Descrição
This paper intends to present a panoramic and theological view of what has been written and
studied about the Sunday School, making the connection of its development in Brazil. That is,
regarding its strategic role in the consolidation of the Brazilian mission Protestantism, in the
middle of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, through the Sunday School
textbooks. In this sense, this research has as a general objective: To identify, demonstrate and
analyze the importance of the pedagogical process historically known as Sunday School that.
through songs, Bible reading and the practice of prayer, was adopted as one of the strategies of
implantation of Protestantism in Brazilian soil, in the mid-nineteenth century and early
twentieth century. It aims to demonstrate, by comparing them, the models implanted in
Brazilian soil, with classical models from the Anglo-Saxon world, seeking the explanations and
justifications of eventual adaptative changes to the social reality of the converts, in the
construction of a new habitus and the conquest of a new field, in the midst of a society where
popular Catholicism had reigned for centuries. The analysis of the bibliographical corpus of the
research allowed the rediscovery of certain textbooks that, based on the Bible, print the
perspective of the Protestantism of North-American missionary origin, notably the
Congregational and Baptist groups; the pedagogical bias of these textbooks reveals a new
confession of faith and religion that was emerging in Brazil during the above-mentioned period.
Furthermore, regarding the results: the missionary educational strategies of the North-American
Sunday Schools in Brazil cannot be dissociated from the North-American expansion project
itself: the "manifest destiny" of the mid 19th century. The Sunday Schools founded in Brazil at
that time were born linked to the missionary idealism of the Congregationals, Presbyterians and
Baptists for the evangelization of Brazil. We adopted as methodological procedures the
historical research of bibliographical character, electing as theoretical reference the authors
discussed in the field of Religion Sciences, among them, P. Bourdieu, A. G. Mendonça and P.
Garcez, also using the conceptualization of M. de Certeau, regarding the strategy.
