Aliança Evangélica celebrates 100 years and says there are 400,000 protesters in Portugal | Religion
One hundred years after the creation of the Portuguese Evangelical Alliance (AEP), there are around 400,000 protesters in Portugal, numbers driven by the 25th of April and by immigrants from Brazil and Eastern Europe, the president revealed this Sunday to Lusa.
Speaking on the sidelines of the commemorations taking place in Porto, for the centenary of the association that brings together most of the protestant religions existing in Portugal, António Calaim took stock of a path “benefited whenever the country moved towards democracy”.
“100 years ago, Protestant evangelicals were few fortified, after the 25th of April they became more than a hundred thousand and today we can say, according to a survey carried out by Professor Alfredo Teixeira and Professor Helena Vilaça, in connection with Francisco Manuel dos Santos, who reveals that in the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon 5% of the population recognizes itself and identifies itself as evangelical”, summarized the also religious leader.
All in all, António Calaim estimates that, based on the survey carried out “four or five years ago, there are around 400,000 protesters”, numbers that are in force because “the results of the last censuses remain unknown”, he said.
Created in 1921, in a plenary general assembly, to “foster a better relationship and communion between different missionaries, pastors and workers who lived in Portugal and were of Protestant and Evangelical religion”, the AEP emerged in the “promising context” of the First Republic, he said.
“The First Republic ended with the prohibition, among others, that churches, houses of worship, synagogues, Jewish quarters could have a door to the street”, pointed out the person responsible for a journey that only regained expression after the Revolution of the Carnations.
According to António Calaim, in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, “some protestant missions were implanted which had some privileges of being able, through teaching, social action, providing some development in the tribes and peoples where they were missionaries”.
“When April 25th occurred, because there was also an evangelical Protestant population in those colonies, namely in Angola and Mozambique, there was a large group that returned to Portugal, thus contributing to a rejuvenation of the evangelical churches”, he continued.
The growth, however, did not stop there, since in the 1980s “with the immigration from Brazil and Eastern countries, some of them, Protestants, sought to join with other existing churches here”, generating a “new impulse” .
Even so, he defends, “the Protestant presence in society should not be seen by numbers, but by the living influence, of the reality of living evangelical lives, of people who intend to be an expression in this time of being little Christs”.
On abortion and euthanasia he reiterated: “In the so-called fracturing issues of our society, we evangelicals, like the Catholic Church and other religions, stand in defense of life. Therefore, we are together in this fight, but we do not place ourselves in a position and defense with the right to radicalism”.
And it is with the same serene posture that he speaks of allegations of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, starting by pointing out that “the evangelical church has a different posture in relation to the marriage of priests and pastors than the Catholic Church.”
“That this eventually causes there to be a lower percentage of hypotheses, credit that yes”, addition, before repudiating the phenomena of “addition and perversion” that exist in society and assured not wanting to find in their religious milieu and, in particular, “On the leaders of Protestant churches.”
