Of Bibles and ballots

A T 4PM EVERY Sunday in Barra de Pojuca, a poor town in Bahia, the streets suddenly empty. You may think people are taking a siesta, until you spot the crowded churches. “For every sister in church there’s a brother in the bar,” jokes Cremilda, a member of the Assemblies of God, as she climbs to the cinderblock chapel. But in the 20 years since she helped build the church, more men are choosing Bibles over beers.

In 1970 only 5% of Brazilians were evangelical. Now a third are. The movement owes its growth to rapid urbanisation. Pastors arrived with little more than a Bible and preached in words people understood. Pentecostalism offered lively worship and solutions to earthly problems like poverty, alcohol abuse or domestic violence. A study of Brazilian men in 2014 found that Protestant faith was linked to a rise in earnings, especially among less educated black men. “Becoming evangelical isn’t only a bet on the supernatural, but a choice” for a better life, writes Juliano Spyer, an anthropologist, in a new book.

The largest subset of evangelicals are poor black women, a group Mr Bolsonaro has derided. Yet two-thirds of evangelicals voted for him, many on advice from their pastors. Evangelical churches once shied away from politics. Their representatives at Brazil’s constitutional convention in 1988 urged Catholics to...