Religion in Gilberto Freyre — Syncretism and «Christocentric» civilization

Abstract

In this article, I seek to dialogue with the thesis of alternative modernity in Freyre’s work from a less explored dimension: the religious one. Using texts and excerpts explicitly problematizing religion’s role in Brazil’s social formation, I show how we can read this alternative modernity in the light of an «alternative religiosity». This text then explores the author’s intuition of the influence of the Orient in the forms of the social organization of colonial Brazil. It is argued that this should be understood as refracted by Christianity and that the latter assumes a fundamental role in the cultural production of hybridity. This combination has its ethical core, allowing us to understand the utopian sense of some of Freyre’s theses. A sense which cannot be dissociated from a very particular attempt at the «invention» of national identity.