Religião e pós modernidade: as recentes alterações do campo religioso brasileiro

Abstract

Social changes have provoked alterations in the religious field in very different contexts, and consequently have transformed the man's way of being in the world and his experience with the sacred. Brazilian religious field has been suffering changes of all kinds, particularly in the last quarter of tlris century. Such changes comprises migrations of the Protestantism in the last century, which clearly modified the composition of Brazilian culture, turning out to be an important element in thris cultural mosaic of Iberian origin with dark traces of Afro-Amerindian culture, the insertion of Pentecostalism, religion of the "deserted", which reaches Brazil in 1910, changing significantly people's experience of the sacred and culminates in Neopentecostalism, as from the sixties, an offensive that transforms our religious way of living in a truly seduction for the sacred - a reenchantment of the world with detriment to the religion characterized by modern rationality. This work aims to understand the dynamics of the religious phenomenon from a pendular situation: between the disenchantment and the reenchantment of sacred in modem and postmodem societies, searching its survival strategies and adaptations to keep on orientating man's meaning of life. Neopentecostalism, as a part of the religious Brazilian field, is inserted in a changing context and has to face the ambivalence of sense, references and meanings; the dissolution of paradigms; the multiple trials for elaborating new elements that give meaning to life. What is important here is to study how groups of the New Religious Movements characterized by protestant orientation reconstruct their discourse and redirect their praxis in such context. ln brief, we intend to demonstrate how Brazilian religious field became dynamic in the face of the demands of representations and meanings caused by social changings occurred in the last half of this century in Brazilian society