Some Brazilians, especially in the Catholic hierarchy, feared that the arrival of Protestant missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century would do harm to the dominant order. And indeed, as José Carlos Barbosa shows, the long-term goal of some of the North American missionaries was to diminish the importance of the Catholic Church and other traditional institutions by encouraging religious freedom and introducing modern forms of thought and association. However, there turned out to be very little danger to the Brazilian status quo. Protestants were few in number and their major practical concern was establishing themselves on a permanent footing. And when it came to one of the major institutions of the Brazilian Empire, slavery, the Protestants were either supportive or quiescent, even as more Brazilians turned against it.
Protestants who came to Brazil from the United States arrived from one of the other great American slave societies of the era and...
