A trajetória do missionário presbiteriano Ashbel Green Simonton no Brasil Imperial e Católico: proselitismo tático, ideias políticas liberais e antiescravismo silencioso (1833-1867)

Abstract

This academic work discusses the trajectory of missionary Ashbel Green Simonton, founder of the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, who worked in a proselytizing way, using the press and education as means for the development of his religious project. We accomplished a bibliographical and documentary analysis with the intention of building its path in the “tropics” through tactical mechanisms, because this country had an official religion, with few rights guaranteed to Protestants. As a citizen, Simonton left traces of his liberal and conservative political actions, based on religion (Calvinist), which can be seen through his diary and copies of the newspaper he directed: Imprensa Evangelica. These documents favor a wide range of interpretative possibilities regarding the eyes of this foreigner in nineteenth-century Brazil, as well as his calculated actions intending to establishing the Presbyterian denomination. The understanding of Calvinist ethics and its relation to the world, an approach produced by Max Weber, and the concept of tactics, by Michel de Certeau, will contribute to the perception of the path taken by Simonton in the complex terrains of foreign and Protestant life in the second half of the Eight Hundred. We seek to understand and analyze Simonton’s world readings about the various subjects of “Tupiniquim” daily, from social, religious and legal organization, as well issues related to climate, geography and slavery. We aim to describe Simonton’s social place in the first chapter, to draft the religious context of the insertion of Protestantism in nineteenthcentury Brazil, as well as to discuss the means used by the missionary in the second chapter, to analyze his views on Rio de Janeiro and his liberal-conservative political ideas in the third chapter, and in the fourth chapter, to problematize his perspective on slavery in the United States and Brazil. Our hypothesis is that the missionary Simonton pursued as a major target of his passage through the tropics the dissemination of his Presbyterian faith and the establishment of this denomination, tactically safeguarding his political ideas that could cause obstacles to the realization of his religious intent, such his anti-slavery opinion, omitting them from public media and exposing in a particular way to intimate people and in you diary.