Propagandists of the Book: Protestant Missions, Christian Literacy, and the Making of Brazilian Evangelicalism

The evolution and spread of Protestantism has been shaped largely by its focus on reading and interpreting the Bible. For evangelists in late-nineteenth-century Brazil, the promotion of literacy was key to spreading the gospel throughout the country, a fact that shaped the communities and cultures that grew up around the faith.

In this book, Pedro Feitoza explores the intricacies of the early history of Brazilian Protestantism through an analysis of the production and circulation of evangelical texts. He examines the experiences, aspirations, and ideas of key missionaries, ministers, schoolteachers, and booksellers, whose proselytism was dependent on the distribution of religious texts and who went to great means to support the publication and circulation of this work. Through the pages of such texts, evangelical ministers and writers projected themselves and their religious communities into the public debates of their era. This book uncovers how foreign missionaries and local religious experts navigated among multiple conceptual and ideological landscapes and transmitted Protestant ideas and theology to the Brazilian public, while simultaneously promoting their religious and socio-political arguments.

Considering an array of periodicals, tracts, books, missionary correspondence, conversion narratives, and autobiographies from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Feitoza evaluates both these texts’ ideas and ideologies and the practices that emerged in their wake. Propagandists of the Book provides a nuanced and comprehensive view of religious change during this time.

Pedro Feitoza is Lecturer in Latin American Christianity at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD in history at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge in 2019 and was awarded the World Christianities Essay Prize in 2018 and the Antonio Cândido Prize for Best Article in the Humanities by the Brazil section of the Latin American Studies Association in 2022.