Abstract
This article outlines some routes of expansion of Brazilian Pentecostal churches into the Portuguese territory, analyzing the asymmetry in the number of denominations and believers among the Portuguese regions, defending the thesis that certain sociocultural conformations prove to be refractory to the implantation and limit the growth of Pentecostal churches. In this sense, rather than focus on transnational flows and strategies for religions born in Brazil to settle abroad, this paper discusses the challenges and the local resistance to these flows. For this analysis we used a double methodological resource: a quantitative one, namely data from the Portuguese census, and a qualitative one, focused on interviews and the analysis of texts from newspapers and magazines.
Keywords
Religious transnationalization; Pentecostalism in Portugal; Local cultures