The Battle Has Already Begun

This chapter provides a background on Catholic–Protestant relations in the Brazilian Northeast. It talks about how the Brazilian Northeast became famous as a place of economic backwardness, political feuds, crippling droughts, popular unrest, and, religious fanaticism following the publication of Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões in 1902. It also looks into da Cunha's account of the Brazilian military's confrontation and eventual destruction of the allegedly fanatical millenarian community of Canudos, which made regional and national elites continuously fearful of the violent potential of northeastern religiosity. The chapter suggests a new religious history of modern Latin America that puts religious pluralism at the center rather than at the margins of historical analysis. It seeks to understand the ways in which religious competition and conflict redefined traditional relationships between church and state, lay and clergy, popular and official religion, and local and national interests.

Saint, Fanatic, or Restorationist Hero?

This chapter pays special attention to Frei Damião de Bozzano, a Capuchin missionary who gained the status of a popular saint. It analyzes how Frei Damião was one of the principal agents of northeastern anti-Protestantism, as his fire and brimstone sermons urged Catholics to purify their towns of the Protestant scourge. It describes the ways Protestants sought to portray Frei Damião as a dangerous religious fanatic who was on the verge of provoking a millenarian uprising in the supposedly backward Northeast. Protestants hoped to provoke the condemnation and repression of Frei Damião by ecclesiastical and civil authorities. It argues that at the same time he was gaining a reputation for being a mystical and religious figure, Frei Damião was working hard to present himself as a modern anti-Protestant agent who was laboring on behalf of his ecclesiastical and civil superiors.