God is always on the lips of Brazilians, a people who live in a predominantly Christian country where culture and faith are intimately intertwined from the highest spheres of power to the everyday life of the common citizen , and in which religious life often fill the gaps left by the State.”
These are some of the factors that explain why Brazil stands out when it comes to spirituality: nearly nine out of ten Brazilians, for example, say they believe in God, according to the Global Religion 2023 survey conducted by the Ipsos institute.
The 89% belief in a higher power puts Brazil at the top of the ranking of 26 countries compiled by Ipsos, based on an online monitoring platform that collects information about the behavior of these populations.
Brazil is tied with South Africa, which also had 89%, and Colombia, with 86% – a statistical tie given the survey’s margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
Netherlands (40%), South Korea (33%), and Japan (19%) were the countries where the population believes in God or a higher power the least, according to the survey.
The Global Religion 2023 is based on data collected between January 20 and February 3, with 19,731 respondents, approximately one thousand of them in Brazil. There are no Islamic countries in the sample, although people who follow Islam were consulted.
Among the countries surveyed, Brazil scored 28 percentage points above the average belief in God, which was 61%.
“In Brazilian daily life, people talk about God all the time, it’s something common and normal, and it’s strange if someone reacts negatively to it,” says Ricardo Mariano, a sociologist of Religion and a professor at the University of São Paulo.
Mariano emphasizes that Brazil tends to stand out in international surveys on religiosity and faith because the belief in God and spirituality are deeply intertwined in our culture, even among those who have no commitment to any specific religion.
According to the Ipsos survey, 70% of Brazilians said they believe in God as described in religious scriptures such as the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, among others, and 19% believe in a higher power but not in God as described in religious texts.
Approximately 5% of Brazilians said they do not believe in God or a higher power, 4% said they do not know, and about 2% preferred not to respond.
“These data are in line with our history as a country where religion and religiosity have predominance in both culture and daily life, as well as in spheres of power,” says Helio Gastaldi, director of public opinion at Ipsos in Brazil.
Religious Life
But believing in God doesn’t necessarily mean being religious – and the Brazilian case demonstrates that well. While 89% of respondents in the country said they believe in God or a higher power, only 76% claimed to follow a religion.
The national index was again above the global average, which was 67% in this case, but well below the top-ranked countries: India (99%), Thailand (98%), and Malaysia (94%).
Among religious Brazilians, 70% said they were Christians (Catholics, Evangelicals, and other denominations), and 6% affiliated with other religions, while 22% said they did not have a religion, with 16% being atheists and 6% agnostics.
The Ipsos data shows that the difference in religious adherence between young Generation Z individuals (up to 23 years old) and the rest of the adult population is much greater among Catholics than among Evangelicals.
While 38% of adults declared themselves Catholics, only 23% of Generation Z youth claim to adhere to the religion – a difference of 15 points.
Among Evangelicals and other Christians, the overall index among adults is 29%, while among young people it is 26% – meaning that in addition to a smaller generational gap, there are already more young Evangelicals than young Catholics in Brazil today, according to the study.
The rate of those without religion in the Ipsos measurement was well above the 8% recorded in the last Census of 2010, which, in turn, detected an increase of 0.7 percentage points compared to the previous survey (7.3%).
“Although we know that the proportion of people without religion in Brazil has been increasing – Datafolha data from 2022 indicates 14% without religion among the general population, and 34% without religion among young people – the fact that the Ipsos survey was conducted online may slightly inflate this number, assuming that among the poorest, this proportion of those without religion is slightly lower,” says Gastaldi.
The belief in a higher power totals 89%.
Brazil is following, albeit timidly, a global trend of an increasing number of people who do not have a religion, says Mariano.
“We need to wait for the data from the 2022 census, but everything indicates that this number will have increased,” he says.
While in Brazil, belief in God surpasses religiosity, in countries like India and Thailand, which lead the ranking of religious populations, and also in countries where affiliation with a religion is a minority, such as South Korea (44%) and Japan (40%), the situation is reversed, and there are more religious people than those who believe in a higher power.
This happens because of the particular characteristics of faith in these places, according to experts.Religions like Buddhism and Shintoism – which are predominant in some of them – are non-theistic, meaning they do not have a concept of God or a higher power like in the so-called Abrahamic religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, explains Gastaldi.
Shintoism is a collection of Japanese spiritual traditions centered around the worship of nature and ancestors. Buddhism, on the other hand, works with the idea of individual spiritual enlightenment.
At the same time, Mariano explains that the concept of God fails to capture the beliefs of polytheistic religions (with multiple deities) such as Hinduism, which is the majority in India, and Afro-Brazilian religions.
However, Brazil has a high rate of belief in God and religiosity even when compared to other developing countries – and this is related to the country’s history.
“Religion has been a fundamental force in Brazil since the time of Portuguese colonization. Catholicism is the religion that was imposed on us by the Portuguese and it plays a central role in national identities,” says Nina Rosas, a sociology professor of religion at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Helio Gastaldi from Ipsos explains that the data from the 2023 survey is consistent with a well-studied phenomenon..Among secular countries, where religion is separated from the state and there is no official religion, religious life tends to be more important for the population in countries with lower per capita GDP (the wealth of a country relative to its population) or where there are high levels of inequality, Gastaldi points out.
“These are places where religion, in a way, fills the absence of the state. It provides perspective, solace, and sometimes even material assistance – but it can also be used as a form of manipulation and a tool of power,” says Gastaldi.
In the Ipsos survey, for example, 90% responded that believing in God or higher powers helps overcome crises such as illness, conflicts, and disasters. Catholicism has always functioned in Brazil as a kind of extension of the state, even after the proclamation of the Republic, says Rosas.
At the same time, there was strong persecution of other religions, explains the researcher – for example, the Penal Code of 1890 criminalized magic, spiritualism, and healing practices. There were remnants of this in the legislation until 1985, according to Rosas.
“So the spiritist religions, both spiritualism and African-based religions, had to adapt to these pressures by trying to fit into something that was considered legitimate,” says Rosas.
This led to the emergence of religious syncretism that goes beyond the boundaries of individual religions.
“Despite the oppression of colonization being intertwined with religion in Brazil, in the form of the imposed religion, the people somehow managed to separate God from the missionary and kept the figure of God,” says Fernando Altemeyer, professor in the Department of Religious Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).
Altemeyer also assesses that the high rate of belief in God found in the Ipsos survey is likely influenced by the immediate context of post-pandemic life in Brazil, which was particularly affected by COVID-19 and where the government was criticized for the lack of an adequate response to the problem.
“We had more than 700,000 deaths, two years of depression and suffering. And we know that after a major crisis, religious beliefs and spirituality increase, there’s an explosion,” he says. ” It was the same in Japan after World War II, after the atomic bomb, for example.”
The Power of Faith
Ricardo Mariano from USP explains that historically, movements that opposed the power or government of the period never had a character of combating religion or spirituality.
“We don’t have an Enlightenment tradition of ideological, anticlerical, and secular political movements,” he says. Secularization is the process of a society moving away from religion.
“Even the Brazilian middle class is not highly secularized,” says the researcher.
He points out that even left-wing movements did not oppose religion itself – for example, the PT, the largest left-wing party in the country, has its origins in the Catholicism of Liberation Theology, a Catholic current that advocates for the Church’s involvement in combating social inequality as a priority.
In Brazil, movements for the rights of groups that have historically suffered religious oppression – such as women and LGBT people – do not tend to be anti-religious, Mariano highlights.
Although certain movements oppose the influence of religious groups in Congress, says Mariano, the opposition is rarely related to the idea of religiosity itself.
“Even when the democratization of higher education advanced, it did not imply the absorption of a culture that opposes religious belief, there was no such confrontation,” says Mariano.
