Stop Suffering! Economic Downturns and Pentecostal Upsurge

Abstract

This paper estimates the effects of economic downturns on the expansion of Pentecostal Evangelicalism in Brazil. Regions more exposed to economic distress experienced a persistent rise both in Pentecostal affiliation and in the vote share of candidates connected to Pentecostal churches in national legislative elections. Once elected, these politicians carried out an agenda with greater emphasis on issues that are sensitive to fundamental religious principles. We, therefore, find that recessions led to the rise of religious fundamentalism in tandem with the transfer of political capital to elected Pentecostal leaders.

Human capital affects religious identity: Causal evidence from Kenya

“…Recently, nonexperimental approaches have been employed to estimate the effects of economic conditions on conversions in Latin America. Costa, Marcantonio, and Rocha (2022) find that regions more exposed to negative economic shocks experience rise in Pentecostal church membership in Brazil, which is broadly in line with our observation that economic disadvantage makes Pentecostal churches more attractive among Christians. On the other hand, in an analysis using a regression discontinuity design in the allocation of cash subsidies in Ecuador greater income was found to be positively linked to church attendance and the likelihood of being a member of a Protestant Evangelical denomination rather than the Catholic Church (Buser 2015).…”

Failed Secular Revolutions: Religious Belief, Competition, and Extremism

“…Additionally, it has been shown across the world (and not just among Pentecostals) that negative economic shocks can increase religious intensity due to 'religious coping' (Binzel & Carvalho, 2017;Bentzen, 2019), where religion is a psychological mechanism used to overcome unexpected bad events. This response is precisely what Costa et al (2023) find contributed to the rapid rise of Pentecostalism in Brazil. They provide empirical evidence that economic downturns lead directly to conversions into Pentecostal churches by people who were previously affiliated with other (typically more mainstream) Christian denominations.…”

You'll never walk alone: Loneliness, religion, and politico‐economic transformation

“…Reverse engineering the current level of perceived relative deprivation to compare against the benchmark threshold related to protest behavior Polarization and radicalization are still considered by core economic research to be hard to characterize and predict (see Guriev & Papaioannou, 2022), although strong evidence for the utmost relevance of this link has already been provided by related disciplines (see Costa et al, 2022;De La O & Rodden, 2008;Pelizzo & Babones, 2007). The empirical task now is to quantify the micro magnitude of association between religion and life satisfaction and to use this to obtain a quantification for the social welfare benefit at the macro level from the religious institution.…”

“…Evidence from around the globe has accumulated, demonstrating that subversive religious beliefs are on the rise and this process coincides with the political polarization geography (see, e.g., Costa et al, 2022;Tubadji, 2022;Wrenn, 2019Wrenn, , 2021. This suggests that traditional religious institutions either lose part of the market for religious beliefs and this associates with political radicalization, or a new contingent of believers appears and chooses a new religious narrative rather than turning to the traditional one.…”