THE BRAZILIAN EVANGELICAL CHURCH AND THE CHALLENGES OF THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Abstract

This article analyzes the challenges faced by the Brazilian Evangelical Church amid the cultural transformations of the contemporary world, marked by so-called liquid modernity. It is a theoretical study of a qualitative nature, developed through a bibliographic review of authors from the social sciences, philosophy, and theology. The study aims to understand how the evangelical religious field adapts to the processes of secularization, pluralization, and fragmentation of identities, examining, in particular, the insertion of neo-Pentecostalism into the logic of the market and of consumption. The discussion traverses the concepts of modernity, postmodernity, and secularization and relates them to the notion of the sacred and to the dimension of the numinous as a constitutive element of religious experience. The results indicate that the adoption of business strategies and of prosperity theology brings part of the evangelical churches closer to the immediatist demands of the consumer society, while at the same time threatening to empty the ethical and prophetic content of the Gospel. It is concluded that the true service of the church to contemporary society lies neither in isolating itself nor in submitting to market logics, but in embodying a community of hope committed to the transcendent and to the ethics of the Kingdom of God.