“Searching diamonds for the crown of the master”: history, religious discourses and Baptist missionary in the Tocantins River Valley

Abstract

This article’s objective is to analyze the speeches produced by Lewis Mallen Bratcher, the National Missions Board, the Brazilian Baptist Convention, the results of a trip to the Amazon region in 1925 by the missionary to the Tocantins River Valley. Bratcher’s narrative on the region is analyzed in the theoretical perspective of Pierre Bourdieu on the religious field, according to the author, an abstract, eminently social space of production, reproduction, and consecration of arbitrary practices, associated to the Cultural History of Religions approach. In the words of the missionary, published in “O Jornal Batista”, one notices not only the evangelical religious worldview but the incorporation of conceptions of civilization in vogue during the first decades of the Republic in Brazil.