as “an ideological arm of West-
ern imperialism.”
Part II
A functionalist perspetive on the religion and
political economy of modernity
Anthropologists have long analyzed the functional relationships
between the various institutions that form the culture of a society.
The approach first was applied to the cultures of the small-scale soci-
eties. Looking out from the role of religion, and focusing on North
America, the source of Brazilian Protestantism, I turn to this next.
The religious beliefs and the practices that oriented and gave
meaning to the economics and politics of the United States were nev-
er included in discussions of what was being offered to developing
nations. Instead, as we have seen, the Protestant religions of North
America arrived separately. Moreover, they usually are studied on
their own by specialists who do not necessarily concern themselves
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with issues of economic development and the political organization
of society. I turn next to an analysis of the functional interrelatedness
of the institutions of the United States, starting with its religion as I
believe it will help to explain how Protestantism, market capitalism
and electoral politics grew so rapidly first in the United States and
then in Brazil and other parts of the world the United States helped
to develop and modernize.
Modern religion
First, however, a few words are necessary about the Protestant-
ism that emerged in Europe and was carried, first to North America
where it became intertwined with a political economy also of Europe-
an provenience, and then to Brazil and other parts of the world with
the push to modernize them. Protestantism emerged as a reaction
to a form of Christianity that had dominated life on the continent
since shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire. In contrast with this
Roman Catholic tradition in which the creator God was actively in-
volved in all aspects of his creation including the lives of humans, the
new Christianity placed the deity and his cast of supernatural helpers
in a separate domain of reality that was to be worshipped individually
in private. An opposition was recognized between the domain of hu-
mans to be understood by science, acted on rationally and by human
agency and that of the supernatural. A consequence of this was that
those who studied religion, the discipline whose subject was the world
of the supernatural and how humans related to it, scarcely followed
what those in the sciences were doing. The reverse also was true. This,
I suggest, may explain why advocates of modernization and develop-
ment rarely acknowledge a place for religion in their policy proposals.
If we look at modernity as a cultural whole, however, it will en-
able us to explore the interrelationship between its institutional parts.
In this way, religion, as one of its institutional parts, can be seen in a
different light. Or as Jenkins (2002:141) put it, we can reverse “our
Enlightenment-derived assumption that religion should be segregated
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Greenfield: Might there Be
into a separate sphere of life, distinct from everyday reality.” Religion
may be viewed and examined as part of a larger interrelated whole,
that of a distinctive cultural complex.8
To do this I turn to the social history of the United States drawing
on scholars who specialize in religion and examine the interrelation-
ship between its religion and economic arrangements. These studies,
as we shall see, clearly demonstrate, in the words of historian Kevin
Kruse (2015:8) that “Christianity and capitalism are inextricably in-
tertwined.”9
Chris Lehmann (2015) sets the historical and developmen-
tal analysis in motion by exploring the transformation that occurred
when the North American colonies were brought into the orbit of
Great Britain’s sprawling transatlantic commercial market system.10
The communal vision of the early Puritan settlers was soon rejected.
The First Great Awakening, in which ordinary people reacted to the
rules set out by the early elites, according to Lehmann, set this in mo-
tion. He draws, for example, on the words of the Reverend George
Whitefield who he sees not only as a leader of, but more importantly,
as exemplifying the spirit of the awakening. In place of the earlier im-
agery that “excoriated the communal pride and vanity associated with
the accumulation of personal wealth” the new view was
“a radically individualist idea of salvation, in which its divine
authors were patient, far-seeking investors, and anxious sinners
were errant credit risks who might, in a moment of miraculous
accord with the true financial order of things, be restored to the
‘blessed stock’ that had been humanity’s windfall at the moment
of creation”.
This return to Calvin’s imagery of individual salvation set Amer-
icans on a path in which their religious beliefs oriented them to
strive to compete as individuals in the market to accumulate mate-
rial wealth. Entrepreneurship and work, concepts of importance in
economics, provided the primary way for them to order their lives.
Members of the many sects that emerged as settlers spread out across
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the continent came to share the beliefs that were at the core of the
Awakening. They were committed to the then radical belief -- shared
by all of today’s evangelical fundamentalists -- of the imminent end
of the world when Christ would return as prophesized in the Book
of Revelation. The Old Testament told how God had created the
earth and all its creatures culminating with Homo sapiens. Since hu-
mans were special and created in God’s image, this was interpreted
to mean that all else was put there for the use of these special beings
(White Jr. 1967). In the Old Testament vision, the universe, the
earth and all on it began with the creation; there was no end point;
seemingly it would go on forever. Christianity’s sacred texts offered
a closing chapter but did not provide an end date. Fundamental-
ists, Jewish and Christian, debated with archeologists the date as
to when the world began. When it would end, when Christ would
return, was specified nowhere.
Most, referred to as postmillennialists, contended that for the
reign of Christ to begin, it would be necessary for humans to first
improve society as the savior would “take a dim view of disarrayed
social conditions and rampant injustice” (Lehmann 2015:65). This
interpretation gave rise to the development of America’s charitable
institutions.
Others, known as premillennialists, held that the great moment
of cosmic reckoning foretold in Revelation would be swift and would
occur suddenly (Dochuk 2019:97). Puny human efforts would be ir-
relevant. In either case, believers had to spread the word, tell others of
all faiths that the end of the world was at hand and that they had best
prepare for it by converting and being baptized in the only true faith.
Some, such as the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, saw in the First
Awakening evidence that “God was finally bringing the millennium
to pass” (Anderson 2015:62). Anderson sees in the later sermons of
Jonathan Mayhew the joining of the vision of a vast redeemed nation
with a divinely authored influx of commerce (ibid.). American Prot-
estantism then in its view of redemption provided the belief system
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that oriented individuals in the performance of productive and com-
mercial activities that, in turn, led to the economic growth and ma-
terial prosperity that would characterize the nation. These religious
beliefs, with their emphasis on competition with entrepreneurship
and work as keys to personal salvation, provided meaning to the
lives of Americans. The expansion of capitalist commerce and the
emphasis on economic growth, led some to see a growing secularism
as fewer people were frequenting houses of worship. Nevertheless,
religious imagery continued to provide meaning for those engaged
in economic matters.
Open confrontations with science, especially as academic knowl-
edge gained credence in public circles, resulted in religious fundamen-
talist’s strategically retreating from the public stage, notably following
just after the Scopes trial in the mid 1920s. Conservative evangelicals
emerged from this period of self-imposed exile with a firmer sense of
missionary purpose and a determination to revive what they took to
be the moral conscience of a nation that they felt was losing its way.
They weren’t anti-modern in that they continued to actively partic-
ipate in the capitalist market system striving to achieve its goals of
material accumulation. Nor did they completely eschew the desire for
participation in the public square (Anderson 2015:224).
The ravages of the Great Depression and the economic hardships
it ushered in for so many, especially those at the lower end of the
socio-economic stratification system, contributed to their staying on
the sidelines. Some viewed these events as signs that the end-times
had arrived. Others meanwhile sought to regain their position in the
public square.
In the 1940s and 1950s in southern California, for example, the
Reverend James W. Fifield Jr. and others who shared his thinking11
organized a socio-religions movement that was to re-conceptualize
Christianity and move it away from the Social Gospel that had em-
phasized public service to accentuate, once again, the salvation of the
individual. This “Christian libertarianism” that saw “Christianity and
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ANTHROPOLÓGICAS 35(2):195-220, 2024
capitalism as ever more inextricably intertwined” provided the ideo-
logical framework that was to serve the interests of American business
leaders seeking to reverse the New Deal policies of President Franklin
D. Roosevelt that they found to be restrictive of their unfettered en-
trepreneurial aspirations. Fifield and the others reached out to these
business leaders “assuring them that their worldly success was a sign of
God’s blessing.” He contacted thousands of pastors across the nation
who in turn preached his reinterpreted version of the gospel – that
taught that the Bible “needed to be sifted and interpreted” – to their
parishioners (Kruse 2015:3-15). This brought into being the coalition
in which evangelical Protestant ministers exhorted their parishioners to
go to the polls and vote for candidates that advocated the free-market
principles championed by business while pro-business candidates prom-
ised to support the social issues valued by the revitalized believers.12
Success was almost immediate. The coalition of religious funda-
mentalists and conservative businessmen helped convince military
hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run and then helped to elect
him president. This enabled the religious leaders to pressure the poli-
ticians to publicly affirm the relationship between the Protestant reli-
gion and the economic success or the nation.
In the years immediately following World War II the United
States was well on its way to returning to its origins as a nation who’s
economic and Protestant religious beliefs and daily practices were inti-
mately intertwined. As Lehmann (2015:xv-xvi) writes, Americans “are,
and always have been, crass worshippers of Mammon, eager to seize
on any available spiritual alibi to make the mythologies of American
success appear, not merely venerable, but sacred and foreordained.”
This was not, it should be emphasized, solely a response to the emer-
gence of the Soviet Union as a world power after the war. What the
Cold War made possible was the return of American Christianity to
the place it had held in public life prior to the economic crash of the
Great Depression. The Soviet Union provided an enemy the United
States could mobilize against. It could reach out to the peoples in
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Greenfield: Might there Be
the many nations that had recently gained their independence, for
example, to assist them in modernizing economically in a way that
included freedom to worship. The latter was in opposition to the neg-
ative attitude to all religion of its godless Marxist foe. In the hands
of economists who advised political leaders, the programs offered to
the new or developing nations were seemingly secular. No explicit
mention was made of the specific religious beliefs that underpinned
the American brand of capitalism being offered to them and their
functional interrelatedness as part of a larger cultural system. As so-
ciologist D. M. Lindsay (2007:208) writes in the concluding chapter
to his book on Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the
American Elite, “Evangelicals have spent the last thirty years building
and strengthening an array of organizations focused on transforming
the cultural mainstream.” Their “leaders have gained access to pow-
erful social institutions – the U.S. military, large corporations, and
many others – and because their religious identities are so important
to them, they have brought faith to bear on their leadership, changing
the very institutions they lead in the process.”
This acknowledgment of the role of religion as central to Amer-
ica’s material success blossomed at the end of the twentieth and first
quarter of the twenty-first centuries as a new generation of charismat-
ic evangelicals revitalized their belief system in a way that dovetailed
with the takeover of the Republican Party by Donald Trump and his
MAGA supporters. As Taylor (2024) tells it, this network of Chris-
tian leaders who refer to themselves as the New Apostolic Reformation
(NAR) has developed a revised theology built around politics and spir-
itual warfare that they have disseminated through a network of local
church leaders who turn out their followers in support of Trump and
the Republican candidates he endorses. “Engaged in a cosmic spiritu-
al war against the forces of darkness [read liberals, Democrats and any-
one not them], they believe God has mandated them to use spiritual
violence [that they do not object to becoming material] to defeat Satan
and build the kingdom of God on earth” (ibid:3). From the Unit-
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ANTHROPOLÓGICAS 35(2):195-220, 2024
ed States they again are spreading their message that now includes a
belief in world domination across the globe. This third wave of mes-
sianic Christianity has come to Brazil and been adopted by the evan-
gelicals there who support Jair Bolsonaro and his right-wing agenda.
Brazil’s evangelicals, going beyond the IURD’s focus on Afro-Spiritist
religions, now maintain that everyone who opposes Bolsonaro and his
extreme political vision are instruments of the devil who they must
defeat in God’s name. Whether they were involved in or provided a
theological justification for the reported coup attempt and planned
assassination of Lula and his vice-president after the 2022 election, is
presently unknown but consistent with the NAR’s contention, taken
from the book of Matthew (11:12), that “the violent take it by force’”
(Taylor 2024:11; see also Stewart 2025).
Modernization, Protestantism and Purdue University
In 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Butz Un-
der Secretary of Agriculture. Butz, at the time of this appointment,
was chair of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue
University. His immediate superior in Washington was Ezra Taft Ben-
son who simultaneously was a member of the Quorum of 12 Apostles
of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, the leadership group of the Mor-
mon church of which he later became president. Public Law 480, the
Food for Peace Program was instituted during their tenure. The Pur-
due University-Rural University of Minas Gerais collaborative project
was revived after being dormant for several years.
Butz returned to Purdue in 1957 to become Dean of the School
of Agriculture. Almost all the Americans that participated in the Bra-
zil program, including my host at the Christmas Party in 1960, were
associated with the Purdue University Department of Agricultural
Economics. Like his superior in Washington who was reprimanded
for supporting the then recently established John Birch Society, a rad-
ically conservative organization, word in West Lafayette was that at
least some of the people in the School of Agriculture were members
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Greenfield: Might there Be
of this organization that had a large footprint on campus and in town.
The Society publicly advocated both the economic philosophy that
was to develop into globalized neo-liberalism along with evangelical
Protestantism. Its motto, for example, as entered in the Congressional
Record, is: “Less government, more responsibility, and with God’s
help, a better world.” The head of Purdue’s project in Brazil prior to
taking the position had replaced Butz as Chair of the Department of
Agricultural Economics when Butz went to Washington.
Had I gone to church services when I was in Lafayette in the
company of my Purdue colleagues associated with the Brazil project,
I might have heard some of the pastors preach sermons emphasizing
the Christian libertarian message Reverend Fifield and his associates
were disseminating. Then I might not have been surprised when I
heard the comments made by the campus director of the Brazil proj-
ect. Like colleagues doing research elsewhere in the developing world,
I too had not examined my own culture sufficiently to understand
the functional interrelationship between American Protestantism and
our capitalist market economy. Had I heard it from pulpits, I might
not have been surprised by the comment by the campus director of
Purdue’s project in Brazil. I would have realized that what was being
offered to Brazil and other nations in the name of modernization and
economic development was a package of which evangelical Protestant-
ism was a functionally interrelated and inextricable part.
Summary and conclusion
This essay started with a comment made by the head of a joint
Brazilian American development project sixty years ago who emphat-
ically contended that no nation, referring specifically to Brazil, could
develop (by which he meant modernize and create a new means of
producing and distributing goods and services) unless they became
Protestant. In retrospect it appears he was right. Brazil now has one
of the largest economies on the planet and is well along the way to
becoming a Protestant nation. When economists and other social
216
ANTHROPOLÓGICAS 35(2):195-220, 2024
scientists at the time advocated an agenda that the United States
government and international agencies implemented, they made no
mention of a specific new religion being part of what they were offer-
ing. A reason for this, I proposed, is that in the worldview of what I
call the culture of modernity, each institutional domain is assigned to
specialists who pursue their investigations independent of the under-
standing and knowledge being accumulated by students in the other
domains. Hence the economists, and the governmental officials they
influenced, treated religion as a private matter that was studied by
its own specialists and unrelated to what they were doing. I have sug-
gested that the functionalist approach of anthropology, in which the
interrelatedness of the component parts of a culture are examined,
when applied to what I call the culture of modernity, shows that the
Protestant religion, in perhaps its more extreme forms, is inextricably
intertwined with market capitalism, which is the name used for the
economy of modernity. If perhaps we had thought at the time of mo-
dernity as a distinctive cultural form, as Marshall Sahlins (2023) has
recently done, and had applied a functionalist perspective to its anal-
ysis, the project director’s statement would not have been a surprise.
But it might have led the leaders of developing nations and their re-
ligious constituents to think twice about accepting what the mostly
well-intentioned economists and their governments were offering.
Notes:
1 Today these beliefs are seen as an intrinsic part of the colonialist project of the
nations of Europe and the United States.
2 Its message was “that believers could bring the forces of heaven to bear on the ma-
terial world to effect miraculous change …” (Blumhofer, cited in Dochuk 2019:115).
Moreover, the “personal ‘born again’ conversion experience that became the hall-
mark of evangelicalism stressed individual decision and was therefore in synch with
the individualism that characterized modernity…” (Anderson 2013:15).
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Greenfield: Might there Be
3 It should be noted that primarily the elite – the coffee planters and those in the
urban centers that were the ports from where the export items were shipped and
those imported arrived – participated in this market based economic transactions.
The agricultural workers, who at first were slaves and then sharecroppers and poorly
paid field laborers, and the residents of urban favelas or shantytowns, were marginal
to what is referred to as the national economy.
4 Local governments unfortunately did not provide the infrastructure needed by
the increasing number of people to reside there.
5 Kardecism is a philosophic and religious belief system based on the writings of a
French intellectual who wrote under the name of Allan Kardec that was carried to
Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century.
6 In Brazil it is not uncommon for people suffering physical, mental or spiritual
pain and anguish to seek help from other religions should they feel that the deities
of their own group had not adequately helped (“cured”) them (Greenfield 2016).
7 The US war on drugs made a little examined impact on the expansion of the drug
cartels into Brazil.
8 In contrast with Max Weber (1958) I am not seeking a causal relationship betwe-
en religion (Protestantism) and capitalism. Instead, I am examining the interrela-
tionship between institutions that are parts of a larger cultural whole. In this way we
can see how when the parts of the whole, its economics and politics, where foisted
on developing nations, Protestant religion came along as part of the package.
9 Individual members of what I am calling this culture of modernity with its capi-
talist market economy participate in it by competing with each other to gain greater
access to the material goods and services that it defines as value (Mazzucato 2018).
10 This was at the time that activist thinker John Locke (1632-1704) and others were
busily fashioning the modern economy (Greenfield 2014).
11 Including dairy farmer Demos Shakarian who is credited by some as one of the
founders of what is known as neo-Pentecostalism (Poloma 1982:13).
12 While there is no evidence I am aware of showing that Williams and/or Boatri-
ght, who brought Four Square Pentecostalism to Brazil in the early 1950s, had par-
ticipated in Fifield’s movement, or actually accepted its economic philosophy and
effort to implement it in collaboration with conservative businessmen through the
ballot box, it would have been difficult for them and others active in Christianity in
southern California at the time not to be exposed to it. They did urge their Brazi-
lian converts to become active in electoral politics and also to support conservative
candidates.
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Poderia Haver uma Relação Inextricável entre Economia e
Religião na Forma como Países como o Brasil Receberam um
Caminho para a Modernização e o Desenvolvimento?
Resumo: Contribuições para o estudo do desenvolvimento econômico e
modernização na segunda metade do século XX incluíram pouco sobre o
papel da religião. Este artigo começa com uma declaração do diretor do
campus de um projeto de desenvolvimento universitário americano no Bra-
sil, fazendo o que, na época, era uma declaração chocante: que nenhuma
nação poderia se desenvolver economicamente, a menos que seu povo se
tornasse protestante. Seis décadas depois, o Brasil tem uma economia mo-
derna e está a caminho de se tornar uma nação protestante. Além disso, os
protestantes, especialmente os pentecostais e outros evangélicos, têm uma
influência na política eleitoral apoiando candidatos conservadores e suas
políticas muito além de seus números. O artigo faz a pergunta: a declaração
do diretor do campus do programa de desenvolvimento no Brasil foi sim-
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ANTHROPOLÓGICAS 35(2):195-220, 2024
plesmente sua conjectura baseada em suas crenças pessoais, ou pode haver
uma relação entre a economia e a política da modernidade que inclui o
protestantismo como uma parte funcionalmente interdependente?
Palavras-chave: Brasil, Desenvolvimento econômico, Modernização, Reli-
gião, Evangélico, Protestantismo
Recebido: 10 de setembro 2024.
Aprovado: 29 de dezembro 2024.
Direitos autorais das pessoas autoras, 2025. Licenciado sob Licença Creative Commons
Atribuição 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0). Esta licença permite que outros distribuam,
remixem, adaptem e criem a partir do seu trabalho, mesmo para ns comerciais, desde
que lhe atribuam o devido crédito pela criação original.
Texto da Licença: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
