O cristianismo protestante na cidade de Paulo Afonso - Bahia, de 1948 a 1964

Abstract

The renewal movement of Protestant Christianity, which has a missionary inclination, reached the municipality of Paulo Afonso on the construction site of CHESF in 1948. As part of the implementation of economic policies for the development of the Northeast in the time of President Getúlio Vargas and the engineer Apolônio José Sales of the Ministry of Agriculture (1945) was planned the construction of the Hydroelectric Plant. From the works begun, Paulo Afonso "came into existence" and in 1948 under the chairmanship of Eurico Gaspar Dutra CHESF was inaugurated. The purpose of the text is to examine Protestant Christian groups in the region of Paulo Afonso at the beginning of the construction of CHESF. Guided by the assumptions of Cultural History, specifically defended by Roger Chartier (1988), we seek to identify the "ways of life" of religious groups; their "systems of normative values," their "reality narratives," which, in this reflection, constrain the religious individual to the quest and practice of life that ranges from the monastic isolationism of conservative fundamentalist theology and the "profane worldliness" of a liberal theology. In order to do this, we have compiled the specialized bibliography with the memoirs of pioneers registered in magazines, books of Acts of the churches and annual reports of CHESF, in order to understand the identity and nature of the church as well as the reasons for its installation in Paulo Afonso between 1948 and 1964 This period was marked by the perseverance of believers in founding Protestant churches in the region.