Thursday, November 2, 2017

Faith Behind Bars: Why Prison Pentacostalism Is Flourishing

To kick off his more general investigation of religion in Brazil’s prisons, Andrew Johnson spent two weeks living inside two different lockdown facilities. He slept in crowded cells with the inmates. He ate, played soccer, and conducted interviews, while observing and attending religious activities.
 

Pentecostalism Is Flourishing In Brazil's Prisons 

 

And he quickly narrowed his study to the primary faith expression that was pouring into the grim prisons from the outside community: Pentecostalism. It is flourishing within the hardest gang-populated units.

For the next several years, Johnson tracked the shape, history, and power of Pentecostalism as “the faith of the killable people.” In Rio, these are the urban poor, those with black and brown skin, those living in the swelling, improvised slum mazes known as favelas, where the narco-gangs have been an ongoing counter-state presence among a people long excluded from the benefits of official society.




See also: Christian Headline News at Elevate Christian Network