A spiritual revolution is transforming the religious landscape of Latin America. Evangelical Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, has replaced Catholicism as the leading religion in thousands of barrios on the urban periphery. But in few Latin American nations have Protestants multiplied as rapidly as in Brazil. What accounts for this rise? Combining historical, political, and ethnographic research, R. Andrew Chestnut shows that the relationship between faith healing and illness in the conversion process is integral to the popularity of Pentecostalism among Brazil's poor. He augments his analysis of the economic and political factors with extensive interview material to capture his informants' conversion experience. In doing so, he presents both a historical framework for a broad understanding of Pentecostalism in Latin America and insight into the personal motivations and beliefs of the crentes themselves.

This study makes a distinctive contribution to the understanding of these Pentecostal congregations, their members, and their leaders. Although the focus of this study is Betim, Brazil, the dynamic it describes and analyzes is pertinent to similar groups condemned to poverty throughout Latin America.

An exciting and provocative book! Without sensationalizing, Chesnut brings us to an understanding of the spiritual and emotional profundity of conversion.

An engaging case study of one of the most successful Pentecostal bodies in Latin America. Importantly, it focuses on what most Latin American Pentecostals doùpersonal healing.

Professor Chesnut's succinct study should be required reading for all scholars of comparative religion, intellectual and social history, and Latin American culture. The fruit of an intensive field period of field research in the early 1990s...this volume manages in clear, unredundant, and highly readable style to synthesize the twentieth century history of four of the main Pentecostal denominations...of Brazil as well as exploring in depth the infrastructure and external politics of the largest of these denominations.