Home to more than 100 million faithful, Brazil has been called the world’s most Catholic nation. But in the upcoming presidential election, candidates are chasing evangelical voters the hardest. The country is preparing for the first round of its national elections on Oct. 4. Besides voting for president, Brazilians will also choose senators and governors, as well as state and federal representatives.

Catholics remain a broad majority in Brazil, even if not all are regular churchgoers. The country is still home to the world’s largest episcopal conference, comprising 281 dioceses and other ecclesial jurisdictions, as well as 498 Catholic bishops.

For decades, however, Brazil’s religious landscape has shown a steady trend: growth in the population identifying as evangelical—Protestant churches ranging from historical or traditional denominations to Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal ones. The number of those whom American sociologists would define as “nones” is also rising in Brazil.

A divide across church and political lines?

Brazilians have been divided in recent years between two charismatic leaders: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and former president Jair Bolsonaro. The 2026 presidential election includes 12 candidates, but so far only two candidates appear to have a chance of winning, according to polls, the incumbent Mr. Lula and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of his political adversary. If no ​candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote on Oct. 4, the two frontrunners advance to a runoff ⁠on ​Oct. 25.

Jair Bolsonaro remains a formidable presence within Brazil’s far right. Sentenced to 27 years in prison because of his role in an attempted coup, he was granted a medical release to house arrest in March. The elder Bolsonaro has been ruled ineligible to run for office until 2030 after being found culpable for abuses of power in 2023. He has delegated the mission to his eldest son.

Both “Lula” and “Flávio,” as they are known popularly, have made repeated gestures to evangelical voters during the election.

In an unusual move, Mr. Lula’s campaign distributed a pamphlet, “The Brazil that Cares for Families: Faith, Hope, Social Justice and Freedom,” which links policy proposals to biblical passages. The text speaks, for example, of life as a “gift from God,” citing John 10:10.

In another unexpected moment, First Lady Rosângela Lula da Silva, who goes by “Janja,” sang a Lula campaign song alongside popular evangelical gospel singer Kleber Lucas, surprising even her own husband: The couple is not evangelical.

On the other side, candidate Bolsonaro has appeared alongside evangelical leaders and stepped up his attendance at evangelical churches, services and events. He presents himself as evangelical, though religious rhetoric has not typically been a hallmark of his public life either.

In January 2026, already intending to run for president, he went on a trip to Israel and returned to the Jordan River to “renew his baptism,” a scene widely shared on social media.

The religious factor always weighs on Brazil’s elections. In the final week before the first round of voting, a controversy over Our Lady of Aparecida became the dominant topic of the campaign when a claim spread on social media that Flávio Bolsonaro, if elected president, would strip Mary of her title as “patron saint of Brazil.” A bill along similar lines was proposed in 2007 by a former representative, pastor Victório Galli, but there is no evidence this is part of Mr. Bolsonaro’s platform.

The presumed threat to the status of the nation’s patron nonetheless triggered a wave of anger among Catholics across the political spectrum that included attacks against evangelical leaders connected to the Bolsonaro family. Justices of Brazil’s Supreme Court were even drawn into the dispute, first ordering the “fake news” content be taken down, then reversing course and restoring it several times. Accused by Mr. Bolsonaro of planting the reports, the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil was forced to deny any role in the online campaign.

Whether this latest uproar over faith in Brazil’s political life will work to Mr. Lula’s advantage on Oct. 4 is unclear.

A growing evangelical presence

According to official data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics 2022 Census, 57 percent of Brazilians still identify as Catholic—more than 100 million people—while 27 percent say they are evangelical Protestant—about 47 million. Religious adherents can also be found among Spiritism, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous religions, and “Other,” a category that includes Judaism and Islam. Nine percent of Brazilians do not identify with any religion. Brazil’s current population tops 214 million.

“It is not unreasonable to say that at least one in three Brazilians is evangelical,” writes anthropologist Juliano Spyer in his recently published book O Brasil dos Evangélicos (The Brazil of Evangelicals). While Brazil is a “young force” in global Protestantism compared to the United States or Europe, it is founding new Christian branches and already sends many evangelical missionaries to other parts of the world, according to Dr. Spyer.

“There is no historical precedent for what is happening in Brazil: a country of continental dimensions changing religion spontaneously, without state interference,” Dr. Spyer writes. “Protestantism is about to overtake Catholicism in absolute numbers in the largest Catholic country in the world.”

Other observers of religion and politics in Brazil report that the nation’s growing evangelical community does not represent a homogeneous mass. The most visible evangelical leaders are middle- to upper-class men, but most Brazilians who identify as evangelical are women from lower income classes.

The most vocal and media-genic evangelical leaders present themselves as political conservatives, but that cannot be said of all evangelicals. Evangelical women are often drawn to the social policies proposed by left-wing parties while upholding traditional values usually championed by the right.

“This country has always been conservative,” says Ronaldo de Almeida, director of the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences and a researcher at the Laboratory for the Anthropology of Religion, both at the University of Campinas in São Paulo. “But over the last 10 or 15 years, Brazil has given way to a more extremist strain, a more violent, more exclusivist conservatism with an authoritarian dimension.”

While in the early 2000s most evangelicals voted for left-wing or center-left parties, the trend has reversed toward the right since the rise of Bolsonarismo in 2019. In this context, Dr. de Almeida says, evangelicals have moved from a minority position, one of “protecting their religiosity,” to the goal of “projecting their religiosity onto the rest of society,” including in politics.

“There is no such thing as the evangelical vote. There is a hegemonic force, or current, which has captured the term evangelical,” he adds. “Sometimes we make a direct association between this conservative evangelical group and evangelicals in general. Yet, among evangelicals, there is in fact a large political ‘center’ that is not radicalized.”

What the evangelical traditions have in common in Brazil is a strong emphasis on ethics and the moral dimensions of life in society, says Christina Vital, a professor in the Graduate Program in Sociology and coordinator of the Laboratory for Studies on Politics, Art and Religion at the Federal Fluminense University in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro state.

“All currents express themselves in parliamentary politics and in municipal and state executive branches,” she says. The dominant posture, in this sense, is morally conservative, defending values such as the traditional family and defined social roles for men and women.

“On the other hand, there is significant growth among progressive and left-leaning evangelicals on the political spectrum who call for new theologies and an ethical stance that diverges on many points,” Dr. Vital says. These groups tend to be more flexible regarding human sexuality and the use of alcohol.

“Today, we see the evangelical segment internally strained by a dispute over the legitimacy of evangelical identity,” she adds. “Some say that being far-right is incompatible with the Gospel; others believe that being truly evangelical means being [politically] conservative.”

Unlike many analysts on the subject, Dr. Vital does not believe evangelicals will come to form an absolute majority in Brazil—the share of people with no religion is also growing rapidly. In her view, evangelicals have a strong sense of community and mutual support in their churches. That, “along with their significant presence in social media and in building networks of trust and solidarity in favelas and peripheral urban areas, will contribute to establishing a diffuse Pentecostal culture in Brazil,” she says.

Francisco Borba Ribeiro Neto is a sociologist specializing in the relations between culture, religion and politics who currently edits the “Faith and Culture” and “Faith and Citizenship” supplements for the Catholic newspaper O São Paulo.

“In the second half of the 20th century, the Catholic Church struggled to respond to the hardships of the emerging lower-middle class in the peripheries of major cities,” Dr. Borba says. “These were people seeking a message of comfort and individual strengthening in the face of an extremely challenging reality.”

Evangelical communities, often organized in “cells” or prayer groups, responded to some of those needs. In Brazil, most evangelicals attend small churches, which often meet in garages or private homes and are led by one, usually married, pastor.

Among Catholics, the growth of evangelicalism is often viewed with suspicion. He believes the most relevant religious divide at the moment in Brazil is not between Catholic and evangelical but between conservative and non-conservative Christians.

“The conservative Christian can be Catholic or evangelical,” he says.

The fact that they are a demographic and cultural minority, says Dr. Borba, make evangelicals more “militant” and at times even aggressive in their political stances. In his view, however, there is widespread disillusionment with politicians across all religious groups.

“Brazil is already a country of religious pluralism, where evangelicals carry weight equal to that of Catholics, sometimes even greater,” Dr. Borba says. “People are tired of polarization, but they don’t know how to free themselves from it.”

Polls show that Mr. Lula and Mr. Bolsonaro remain in a dead heat should the election go to a second round, as is widely expected.

Filipe Domingues is a Brazilian journalist who reports on religion, environment and economics.