The Washington Post has an interesting article about Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian animistic religion. Read about it after the jump. I predict that this religion will come to this country, not just among immigrants but also among the white middle class. Candomblé has a lot of what people want in religion–ecstatic experience, get-your-way health & prosperity promises–without too many moral demands.
One reason I think this religion could catch on here is the way this news story is so sympathetic to this primitive religion and so antagonistic to its Christian critics (who are also facing legal jeopardy from the Brazilian government for their “intolerance”).
From Dom Phillips, Afro-Brazilian religions struggle against Evangelical hostility – The Washington Post:
The religious ceremony had only just begun when Caroline Linhares unleashed a long, guttural roar, clearly audible over the drums and chanting. She had been “incorporated,” she said, by one of the deities being celebrated in this outlying Rio de Janeiro suburb one recent Saturday night, in a white house down a dirt road.
Linhares, 22, a security guard, came outside and sat in the yard: perspiring, shaken, yet cheerful. Then she rushed back inside.
“I don’t remember anything,” she said later. “It’s really something from another world.”
This is Candomblé, a Brazilian religion that developed from animist beliefs imported by African slaves. During four hours of singing, drumming and dancing, devotees screamed, grimaced or froze as they were incorporated by these deities, called Orixás. Associated with forces of nature, many are synchronized also with Catholic saints, so slaves could hoodwink their Catholic Portuguese masters and secretly keep worshiping them.
Candomblé is a Brazilian religion developed from animist beliefs, imported by African slaves. But the quasi-respectability gained in recent decades is now under attack from radical Evangelical Christians – a growing force in Catholic Brazil – who regard it as the devil’s work.
Candomblé survived centuries of slavery, but the quasi-respectability it has gained in recent decades is now under concentrated attack from radical Evangelical Christians, a growing force in Catholic Brazil, who regard it as the devil’s work and its priests and priestesses as little more than neighborhood witches.
[Keep reading. . .]
For details about Candomblé beliefs, go here.
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