Power from on high : the political mobilization of Brazilian evangelical Protestantism

The resurgence of religion as a vehicle for mobilizing voters and influencing government policy has surprised those who assumed religion would become less important as nations modernized. This dissertation proposes a new explanation of religiously based political mobilization and tests the explanation with qualitative and quantitative data from Brazil. Religious behavior is shown to be the product of subjectively rational individual decisions constrained by organizational culture. The politicization of religion is shown to be a result of strategic decisions about how to maintain or expand the conditions and resources necessary to reproduce religion. Changes in social and political structure are shown to have a determinative effect on the decision to mobilize politically.