How does religion shape and affect the lives of prisoners and other marginalized people in Brazil? Dr. Andrew Johnson, a research associate with the Center for Religion and Civil Culture at the University of Southern California, visits with us and details his amazing study of Pentecostalism in Brazilian prisons, a study that actually had him living as an â??inmateâ? in a Rio de Janeiro prison for several weeks. This study not only became the basis for his dissertation and subsequent publications, but is also part of a documentary film designed to take scholarship to a broader audience.
After a wee bit of banter about Super Bowl 50 and Andrewâ??s woes about the Minnesota Vikings, Prof. Johnson discusses how he came to study the role of religion in prisons. He recounts his time as a basketball coach for inner city youth and how some of the kids he knew ended up in the penal system. We then spend some time going over the religious landscape of Brazil, his primary country of study. Although the largest Catholic nation on Earth, Brazil has witnessed a significant increase in Protestantism in recent decades with a majority of those Protestants being of the Pentecostal faith. Andrew documents how Pentecostalism is a very appealing faith to individuals within the poor, marginalized neighborhoods of Brazilian cities known as favelas. These are also areas where criminal gangs run the neighborhoods, but interestingly these gangs have a very symbiotic relationship with the Pentecostal churches. It is this interesting relationship that then translates into prison, which is often a concentrated microcosm of life within the favelas.
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