For the first time in Brazil’s history, evangelical Christians now account for more than a quarter of the population, according to new census figures released Friday.
In the 2022 data, published by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), evangelicals numbered 47.4 million people, or 26.9 percent of Brazilians aged 10 and over, up from 21.6 percent in 2010.
The evangelical figures include Pentecostals as well as all other Protestant groups; a denominational breakdown is expected in the coming months.
Meanwhile, the share of Brazil’s historically dominant Catholic population fell from 65.1 percent to 56.7 percent. Those who identified as having no religion increased from 7.9 percent to 9.3 percent. In two states, evangelicals outnumbered Catholics for the first time.
The momentum of evangelicals’ growth, however, is slowing. Between 2000 and 2010, the total number of evangelicals in Brazil rose from 26.2 million to 42.3 million, an increase of more than 16 million people. From 2010 to 2022, the increase was just over 5 million people.
Demographer José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a retired professor from the National School of Statistical Sciences, said the data doesn’t change trends but delays the moment when the number of evangelicals is expected to surpass the number of Catholics in the country.
In 2020, Alves published academic articles arguing that, based on trends shown in previous censuses, this overtaking could occur in 2032. “In that hypothesis, I was working with a trend of accelerated growth of evangelical churches and a sharp decline in the number of Catholics,” he said. Instead of accelerating, however, Protestantism grew at a slower pace.
As a result, the religious transition “will probably occur in the 2040s or even in the 2050s,” Alves said. In a revised version of his article, he puts 2049 as the possible date.
This deceleration was expected. Anthropologist Livan Chiroma, coordinator of Aliança LAB, the research and missional intelligence department of the Brazilian Evangelical Alliance, detected a cooling trend starting in 2018. By tracking data on evangelicals in public opinion polls, Aliança LAB found that polling institutes stopped betting on continuous growth during this period.
This timing coincides with the presidential election won by Jair Bolsonaro with heavy support from evangelical leaders. “Many believers seek a spiritual space in churches, not a political one,” Alves said. “When religious leaders adopt radical partisan positions, some members feel uncomfortable and even betrayed.”
As evangelical growth slowed, the proportion of people classified as religiously unaffiliated increased—up from 14.6 million in 2010 to 16.4 million in 2022. The nones—including atheists, agnostics, and those who declare no religious identity—account for 9.3 percent of Brazilians, the highest proportion in history.
The census also confirms the profile and the geography of Brazilian evangelicalism, which is predominantly female. Women make up 55.4 percent and men 44.6 percent—in the Brazilian population overall, 51.8 percent are women and 48.2 percent are men.
In general, evangelicals are less white than the national average—38 percent, compared to 44.3 percent—and more Black (12 percent, compared to 10.7 percent of Brazilians overall). Of the Indigenous population (only 1.4 million people), 32.2 percent identify as evangelical.
In another unprecedented shift, evangelicals outnumbered Catholics in two of Brazil’s 27 administrative regions: Acre and Rondônia, both located in the country’s northern Amazon region. In Acre, evangelicals made up 44.4 percent of the population, compared to 38.9 percent Catholics. In Rondônia, the numbers were closer—41.1 percent evangelical and 40.9 percent Catholic.
The growth of evangelical Christianity in the Amazon is a well-documented trend. As early as the 1991 census, when evangelicals made up just 9 percent of the national population, they already surpassed 20 percent in Rondônia. While missionary efforts in the region remain strong, scholars argue that demographic factors play a more decisive role in this expansion.
“We need to see the Amazon in less exotic terms,” said Chiroma. “Missiology tends to view the region through a lens of exoticism—river communities, Amerindians, the ‘noble savage,’ as sociologists put it. But while these groups are present, what’s often overlooked is the growing urbanization of the region, which is where much of this growth is happening.”
One example is Igreja Batista Bíblica Emanuel, a conservative Baptist congregation in the eastern outskirts of Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia. When the church was founded in 2000, the area was sparsely populated and mostly rural. Since then, Porto Velho’s population has grown by 38 percent, reaching 460,000. Rural plots have given way to makeshift housing and, later, to large-scale public housing developments, bringing with them the same urban challenges faced by other major cities.
Pastor Antônio de Souza, who leads the church, spoke to CT over the phone while police helicopters circled overhead, searching for suspects in the neighborhood’s dirt alleys. The previous Sunday, someone was shot on the empty lot next to the church. “There’s been an urban explosion in Porto Velho, with all the problems that brings,” he said.
In the midst of a population lacking security and care, churches fill a void. “We can evangelize in places where most people can’t even enter,” said Souza.
The country’s most populous region, the Southeast, is also the most religiously diverse. Catholics make up 52.2 percent, evangelicals 28 percent, the religiously unaffiliated 11 percent, and spiritists 2.7 percent.
In the South, 62.4 percent are Catholic, and 23.7 percent are evangelical. In 14 municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul state, though, the number of Catholics exceeds 95 percent. These are mostly small cities with a significant number of Italian and Polish immigrants who are Catholic.
In the Center-West—where the Brazilian capital, Brasília, is located—52.6 percent of residents are Catholic, and 31.4 percent are evangelical.
Brazil’s Northeast is the main stronghold of Catholicism and, consequently, the country’s least evangelical region. In the nine Northeastern states, 63.9 percent of the population identifies as Catholic and 22.5 percent as evangelical.
Piauí state has the lowest proportion of evangelicals at 15.6 percent. The percentage of Catholics is 77.4 percent, the highest in the country.
The lowest percentage of Catholics is in Roraima, in the country’s far north, at 37.9 percent. In that state, 34.3 percent are evangelical, and 16.9 percent are religiously unaffiliated—the highest number in the country.
