"Destruindo as Trevas Espirituais, Morais e Intelectuais”: História, Mediação Cultural e Missionarismo Batista no Vale do Rio Tocantins (1925 – 1940)

Abstract

The purpose of this monograph is to return to the past by trying to weave a narrative made up of religious groups about the occupation of the Amazon region, in particular the implementation and consolidation of the Baptist denomination's evangelization plan for the Tocantins River Valley between 1925 and 1940. For this, we analyze the first two trips made by Baptist missionary Lewis Mallen Bratcher - Secretary of the Board of National Missions (JMN) of the Brazilian Baptist Convention (CBB) - to the Tocantins River Valley, undertaken between 1925 and 1933. These trips They were intended to explore the valleys of the Araguaia, São Francisco and Tocantins rivers, with the intention of delimiting the situation of the populations existing there and in order to define the parameters of action of the Baptist missionary movement in the interior of the country. We are also interested in the activities of the missionaries and teachers Beatriz Rodrigues da Silva and Lygia de Castro Martins in promoting, in this region, a cultural conformation of the indigenous and backcountry populations to a model of civilization defended by both these Protestants and the civilizing projects contained in positivist order of the first decades of the Republic. The impacts generated by Baptist missionaryism in the region and the development of the evangelization program formulated by the JMN for the Tocantins River Valley, from 1925, are part of the reflections offered in this study, which was anchored in theoretical and methodological contributions from Cultural History. and the History of Religions and approaches from Sociology and, mainly, from Anthropology. These perspectives were adopted because of the need to use the notions of religion and civilization without incurring the problems arising from the ethnocentric character of the Western value system, one of the warnings given by the Italian school of religious history.