The recent religious book in Brazil: a reflection on the editorial strategies of spiritualists and evangelicals

Abstract

The religious book segment has had the biggest growth in Brazil’s editorial market. This article suggests a preliminary mapping of this phenomena, starting from the hypothesis that, both books and reading, when related to the religious universe, can’t be reduced into particular expressions of determined religious groups’ growth, neither can be leveled to a generic religious market – despite that, it presents certain questions and characteristics derived from the cultural and historical specificity of the object “book”. The religious editorial market expresses the growth of certain groups – like the pentecostals – and generic cultural tendencies of passages between doctrinary and denominational borders as well, where the degree of interdenominational change, expressed by market numbers and publishing companies’ titles is bigger than what is admited by the church leaders’ discourses. From the examination of kardecist and evangelic cases, the autonomy of the phenomena is inquired, and it is suggested that both the ideas of market as well as the ideas of culture must be combined in order to accomplish an interpretative model that is able to cover the phenomena.