Popular Ideas across the Atlantic

This paper, from my recent book, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2008), as well as other research, will discuss the circulation of dissident, non-orthodox ideas in the Luso-Brazilian Atlantic, not among the university-educated but among common people. It will demonstrate that these ideas about Church doctrine, such as salvation and Eucharist, were found not only among Portuguese and foreigners living in Brazil, men like João Floriano, a Flemish senhor de Engenho in Bahia, and among New Christians who also lived in the sugar zones or on the West African coast, but also among individuals involved in transatlantic travel, men like Sebastião Damil e Sottomaior, a Rio de Janeiro-born fazenda administrator with Copernican ideas. Such ideas, sometimes defined as superstition and sometimes as heresy, indicated a willingness to accept alternate ways to reach or control the supernatural. I will argue that this reveals an openness to alternative beliefs, such as African or indigenous practices, and is thus a partial explanation of the extensive syncretism in Brazilian life even among whites. Many in this society, from a strong orthodox theological base, expressed a desire for “freedom of conscience,” which increasingly meant freedom to read and think what they wanted, despite restrictions imposed by crown and altar. By the 18th century, the idea of “freedom of conscience” was expanding from the religious to the political realm, stimulated by “French ideas” and by political events, but drawing on old dissident tradition as well. This was made clear by Inquisitorial cases and by the frustrated political movements of Minas (1788), Bahia (1798), and Rio de Janeiro (1801). Ultimately, the Inquisition was justified in seeing the relationship between the questioning of dogma and the emergence of radical political thought throughout the Atlantic world.