The Global Rise of Narco-Pentecostalism

When Brazilian authorities raided the home of Alvaro Malaquias Santa Rosa in 2021, what they found wasn’t your typical drug kingpin’s lair. Surrounding the sizable swimming pool was a large fresco depicting the old city of Jerusalem, complete with armed forces carrying a Star of David flag — and all under a banner with the words “Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

Then again, the man better known as Peixao, which translates to Big Fish, is few people’s vision of your typical cocaine trafficker. Reportedly an ordained evangelical pastor, Peixao headed a gang variously known as Army of the Living God, Aaron’s Troop or Bonde da Kabbalah, and it controls a cluster of five favelas — the slums that ring Brazil’s major cities — known as “Complexo de Israel” in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro, home to some 134,000 people.

After the gang violently swept into the area in 2016, a heart symbol and “peace” were reportedly painted on barriers showing the gang’s new, expanded boundaries. Since Peixao took over, the spotless streets, security taxes and strongly enforced order have become a feature of the Complexo de Israel, along with Star of David symbols etched on buildings — one of which can be seen all the way downtown in ritzy Avenida Brasil, Rio’s main thoroughfare — while verses from the Psalms are painted on prominent buildings.

If it wasn’t clear enough that there was a new sheriff in town, police alleged that in the process of consolidating his stronghold, Peixao executed eight members of the community who resisted his authority, then ordered the killing of two local drug dealers, sending their bodies to their gang in gift-wrapped boxes.

Peixao is part of a growing band of “narco-evangelists” — organized criminals with a strong religious motive who have become a bug, if not a feature, of a strand of Christianity that is sweeping all before it. What began as a peculiarly Brazilian phenomenon has become a global trend of gangsters — and sometimes pastors — using evangelical Christian networks and beliefs to stamp their authority on illicit trades.

Emerging from the Americas and now appearing in Europe, the Philippines, Nigeria and South Africa, today’s narco-evangelists share an increasingly popular strand of Christianity: Pentecostalism. It’s the fastest-growing religion in the world, already with around 650 million followers. A branch of evangelical Protestantism, in recent decades Pentecostalism has become the faith of the world’s poor. In large part, this is because of its particular focus on the Holy Spirit’s role in health and wealth, but there is also the significant lure of the faith’s deep authenticity, rooted in local cultures. Much of this is due to the fact that there is little in the way of authority structures and pastoral oversight. Not only is there no Pentecostal pope, but all you really need to be a preacher is followers.

Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, was one of the first outsiders to chronicle the shifting religious sands in Brazil, where Catholicism was nearly monolithic only 40 years ago. “It all starts in Brazil, because Brazil today has the largest Pentecostal population on the planet,” he explains. “Narco-Evangelicalism is really narco-Pentecostalism — because about 70% of all Protestants in Latin America are specifically Pentecostal.” (It’s more difficult to calculate in the United States, but one recent study estimated that 36% of evangelical Protestants are classified as “Renewalists,” meaning they’re charismatic or Pentecostal.)

Back when Pentecostalism first developed in Brazil in the late 1970s, the idea of narco networks in churches was unthinkable. Since then, it has become an outgrowth of Pentecostalism’s most compelling doctrine: prosperity theology, more commonly known as the gospel of health and wealth. “Manifesting God’s blessing by how prosperous you become has become more important than Christian morality and where your soul might end up in the afterlife,” Chesnut says.

The prosperity gospel emerged among a group of syndicated evangelists in the United States following World War II, when America was on the rise and anything other than stars and stripes capitalism was blasphemous. Equally, this new cohort of preachers, like Oral Roberts and Kenneth Copeland, knew how to speak to the concerns of everyday people. Fairly soon, the idea of a God who is interested in how much you have in your wallet at the end of the week — not to mention how much of that you are tithing to your church — became a feature of televangelism.

Making up only 6% of the world’s Christians in 1980, it now accounts for at least 25%. That Catholic churches and mainline Protestant denominations are taking on Pentecostal practices in order to keep up points to a far wider influence than simple numbers suggest. In the mid-1980s, the prosperity gospel began trickling down to Brazil, which was culturally susceptible to ideas from its wealthy northern neighbor. There, it was picked up by evangelist Edir Macedo, who has been a critical figure in shaping modern Brazil. A poor boy from a large family who had joined the wave of mass urbanization to the favelas on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, he caught the fire of the Holy Spirit and all of its promises of a good life today, as well as tomorrow. Macedo should know: These days he is the billionaire leader of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, is the owner of Brazil’s second-largest television station (Record) and was a significant player in the rise of disgraced former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Brazilian prosperity theology, which sits alongside football as the vehicle for the aspirations of the working poor, has made it possible for pastors and their congregants to be “involved in the drug trade and human trafficking, even in prostitution, and yet still see themselves as loyal and steadfast Christians,” Chesnut says, even if outsiders see “great contradictions in slinging an AK-47 across your shoulder after you’ve attended church.” While Brazil’s narcos aren’t the first to use spiritual coercion and justification for their activities — the Italian mafia’s use of the Catholic Church springs to mind — their brand of narco-Pentecostalism has distinct and more far-reaching effects.

When Pentecostalism was taking off in the 1980s, largely thanks to Macedo, many of Rio’s gangsters were adherents of Afro-Brazilian religions, particularly Umbanda and Candomble, which feature drumming and dancing ceremonies to connect with traditional West African deities. “The great recruiting ground was prisons, because nobody evangelizes like Pentecostals,” Chesnut says. Armed with their new faith, converts set about repressing the faith that was once central to the underworld and in many cases their own lives. Peixao’s gang marked its arrival with a wave of terror against these Afro-Brazilian faiths: destroying a Candomble temple and expelling its followers from the area. On a wall, they left a pointed message: “Jesus owns this place.” The victims of 30 such recorded attacks in 2018 alone said that the gang took over their properties. Last month, Peixao ordered the closure of Catholic churches and African-based religious centers in Complexo de Israel, sending armed thugs into parishes to ensure that they were closed.

The Holy Spirit’s new soldiers didn’t spare their brothers in Christ, either. Members of one neighborhood that venerated Saint Edwiges — the patron saint of debtors — had an image of her desecrated by Peixao’s thugs. The spot was left vacant, a symbol that what had come before was no longer there.

Brazil might be the epicenter of narco-Pentecostalism, but other former Catholic strongholds in the region have felt the Pentecostal pull and have seen how the new form of Christianity can dovetail nicely with doing illicit business. Central America, the bridge between South American production and North American consumption, has been ravaged by the drug war like nowhere else. Though Guatemala has become proportionately the most Pentecostal nation in the world and many of its neighbors are following in its footsteps, Mexico remains a staunchly Catholic outlier — for now.

Mexico-based drug war journalist and author Ioan Grillo witnessed the rise of narco-Pentecostalism firsthand. One of his most fascinating cartel studies is Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, who, Grillo writes, went from “impoverished child laborer to gangster saint” in the state of Michoacan, where his Knights Templar cartel “cultivated a narco holy image.”

After going through Alcoholics Anonymous in Texas in his teenage years, Moreno was drawn to evangelical Christianity during his battle with the bottle. “Unlike the Catholicism that Nazario grew up with, evangelical preachers often emphasize improving your lot and fulfilling your dreams,” Grillo wrote. “This struck a chord with Nazario. He developed an incredible self-belief, a conviction he was destined to be somebody.” Only his “dream was to become a brutal gangster warlord.”

Once again, the contradictions apparent to outsiders are not seen by the perpetrators.

“In his mind, he was righteous,” Grillo says. “They were waging holy war.” Moreno effectively turned himself into a deity, even issuing a book of 53 commandments for his followers, who were frequently recruited from rehab centers. “He did operate a bit differently than other narcos,” Grillo told New Lines from Mexico. “He mentioned his faith a lot, but he also created something of a cult around himself.” Exerting “intense control” over his recruits, he became a “a megalomaniacal figure” — for which religion played no small part. “He found justification in a weird, twisted, perverted way from the church.”

Moreno was eventually killed in 2014, and though splinter cartels have taken over his former turf, no one has done it with the same zeal as the born-again leader. Elsewhere in Mexico, which counts only around 10% of its population as Pentecostal (Guatemala, in contrast, is around 70%), new evangelically minded cartels are emerging. Grillo recently wrote about the Indigenous Chamula cartel, which draws its members from evangelical slums — formed after born-again converts were expelled from towns proper by the ruling clique — in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, which has become the first Pentecostal-majority state in the country (it’s not a coincidence that it is also the poorest and has the largest Indigenous population).

Because poverty provides a steady stream of foot soldiers for both born-again souls and organized crime, it’s no surprise that narco-Pentecostalism is extending well beyond the drug corridors of Latin America. In Romania, the son of prominent pastor Vladimir Pustan was recently arrested for large-scale drug trafficking. Local press described Vladimir Pustan Jr. as a “former policeman turned drug dealer” whose father’s church has found great success with branches for the Romanian diaspora in Britain and once boasted that he had strangled a girl.

Home to Europe’s largest proportional Pentecostal population, a 2021 survey in the country of 19 million found that around a fifth of Pentecostals are from the persecuted Roma minority. But just as Brazilian Catholics have co-opted Pentecostal ideas through the syncretic Catholic Charismatic Renewal in order to stem the flow of converts to the new kids in town and their doctrines appealing to this life, so too has the native and dominant Romanian Orthodox church. “Many of these churches have Pentecostalized to the point that it’s become almost hegemonic on the Christian landscape of Romania,” Chesnut says.

Romanian sociologist Mihaela-Alexandra Tudor, an expert in religious communication, says that the narco-Pentecostalism phenomenon is only just beginning to take shape in the country. Just as the Brazilian form has its own distinct local features, Romania, with the story of the Pustans and their Holy Spirit-centered faith, has its own unique story.

In a place that is one of the three largest drug trafficking corridors in Europe, Tudor says that both Pentecostal and Seventh Day Adventist churches have been infiltrated or have themselves become involved with the drug trade. The reason, she says, is that these churches “focus heavily on the preaching prosperity theology,” which in turn spurs “the unhealthy craving to seek unlimited wealth — whatever the consequences.”

Pustan Sr., who built a successful empire of financial, media and real estate businesses, has “mastered the digital pulpit,” Tudor says, crafting influence both at home and among the large Romanian diaspora in Europe. Equally, Tudor says, he has become a key figure in the far-right populist political movement, including the current governing coalition, which relies on churches as a key part of its support base. Pustan Jr., whom Tudor describes as “a religious vlogger and an agent of political influence like his father,” has also been a keen political player who has run for a number of local and regional elections, without success. Tudor sees his story as part of the nexus between political actors and drug traffickers and certain religious groups.

Given that churches often play a critical role in helping diaspora populations navigate their new lives, these churches have become fertile ground for recruiting among organized crime networks. And if Brazil is one Pentecostal goalpost in the world, then Nigeria, and the significant Nigerian diaspora, is undoubtedly the other.

In Italy, where over 500 Pentecostal churches have sprung up in the home of Catholicism — making it the largest Christian community outside Catholicism — the trade in humans has pervaded Pentecostal church networks. In 2022, Investigative Reporting Project Italy uncovered a group of “madames” who sell young Nigerian girls into sexual servitude and steal their earnings — and have “front row pews reserved” for them in their homeland “in exchange for their sizeable donations to the Church.” The project reported that the rot went deeper than mere infiltration by bad actors. One victim heard her pastor tell churchgoers to “honor your debts” in a sermon, with “a strong implication that he was addressing those in the audience forced into prostitution.”

Faith-based organized crime networks may be providing a pipeline of willing young believers into material hell overseas, but they are not without their counterparts back home. Asonzeh Ukah, head of the Department for the Study of Religions at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, studies the role of the economy and financial entanglements of Nigerian Pentecostal organizations in London, West Africa and South Africa. Describing Pentecostalism as “Nigeria’s third-largest and most lucrative global export,” he notes that as a “highly competitive and moneyed industry,” where fraud is an important practice.

Ukah says that the number of Nigerian-founded and Nigerian-owned religious establishments are doubling every seven to 10 years. The race to capture souls, who are often indistinguishable from customers, has led to what we might politely call more business-focused outcomes. Here, the goal isn’t necessarily to be the most compelling pastor, but to bring in the most money. The church, as Ukah points out, has a near monopoly on the scarce resources of leadership, visibility and authority. In turn, they generate networks that are “labyrinthine and impossible to fully investigate or make transparent.”

Where the money goes, so do all kinds of actors, some of them bad. Plainly, Pentecostal megachurches speak to everyone, including businesspeople, politicians and criminals.

“Under this open entry or low-cost entry into the Pentecostal market,” Ukah says, “individuals with different motives have infiltrated the fold.” Churches start operating like any for-profit corporation, putting in place structures and teachings that are centered around wealth extraction.

Just as Google or Coca-Cola define their success in terms of numbers of customers and the profit margins they present, Ukah says, “salvation is defined as both spiritual and material accumulation.”

Pentecostal churches have become an extremely competitive marketplace, where institutional survival is predicated on traditional business outcomes. “Life challenges sometimes blur the boundary between morality and survival,” Ukah says. This includes churches that ordain pastors based on the amount of money they bring into the church and a culture where “the volume of money determines how fast a person rises in the church hierarchy.”

The 2021 arrest of alleged cocaine trafficker Stephen Afam Ikeanyionwu inside a Pentecostal church in Lagos state highlighted how easy it has been to work in illicit trades on the one hand and seek spiritual forgiveness on the other. Churches might not necessarily condone these activities but have created a culture that is focused on money. However funds can be recruited is all that matters.

Nowhere is this clearer than South Africa, a country in which corruption has become so rampant in recent years that the word itself is not enough: Locals prefer the term “state capture.” Patronage schemes have inevitably made their way into the country’s booming Pentecostal churches, as an alternative to political and big business actors. When it’s widely accepted that everyone in power is crooked, particularly by the post-apartheid generation that was promised so much, secular government has become toxic. Faith-based organizations in local communities, on the other hand, are the best way to get by — and get ahead.

In 2019, police in Johannesburg closed 10 churches that they found to be involved in drug and human trafficking and the following year arrested a female bishop suspected of dealing drugs out of her church. The president of the Church Leaders Council of South Africa, Bhekimpi Mchunu, said that the “behavior of highjacking churches for these types of activities is becoming a social time bomb.”

Ukah says that smaller, independent operators are positioning themselves to take advantage of opportunities presented by a willing congregation of souls. “You notice them loitering at large … religious events seeking connections and access to the inner workings of the network,” he says. “These are opportunistic actors who pick up the leftovers or exploit specific opportunities as they become available.” New entrants he describes as “weak spiritual scavengers” often scoop up the “sacred waste left behind by the ‘major league’ religious corporations.”

While the prosperity gospel runs rich in both Nigeria and South Africa, the idea of the End Times — which Ukah describes as the “spiritual anxiety and urgency to spread the gospel” — is also a powerful driver behind narco-Pentecostalism and other organized crime in church networks across the continent. While Pentecostalism has been mainstreamed, its origins at the turn of the 20th century in the United States are one of an apocalyptic religion, where ordinary people and believers alike face a profound reckoning. The need to prepare themselves, and the world, for an inevitable outcome opens true believers to finding certain activities permissible “under the circumstances of imminent spiritual risk humanity is exposed to,” Ukah says. In this world, “ethical living, consistent biblical interpretation or legal observances” don’t matter much in the context of “worldly” consequences.

This is not to say that all 650 million Pentecostals in the world are involved in drug or organized crime rings — far from it. The vast majority of Pentecostal conversions are no doubt sincere. As Chesnut points out, a significant number of drug dealers find Jesus and leave their past behind. But without the “ascendancy and hegemony of prosperity theology,” he says, the concept of narco-Pentecostals would have been “unimaginable.”

The prosperity gospel has become among the most influential doctrines in the Christian world today and remains a large part of why many people are getting in the tent. In failed states and states that are being failed, Pentecostalism has become, for better and for worse, the only game in town. As historian Dominic Sandbrook has observed of America’s Pentecostal turn in the 1970s, churches became “at once refuges from modernity and temples to it.” Only today, religious leaders aren’t overturning the money changers’ tables — they’re doing deals under them.

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