New 2022 Census Data Show Brazil Is 87% Christian – 02/09/2026 – Brazil

The 2022 Census details, for the first time, Brazilians’ religious affiliation based on microdata released Monday (31). Among evangelicals, the largest subgroup is the “undetermined” category — people who described themselves generically as evangelical or believers without naming a specific church — accounting for 15.6% of the population aged 10 and over. Pentecostals account for 8.1% (14.3 million), while mission evangelicals, from historic Protestant traditions, account for 3.2% (5.6 million).

Catholicism remains the country’s largest religion, but its share has steadily declined: it accounted for 74.4% in 2000, 65.5% in 2010 and 57% in 2022, with 100.6 million followers. Adding other Christian denominations, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, the Christian total reaches 86.9% of the population.

People with no religion total 16.4 million, including 1% atheists and 0.5% agnostics — groups that tripled and increased sevenfold, respectively, between 2010 and 2022. Among African-origin religions, Umbanda leads with 0.8%, followed by Candomblé at 0.3%; together, they tripled in size over the period, while Spiritism fell from 2.2% to 1.8%.

Experts point out that a change in the 2022 Census methodology — which stopped instructing census takers to avoid generic answers such as “believer” — artificially inflated the “undetermined” category among evangelicals, masking the actual size of the Pentecostal group. Demographer José Eustáquio Alves, of IBGE, also cites the pandemic, budget cuts under the Bolsonaro administration, the coincidence with the polarized 2022 elections, and violence in areas dominated by drug traffickers and militias as factors that hampered data collection.

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