In recent years the rise of a relatively new brand of Pentecostalism has made religion a battlefield of political and cultural dispute in Brazil. This neo-Pentecostalism, as it is often described, is observed worldwide, but its effects in Brazil are of particular interest because this is a country otherwise noted for religious tolerance, for a history of multiple and multi-levelled symbolic and political exchanges between different religious traditions, Catholic, ‘African’ and indigenous, even though the Catholic Church has enjoyed a tacit but widely recognized cultural and political predominance.
