Lutheranism in Brazil 1824-2024 - Settlers' Impact and the Struggle for Citizenship

Lutheran churches are a tiny minority in Latin America. They have emerged primarily through migration – especially in the Cono Sur, the southernmost part of the Americas with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay. The proposed paper focuses on the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil (IECLB), today the second largest nationally constituted historic Protestant church in Brazil with approximately 600,000 members. Local congregations first began to form in Nova Friburgo, near the imperial summer residence of Petrópolis in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro, and in São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul, both in 1824, and spread to other areas, especially Espírito Santo, northeast of Rio de Janeiro, through further migration and immigration. From 1886 onwards, the congregations joined together regionally to form synods, which in 1949 formed a Synodal Union, which finally became a national church in 1968. Of the four synods in the union, only one was decidedly Lutheran, the others were de facto United. However, a moderate Lutheran confession prevailed. Thus the confessional basis of the IELCB, as it has been called since 1954, is the Holy Scriptures, the early church confessions the Confessio Augustana invariata (!) and Luther's Small Catechism. In 1998, a reorganisation took place that divided the church into 18 synods. At the same time, a model of "shared ministry" was adopted, according to which pastors, deacons, catechists and missionaries, despite different emphases, are equally theologically trained, ordained and qualified to exercise congregational leadership, including preaching and administering the sacraments.

In Brazil, the immigration and settling of non-Catholics was made possible by the constitution of the independent empire (1824). Although it continued to regard the "Catholic religion" as the state religion, other religions were permitted, provided believers gathered in private houses. Immigrants, among them many Protestants, came mainly from Germany, but also from Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg and Russia, among them mainly Lutherans, but also United and Reformed Protestants. The Brazilian Empire was interested in settling white immigrant families especially in the lands that only relatively recently had come under its jurisdiction in the South (from 1750). Differently from the slave-intensive coffee, sugarcane and cotton plantation elsewhere in the country, a new model of family agriculture was introduced to stimulate procreation. Some immigrants replaced African slaves in the coffee plantations of São Paulo because the slave trade had already become too dangerous and expensive. After the revolutions of the Afro-Americans in Haiti (1804) and in the malês rebellion in Bahia (1807-10), Brazil feared a more widespread uprising of the Afro-Brazilian population, which already constituted the majority of Brazil's inhabitants. With the aim of "whitewashing" society, European settlers were therefore invited into the country. They also fought the present indigenous populations. The first congregations met mainly in the communitarian schools founded by the immigrants, whose teachers also performed pastoral tasks. This grassroots congregational model was soon transformed into a more clerical model by the arrival of pastors trained in Germany and sent out by missionary societies. The 19th century, until the full guarantee of religious freedom following the founding of the Republic in 1889, can be considered a time of struggle for the civil rights of immigrant families, as all documents on citizenship were monopolized by the Catholic priests, from Baptism to death. I call it the first phase of the Struggle for Citizenship. In largely homogeneous, rural communities with family subsistence farming, the immigrants cultivated their culture and language, for which the church provided the social framework, so that it was known early on as the "German church" or the "church of the Germans" – at times it is still called that way today. With expanding pan-Germanic tendencies of the German Empire constituted in 1871,  Brazilian congregations and synods became increasingly connected to the central church bodies in Germany. Not too few advocated that the "Protestant Church and Germanness must remain indissolubly linked".

The two world wars severely restricted contacts with Germany and even the public use of the German language in Brazil, so that the Lutheran churches were increasingly left on their own and also had to found their own college to train pastors, later also female pastors and other ministers. Thus, in 1946, the Escola de Teologia in São Leopoldo, now Faculdades EST, came into being. This phase heralded the second phase of the Struggle for Citizenship: the clear positioning of the Church as a Brazilian Church. The first General Council of the Synodal Union took place in São Leopoldo in 1950 and emphasised: "the Synodal Union is the Church of Jesus Christ in Brazil, with all the consequences that flow from this for the proclamation of the Gospel in this country and the co-responsibility for shaping the political, cultural and economic life of its people".

This was severely tested under the military regime (1964-85). Human rights violations, the ever more restricted freedom of religious education and an exaggerated expectation of patriotism were to form the central elements of the "Curitiba Manifesto", adopted at the General Council of the IECLB in October 1970. The IECLB now took a more frequent and increasingly critical stance on issues of democracy and civil rights, land reform, economic and social issues, human rights, violence and ecology, in what I call its third struggle for citizenship: standing up for others' rights. However, while the official stance became somewhat progressive, prejudice and even violence namely among land settlements  - after the military regime had strongly encouraged internal migration under the motto "land without people for people without land" where in fact there were people on the land - continue stronlgy among members, many of which are farmers.

The Bolsonaro government (2019-22) and what preceded it became again a test for the IECLB, creating (or bringing to the fore) a strong polarization between its theological and pastoral work towards social justice of most of its ministers and the moral conservatism of many of its members. The leadership took a more pastoral line, avoiding too direct positionings and renouncing extensive theological reflections. The consequences of the third Lula administration which has just started are still to be seen.