A desinstitucionalização religiosa nas igrejas diante da nova realidade nas igrejas pentecostais e neopentecostais brasileiras: novos caminhos de uma quarta onda do pentecostalismo

Abstract

The Brazilian religious scenario has suffered changes since the end of the 19th century when the historical protestant churches arrived in the country in the beginning of the 20th century with the start of the Pentecostal movement. The Pentecostal churches, in special, provoked the rupture of the Catholic Church’s monopoly in the religious scenario. It occurred a religious resignification with the awakening of emerging church leaders and the opening of new churches bringing innovations on liturgy, worship and preaching. It emerged a phenomenon called Neo-Pentecostalism. The new modus operandi contributed so that thousands of people started to attend the new format de culto, which was copied by the majority of the pentecostal churches and also a few Non-Pentecostal ones. The thesis resumes Paul Freston’s conception, also utilized by Ricardo Mariano and others, from which it is defined characteristically three big waves of Pentecostalism in Brazil in order to collect arguments to demonstrate, through various empiric material, primary and secondary, the existence of characteristics of a fourth wave of Pentecostalism that is being designed by this rising phenomenon of the “unchurched” or, more properly, of the religious deinstitutionalization among the Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal. The main purpose was to comprehend the causes of this movement. Specifically, it was sought to identify: i) the correlation between the liturgy practiced by Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal churches and the disengagement of people; ii) the main motives or reasons of rejection and of the disengagement of the members of these aforementioned churches; iii) the new expectancies of the “unchurched” after the deinstitutionalization. Theoretically, the research was based, mainly, on the works done by Freston (1994); Mariano (2004;2014); Romeiro (2005) on the approaches and comments about Neo-Pentecostalism; Berger (1985; 2017; 2017b) on the process of secularization matters; Hervieu-Léger (2015) comparing the secularization movement of the Brazilian and French churches; Souza and Martino (2004), and Teixeira and Menezes (2011) on the correlation of the religious sociology and social change; Matos (2011; 2017) on the history of the Brazilian protestant churches. Beyond these works, the approach taken by Bauman conceptualizing what he called liquid modernity, an expression he adopts to talk about the volatility of interpersonal and social relationships, in general, considering that this behavior has been one of the indicators of the deinstitutionalization process Bauman (2013), the papers published by Follmann (2006 and 2007) with clarifications about the change of religious behavior on many churches were of the most importance. It was also, and above all, required to be performed dozens of informais interviews with people at churches. Two semi-structured questionnaires were applied, one for the “unchurched”, obtaining 31 answers out of 45 (i.e., 69%), and another directed to pastors and leaders of the Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal churches, obtaining 17 answers out of 48 (i.e., 35, 4%). The research was able to draw a line of debate that is sufficient to maintain the hypothesis of a fourth wave of Pentecostalism in Brazil, characterized basically by the phenomenon of the increasing multiplication of “unchurched” people or the religious deinstitutionalization in the mid of the Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal. The study also takes up a character of applied sciences, in the degree that it sought to enter in interlocution with pastoral internal concerns present at churches.