Sola Fide: Protestant Christianity Among Native Americans In Portuguese America

Evangelization was an important element for the strengthening of the States that sought to establish themselves in Portuguese America, whether Catholic or Protestant. The Indigenous people, who had already been presented to Christianity through the Catholic missions, since the arrival of the Portuguese people, were now facing a new religious configuration: Protestantism. This was the result of France and the Netherlands invasions - Protestant states – even after the colony had already constituted. Thus, this article aims to understand the rise and decline of the Protestant expansion based on the strategic role of religion in imposing the Colonizing State. In general, the Catholic or Protestant missions were associated with the metropolises and were all settled in indigenous territories, through religious cooptation and the understanding of language, as a form of communication, in order to establish a parity with the moral precepts and metropolitan consuetude’s and physical violence in order to exterminate even the most resilient indigenous people.