Intergenerational religious mobility in Brazil

According to the Brazilian Census, the proportion of self-declared Catholics decreased by 22 percent, while the share of Protestants increased six times and the share of people without religion increased 37 times between 1940 and 2000. From a generational point of view, however, there is little evidence in Brazil about the patterns of reproduction, maintenance and change in religious affiliation. This article uses original data from the Pesquisa Valores e Religião no Brasil (PVRB), conducted in 2002, to investigate the patterns of intergenerational religious mobility of Catholics, Pentecostal Protestants, non-Pentecostal Protestants, and people without religion. We estimate confidence intervals for the probabilities of belonging to each of those categories using Monte Carlo simulations and taking into account parents’ religion, their frequency of religious practice, their attendance to religious ceremonies and other relevant individual demographic characteristics such as sex, age, race and geographic location. Our findings show that even though the share of Catholics has declined over time, this group still has the highest rate of intergenerational transmission since 82 percent of the Catholics have the same religion of their parents. We also show that Pentecostals have a rate of intergenerational religious transmission of 66 percent, while the probability of not having any religion is statistically independent of the parents’ religion.