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"The Bible tells us to go far and, well, that’s what we did."

Spirits were high as the double-decker Missionary chugged down the Negro River, carrying some 30 Brazilian evangelicals home after a weeklong expedition deep into the Amazon.

The missionaries said they aren’t only doing God’s work here—they are advancing the government’s, too. Every month, Brazilian and U.S. churches send hundreds of evangelical pastors, doctors and dentists upriver to provide health services to the poor, converting fishermen and indigenous people along the way.

Their ministrations are paying off.

Brazil’s first census in 12 years showed in June that the Amazon has the nation’s highest share of evangelical Christians, accelerating the country’s shift away from Catholicism. Over a quarter of Brazil’s 213 million people are evangelical, up from 9% three decades ago. A third of indigenous people have adopted this branch of Christianity, and evangelicals for the first time outnumber Catholics in Amazonian states such as Acre and Rondonia.

As the blue-and-white Missionary proceeded through the steamy forest, villagers crowded the river’s silty reddish banks. The lower deck, where missionaries sleep on hammocks at night and pray on plastic chairs by day, was transformed into a makeshift ward for some of the 100,000 or so patients the boat treats a year.

“We don’t just offer them medical care. We offer them Jesus,” said Germana Matheus, a dentist who runs the boat as part of Project Amazon, a campaign by Brazil’s Baptist churches to evangelize the forest’s nearly 30 million people.

In the most remote communities, where locals have little contact with Western medicine, she said even a painkiller can seem like a gift from God after months of toothache. “People are grateful for the simplest of things,” she said over a cacophony of gospel music and the drone of the boat’s engine.

The spiritual battle in the Amazon is also reshaping the world’s biggest rainforest, environmentalists and indigenous leaders say. Brazil’s evangelicals have forged alliances with right-wing agribusiness groups and landowners who have thwarted moves in Congress to protect the forest.

Missionary activity could accelerate the erasure of indigenous culture, threatening communities that environmentalists say safeguard the Amazon. Deforestation rates in indigenous lands are more than 80% lower than elsewhere in the Amazon, a 2024 study by U.K. and Brazilian...Continue Reading + Pictures

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