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We’re pleased to share this first report from Glenn McMahan, the first international correspondent for InsideWork®. Glenn has lived in Brazil for 12 years. He has lived in Londrina, a city in Southern Brazil, for the past seven years. In the days ahead, he will be reporting on business and work issues not only from the biblical perspective you expect from InsideWork®, but also from a Brazilian perspective. One of our goals at InsideWork® is to provide a global perspective on business, and Glenn is perfectly suited to help us! Glenn is also involved with a group of business colleagues translating and adapting our Scriptural Roots of Commerce series into Portuguese. This is a huge task with even greater potential. — Dan

Pope Bento XVI spent five days in Brazil recently, attracting throngs of receptive and enthusiastic Catholics. He encountered a religious landscape that is fervently religious, but far less Catholic than in the recent past.

According to a landmark survey of nearly 45,000 Brazilians from all economic classes and geographic regions, during 2006 and 2007, about 97% of all Brazilians believe in God. Only 2% were agnostics and only 1% declared themselves to be atheists. The survey showed that 64% of Brazilians are Catholics, a decline from 74% a decade ago.

The only religious sub-group that has grown in the past 10 years is the Pentecostal movement. About 17% of Brazilians today are Pentecostal, and 85% of those people are among the poorest in Brazil. By comparison, about 5 percent of Brazilians are mainstream evangelicals (Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc.), and there hasn’t been any significant growth among them in the past decade. About 7% of the Brazilians said they followed no specific religion.

Brazilians are notorious for mixing and blending ideas from all the philosophies and religious perspectives.

Unfortunately, the survey didn’t ask questions that would indicate what Brazilians believe about the nature and identity of God. To simply say “I believe in God” doesn’t mean much in Brazil. That’s because Brazilians are notorious for mixing and blending ideas from all the philosophies and religious perspectives. For example, more than 50% of Catholics here believe in reincarnation, an idea that comes from the strong Spiritist (like New Age) movement here. My experience, while not scientific, is that most people believe God is an “energy.”

What we really need to know from people is who they think God is and what they think God is like. Do they understand the essential Biblical message that salvation comes by grace through faith in Jesus?

The essence of the survey shows that Brazilians are extremely religious, but they tend to avoid devout commitment and they usually accept high levels of cross-pollination between diverse religions and philosophies.

The Absence of Faith Among Brazil’s Elite

One of the most striking results of the survey showed that the wealthiest and most educated people in Brazil tend to have the lowest levels of faith in God. This is important because this “elite” group of people leads the nation’s politics and commerce. Only 5% of Brazilians with a college degree and only one percent of those with a post-graduate degree believe in God.

Faith in God also plummets as wealth increases. Just 10% of those earning between $900 a month and $1700 a month believe in God. That number drops to four percent when income rises to between $1700 and $3500 per month. The percentage drops further to a mere 1% when people earn more than $3500 a month.

This “faith vacuum” among Brazil’s educated and wealthy leaders usually means that they have adopted moral relativism and materialism as a basis for life. Although we need more research on the subject, this relativistic world view has certainly contributed to the high levels of political corruption and economic difficulties in Brazil over the past four decades.

2 Reasons for the Faith Vacuum

There are at least 2 reasons for the low levels of faith in God among the Brazilian elite.

First is the human tendency to perceive wealth as a basis for self-reliance. This is an illusion, as Jesus pointed out to the wealthy young man in Matthew 19. The Bible never says that wealth is wrong, but neither is it sufficient for Man.

Another reason for the elite’s faith vacuum is that Brazilian universities, like their U.S. counterparts, are places where students receive heavy doses of naturalistic indoctrination. Many young people who were raised as Catholics and Protestants, often abandon their faith during the college years. Normally they are unprepared to respond to the intellectual challenges that professors levy on their students. (The same thing is happening in the U.S., so prepare your kids!)

True followers of Christ, living and working among the educated and wealthy Brazilians, often face tremendous pressures and risks as they attempt to live a Christ-like life in a corrupt environment. They are often alone in a very cruel game. We know several who have faced death threats for taking a stand against corruption. Standing alone is difficult, and they often feel impotent to make changes in a system that has little moral structure.