The title of this book is a misnomer. This work is actually a study of United States influence, specifically, that of Protestant missionaries and laymen in Brazil between the 1830s and the 1870s. Gueiros, a long-time resident of the United States and a Ph. D. from a United States university, first presented the work as his doctoral dissertation.
The book begins with two premises: (1) a test of the Brazilian bishops argument in the 1860s and 1870s that the United States was using Protestant missionaries as “vanguards of American imperialism”; and (2) a reexamination of whether there was a worldwide Masonic conspiracy to destroy Catholicism, a theme that was well explored by Sister Mary C. Thornton some three decades ago. On the first count, Gueiros found no factual bases to support the bishops’ contention; on the second, he found plenty.
Gueiros skillfully reviews various religious and philosophical ideas that haunted Brazil from late colonial times to the 1870s, ranging from Jansenism and Galicianism to protestantism and positivism. In an enlightening manner, he argues that it was the conflict between ultramontanism and liberalism—not the former and regalism—that precipitated the Brazilian religious question (p. 272). In the 1820s and 1830s, the state-builders, wary of the negative political and social consequences of Jansenism and Galicianism in Europe, took the precaution of imposing firmer control over the church. This state-over-church trend became a fact of life throughout the nineteenth century. Brazilian liberals, according to Gueiros, were more interested in their ideational devotion to progress and less so in religious philosophies. This notion of progress, especially material progress, united North American Protestant missionaries and Brazilian secular men of letters, power, and money into an informal alliance to oppose the ultramontanist church. The backwardness of Brazil, they reasoned, was attributable to Catholicism (p. 75); to overcome this, Brazil should welcome protestantism, along with other new progressive ideas.
James Cooley Fletcher was one of several influential missionaries who represented the era of Manifest Destiny, which produced a generation of New England Yankee patricians and commoners who devoted their lives to trotting the globe in search of heathens and markets. Educated at Exeter, Brown University, and Princeton Theological Seminary, Fletcher was a model missionary-imperialist of his time. Having served as a mariners’ chaplain in Rio in the early 1850s, Fletcher fell in love with Brazil. For his second tour of the country as an agent of the American Bible Society, he doubled as a salesman for various United States products by holding an industrial exposition in Rio. He saw no evil in mixing gospel with money so long as it could bring progress to Brazil. Fletcher soon left his mark on Brazilian affairs: he imported textbooks for use in the Dom Pedro II College, served as an intermediary in introducing the Lidgerwood coffee-processing machine, urged an English businessman to open coal mines in Rio Grande do Sul, and, finally, wrote unabashedly pro-Brazilian letters to New York newspapers during the Paraguayan War that provoked a diplomatic crisis in Asunción.
Such Brazilian liberals as Sinimbu, Almeida Rosa, Caetano Furquim de Almeida, and Tavares Bastos, among others, shared Fletcher’s view that Brazil needed material progress, that the strong grip of Catholicism on society should be broken, and that Protestant ideas and immigrants could bring progressive change to the country. Gueiros implies that the Brazilian elites’ acceptance of these views constituted the basis for the Brazilian reformation. All five of the country’s bishops were ultramontanists, either having been educated in Europe or having traveled there. The church’s three-and-a-half centuries of preeminence in Latin America was disintegrating in Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere on the continent. Brazil’s Catholic newspapers campaigned for the expulsion of Protestants, condemned the state for its failure to defend the official religion, and urged Brazilians to reject the prophets of false religion. The arrival of United States Confederate immigrants in São Paulo further fueled the divisive mood. Joaquim Nabuco, then a student at the São Paulo Law School, organized staged debates, complete with jeering crowds, to provoke Protestant missionaries into confessing that protestantism was false (pp. 258-259). By 1872, Dom Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira, the Bishop of Olinda and the champion of the ultramontanist church, declared war against liberalism and the Brazilian masons. Two years later, he was brought to Rio to stand trial. The rest of the story is well known and does not need to be repeated here.
Gueiros’s book expands our current understanding of the Protestant influence on Brazil and deserves a wide audience. His research was conducted on three continents, from the Vatican archives to the World Mission archives in Nashville to the Imperial Museum in Petrópolis. The book not only updates the subject, but it also brings new insight into imperial politics and into the intellectual history of Brazil. Its only drawback is that it still reads like a dissertation, and, in places, suffers from defective translation into Portuguese.
