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.
