Global Religious Infrastructures: The Australian Megachurch Hillsong in Brazil

Abstract

This article explores the infrastructures that allow the Australian Pentecostal megachurch Hillsong to expand into Brazil. Hillsong is a global religious phenomenon: it has branches in global cities, celebrities among its followers, and an award-winning worship band. Drawing on five years of multi-sited ethnography in Australia and Brazil, I analyse significant infrastructures – smart church buildings, hip soundscapes, and digital media – that enabled Hillsong to establish itself in Brazil. I show that such technologies comprise an architecture through which Hillsong’s ‘Cool Christianity’ circulates. I argue that these infrastructures communicate success, excitement, modernity, and cosmopolitanism to young middle-class Brazilians who aspire to break with the local conservative Pentecostalism that caters for the poor. Here, I call for a focus on human and nonhuman actors and infrastructures that move religion across borders, and a special attention to how imagination and power differentials shape mobility and immobility.

Introduction

Scholars who have researched the fast rise of Pentecostalism in Brazil have demonstrated that it is mostly a religion of the poor in the peripheries of the large Brazilian cities (Chesnut, 1997; Mariano, 1999; Oosterbaan, 2017). The latest Datafolha poll (Balloussier, 2020) has found that currently around 30% of the Brazilian population is Protestant and a large majority of them are Pentecostal, an increase from 22% from the 2010 census. It also found that the majority of Pentecostals are women (58%), black (59%), young (40% are between 16 and 34 years old), and poor (50% of Pentecostals earn up to twice the monthly minimum wage, equivalent to US$187 per month). Pentecostalism has often been stigmatised in the Brazilian media and by the elites for several reasons: it is the religion of the poor; many megachurch pastors have become wealthy by exploiting the poor; others have been jailed for money laundering; their churches are conservative and judgemental with a strong focus on exorcism and magical practices (Chesnut, 1997; Martin, 2006; Rocha, 2019). In the last decades, Pentecostalism has made inroads into the aspirational lower-middle classes (Maranhão, 2013).

However, there is a paucity of research on the arrival of Cool Christianity, a kind of Pentecostalism directed at the upper-middle-class youth. Also known as ‘Hipster Christianity’ (McCracken, 2010; Sandler, 2006), this type of Christianity appropriates elements of secular youth and popular cultures, be it dress style, body decoration, trendy graphic design, pop music, celebrity culture, and the methods of the entertainment industry. The Australian megachurch Hillsong is one of the foremost examples of this type of Christianity (Goh, 2008; Klaver, 2018; Riches and Wagner, 2017; Wagner, 2020). Hillsong is a global religious phenomenon. It has branches or ‘campuses’ in most global cities, American celebrities among its followers, a global audience to its TV cable channel, and an award-winning worship band that tours the world and whose music is sung weekly by an estimated 50 million people in 60 languages. It has an intense presence on social media with 2.4 million Instagram followers, and 1.8 million YouTube subscribers, not including media presence for its bands and global campuses. In late-2016, Hillsong established a campus in an upmarket neighbourhood of São Paulo City, after years of pleading by Brazilian fans of the church and its bands.

Elsewhere, I have discussed the ways in which upper-middle-class Brazilians mobilise their affiliation with Hillsong for class distinction purposes (Rocha, 2017, 2019). In this article, I turn my focus to the infrastructures that allow Hillsong to expand among the upper-middle-classes in Brazil. I deploy the scholarship on material religion (Bräunlein, 2016; Hazard, 2013; Meyer and Houtman, 2012) to analyse how Hillsong’s transnational connections between Australia and Brazil are supported by particular materialities and infrastructures – smart church buildings, hip soundscapes and digital media. I show that infrastructures comprise an architecture through which Hillsong’s ‘Cool Christianity’ circulates. I argue that these infrastructures communicate success, excitement, modernity, and cosmopolitanism to an upper-middle-class Brazilian audience that aspires to break with Pentecostal traditions that cater for the poor and become global citizens. Indeed, as Klaver (2018: 228) has noted, megachurches like Hillsong ‘foster a cosmopolitan, consumerist lifestyle and predominantly attract upward mobile young professionals, creative, fashionable youngsters who share a postmodern urban subculture’. Importantly, such infrastructures allow people to achieve a sense of ‘co-presence’ (Madianou, 2016: 1) with other congregants elsewhere in the world. This is so because Hillsong is a global church – it has campuses in many global cities and highly standardised aesthetics, services, use of media, teaching programmes, and soundscapes (Klaver, 2018: 231–232). These ‘create an alternative geography of belonging’ (Van de Kamp, 2017: 2) through which Brazilians are able to leave the country’s peripheral position behind and to inhabit and feel they belong to the spiritual, physical, aesthetic and even secular (in the sense that Hillsong church is located in the Global North) centre of Christianity and world power.

This article draws on five years (2015–2019) of multi-sited fieldwork in Australia and Brazil. In Sydney, I conducted participant observation and open-ended interviews with the Hillsong College City Principal, and young Brazilians at Hillsong church and its College. I also participated in Hillsong weekly services and conferences, and external church activities, such as weekly connect groups, ¹ parties, and barbeques. In Brazil, I conducted participant observation and interviews at the Hillsong branch, and in the churches that are part of the Hillsong network and family, and those whose pastors had travelled to Australia to participate in Hillsong conferences and services. Moreover, I conducted interviews with Brazilians who had returned after being part of the congregation and/or studying at the College in Australia. In total, I conducted 58 interviews (28 were males and 30 females). Interviewees were recruited through a snowballing method, or people volunteered for interviews during participant observation. Interviews were conducted in Portuguese; they were recorded, transcribed, and translated. All interviewees’ names are pseudonyms but for Hillsong pastors as they are public figures. Furthermore, throughout the research project, I followed Hillsong social media, and its launching of merchandise and music products.

In what follows, I start by exploring the ways in which attention to infrastructures in mobility studies and the material study of religion have brought about a new understanding of how religion is lived and moves around the world. I then focus on three different infrastructures utilised by the megachurch to demonstrate how these transnational networks are established and the (virtual and physical) mobility they afford to those who move and those who stay behind.

Religious infrastructures and materiality

Since the mid-1980s, the ‘material turn’, with its focus on place and other tangible things such as the body, the sensual, the lived experience, practices, and material culture, has been at the forefront of the social sciences. At the time, scholars were reacting to constructivism and its emphasis on discourse, symbols, signs and ideologies that may lead to understanding social phenomena as not real (Meyer and Houtman, 2012: 5). Scholars were attentive to the genealogy of ideas and ideologies, and how ideas were mobilised for different interests, but they were not exploring how things, practices, bodies, senses, technologies mediated and created ideas, and systems of thought.

Following the material turn, scholars of mobility have considered the scholarship on infrastructures, to make sense of how people are able to or impeded from moving, and how moments of mobility/immobility are structured, organised, and given meaning (Weiqiang et al., 2017). They have noted that infrastructures of mobility – roads, transport systems, telecommunications, including the Internet, airports, passports, visas, travel agencies, border checks – are not only physical/material architectures of movement, but also political in that they organise movement. For instance, global and nation-state regimes of mobility and labour migration policies screen, rank, and regulate who is allowed to move and how they are integrated in the host society (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013). In this light, Weiqiang et al. (2017: 169) have called for scholars of mobility to focus on ‘human and nonhuman actors that move migrants within specific infrastructural frames’ rather than solely focussing on those who move.

In this article, I respond to this call by investigating religious infrastructures that facilitate the circulation of people and religious ideas, practices, beliefs, and materialities between Australia and Brazil. I aim to explore infrastructures as an architecture or a system rather than investigating each technology or materiality as a separate entity. Indeed, as Larkin (2013: 330) has noted, ‘Placing the system at the center of analysis decenters a focus on technology and offers a more synthetic perspective . . .’. However, given the space constrain of this article, I will not investigate every single technology of this system but a handful of significant ones. Importantly, this system is embedded in a historically constructed global power geometry (Massey, 1994), in which countries in the Global North and their culture hold more power in relation to flows and movement than those in the Global South. As I showed elsewhere, Brazilians are much more susceptible to adopt trends when they come from the Global North and flow in English, the language of power of globalisation (Rocha, 2017, 2020a, 2020b).

Moreover, infrastructures have a form and a technical function, and these two elements can be autonomous. Form, or the aesthetics of infrastructures, also connects with people through affect. In this sense, I ask what role does Hillsong’s hired buildings, high-production-value services and infrastructure, and online presence play in its expansion in Brazil. Importantly, while most of the research on infrastructures refers to those created by the state to bring about modernity (roads, buildings, monuments, and bridges) and ways in which these are affective (they may inspire, and elicit pride, awe, or frustration), I suggest that we can also think of religious infrastructures in this way. This is particularly so when they are transferred from the Global North to the South, as is the case of Hillsong in Brazil. In this sense, just like Larkin (2013: 333) has noted in regard to state infrastructures, religious infrastructures also ‘hold sway over the imagination . . . [and] come to represent the possibility of being modern, of having a future’.

In this, I follow scholars of material religion who understand religion as mediation, and thus see religious infrastructures (e.g. architecture, technologies of media, and mobility), and the senses, the body, affect, aesthetics, and objects as integral to religion (Bräunlein, 2016; Hazard, 2013; Meyer, 2009, 2011; Meyer and Houtman, 2012; Meyer and Moors, 2006; Stolow, 2005; Van de Kamp, 2017). It is through these media, or ‘authorised religious material forms’, that scholars can investigate ‘the making of religious subjects and communities’ (Meyer 2009: 2). In doing so, they move beyond ‘belief’ as the central category in the study of religion, noting its centrality is due to a Protestant bias that equated religion with interiority, meaning, and the mind. Rather, material religion scholars seek to understand how these assemblages of peoples, materialities, and practices coexist and co-constitute one another and are sensitive to regimes of power. In this article, I build on this scholarship to investigate how the location of Hillsong in the Global North and the high production values of all its products (from services to buildings to online content) give upper-middle-class Brazilians a sense of belonging to a community that is global, affluent, and successful, as they detach themselves from the Pentecostal forms and materialities from the country’s poor. I now turn to the infrastructures that allow this process of binding to the alternative network of ‘Cool Christianity’ embodied by Hillsong.

Sounds and sites

Music is a significant element of Pentecostalism, and plays a strong role in the ways in which it expands globally (Ingalls and Yong, 2015). Worship music mediates the connection between the Holy Spirit and congregants and makes God present for followers (Meyer, 2009). Hillsong is well-known worldwide for its music. Music is so important to the church that in 2001 it changed its name from Hills Christian Life Centre to ‘Hillsong’, after its worship band Hillsong became famous worldwide (Hutchinson, 2017; Riches, 2010). Accordingly, many scholars have investigated the Hillsong sound, analysing the ways in which it is associated with celebrity culture, how it has helped the church’s branding, marketing and its growth worldwide, and how it elicits followers’ affective labour and a sensation of transcendence (Connell, 2005; Riches, 2010; Riches and Wagner, 2012, 2017; Wagner, 2020). Furthermore, I have shown how Brazilians relate to Hillsong United band and its music as fans – going to concerts, asking for musicians’ autographs, buying, downloading, translating, and playing its songs (Rocha, 2017, 2019, 2020b). This affective connection with the band is translated into a desire to travel to Australia to ‘experience’ the Hillsong services, become church musicians, and study at its college. For instance, a young upper-middle-class Brazilian (his father is a judge and mother is a lawyer) told me when I interviewed him in Sydney,

I think 90% of Brazilians cry when they arrive at Hillsong church for the first time. Because I think it’s kind of thrilling. It’s not so much about Christianity, in relation to God, but I think it has to do with [the structure of] Hillsong which you don’t find at Brazilian churches. (My italics, Sydney, 18 June 2015)

A musician himself, he said that, like many of his young Brazilian friends, he first came to Australia hoping to play at Hillsong services and to study music at Hillsong College. He had already passed the test to be a drummer at the church but was disappointed because ‘at the time there were more than twenty drummers waiting for a call [to play at the church services]’. When I asked why so many Brazilians liked Hillsong, he replied,

I think the word ‘cool’ sums up more or less this situation. I think Brazilians began to see that there was something cool, something modern out there. Hillsong is a church and it is cool; it is a modern church, a cool church.

It is clear from this interview that Hillsong and its sound offer excitement, modernity and coolness to upper-middle-classes in Brazil. All this is found ‘out there’ (overseas) because Brazilian churches do not have the large structure, fame, exciting worship music, and a world-touring, award-winning band. Significantly, he does not associate young Brazilians’ emotion upon arriving at Hillsong Sydney with their experiencing God but with the large structure and production values of the services at the church. By singing Hillsong songs and joining the church services in São Paulo or branches overseas (as some of them do when they travel to the United States or Europe), they feel that they are part of a transnational soundscape that is shared by people in the Global North countries.

While there has been a large body of work on the importance of sound in the creation of a deterritorialised and transnational Hillsong experience, there has been very little research on the sites the church occupies, but for Connell (2005) and Goh (2008), whose work focuses on the corporate-like church’s headquarters in the outskirts of Sydney. Here, I am interested in how the hired sites of overseas branches, particularly in Brazil, elicit feelings of belonging to transnational urbanscapes that produce an alternative, ‘modern’ belonging to its followers.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, when all its activities went online, Hillsong São Paulo used to hold its Sunday services at Villagio JK, a nightclub frequented by the city’s upper-middle-class youth and professionals. Located Vila Olímpia, an upmarket neighbourhood close to the financial centre of this global city, the nightclub is in the vicinity of restaurants, hotels, banks, corporations, and a shopping mall. On nights other than Sundays, Villagio JK hosts bands as well as private functions for multinational corporations, banks, and exclusive schools. The venue’s architecture reflects its discerning audience: it boasts a retractable roof over the theatre seating area; a rooftop garden; well-designed hallways, rooms and furniture; and a smart black façade. On Sundays, before each of the church’s five services, the crowded car park and the queues of eager youth winding around the block are not so different from secular event nights. Congregants and their pastors also dress in similar attire to secular patrons of the venue: branded jeans, polo and designer shirts, T-shirts, and fashionable tank-tops and dresses.

This site choice – a hired music venue in an upmarket area – is similar to Hillsong churches in other global cities. For instance, Hillsong London congregates at The Dominion Theatre, located on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street; in Paris, it congregates at the Espace Saint Martin near the Pompidou Centre; and in New York, it holds its services at the United Palace in uptown Manhattan. In calling for scholars to pay attention to religious buildings as a way to understand the role of materiality in social life, Brenneman and Miller (2016: 83) have noted that

The physical structure constructed by a congregation communicates particular values and meanings to those who congregate there as well as to the many who never enter the structure but who nevertheless draw conclusions about its members based on the building’s shape, design, and size.

I suggest that these choices of venues and locations convey a sense of prosperity, success, excitement and of being at the centre of global cities to those in and out of the congregation. The fact that Hillsong branches overseas are not built for purpose but hired urban entertainment venues conveys another important value of most megachurches, especially Hillsong – they blur the boundaries between secular and sacred spaces, proclaiming that the Holy Spirit moves in both of them. Megachurches such as Hillsong emphasise their openness and relatability to the secular world in order to attract newcomers. Its services are entertaining, featuring a live band, professional lighting, and sound, large screens. That is why nightclubs and theatres lend themselves easily to sites of worship and transcendence for Hillsong. These venues also reaffirm Hillsong’s global branding identity and establish a network of sites through which Cool Christianity circulates in the form of highly mobile Hillsong pastors, who preach in many of Hillsong branches all over the world, and followers (including Brazilians who worship at other Hillsong branches whenever they are overseas).

Coleman and Chattoo (2019) have argued that megachurches grow through a double-process of encroaching and enclaving. They encroach into the secular realm, particularly in popular culture, and also leisure activities, economics, and politics, seeking to find new converts. However, the secular is also a place of danger, where the faithful can lose themselves. As such, megachurches work on enclaving and domesticating these new-found areas within the church itself. This double strategy is materialised not only in the choice of venue but also in the slight makeover these venues undergo every Sunday morning before services start. Then, a team of Hillsong volunteers has to turn these buildings into churches by placing Hillsong banners on their façade, setting up stands at the reception area for congregants’ prayer requests, to welcome first-timers, and for the church’s merchandise. The last time I visited Hillsong London, the Hillsong banner over the Dominion Theatre front doors half-covered the sign for the musical ‘Elf, The Smash Musical’.

The contrasts with other megachurches in Brazil are stark. Most Brazilian megachurches cater for the poor or the aspiring lower-middle classes. The social class of its congregants is reflected on their buildings – usually repurposed warehouses or supermarkets, or poorly built, cement-block churches located in outer suburbs of urban centres. Inside, they are brightly lit with fluorescent lights, tiled floors, and furnished with plastic chairs for the congregation. As Martin (2006: 48) observed in her analysis of the aesthetics of Latin American Pentecostalism,

In church architecture the priority is to get the maximum seating for the minimum cost, since what goes on within the building matters more than the architectural or design features or even the sacred character of the building itself . . . The result tends to be utilitarian and [in many cases] positively a-aesthetic.

Even the ‘Temple of Solomon’, the multi-million-dollar headquarters of the Universal Church for the Kingdom of God in São Paulo city reflects its poor congregation’s imaginings of wealth. Its sheer size taking over most of the plot of land, its gaudy façade of marble and kitsch entrance and interiors decorated with gold and velvet, and its location in the outskirts of the city all convey aspiration to wealth in an ostentatious, nouveau-rich style.

Church sites like those of the lower socio-economic churches are rejected by upper-middle-class Pentecostals. When I interviewed a young Brazilian pastor, who had participated in several Hillsong conferences in Sydney and subsequently started his own Hillsong-inspired church, he observed: ‘Many Brazilian churches look like bathrooms. Those white tiles! And what about the plastic chairs?’ (Curitiba, 23 September 2015). Following the example of Hillsong, his own church congregates in a shopping mall cinema on Sunday mornings. A Brazilian student at Hillsong College in Sydney told me as he compared Hillsong with Brazilian churches: ‘I was very impressed by the church structure in general. You know, all that money invested in the church!’. Clearly, these statements have to do with class and taste as well as a desire to break with the way and the buildings where Pentecostalism has been performed in Brazil and to connect with centres of Pentecostalism in the Global North.

The online church

On Monday, 16 March 2020, the Australian government banned gatherings of more than 500 people to curb the spread of Covid-19. Hillsong in Australia and its overseas campuses had no issues moving the church swiftly online. For many years, the megachurch had made intense use of technology – developing its own apps; having a strong presence of social media, blogs and webpages; making videos for the ‘church news’ section of its services; linking-up campuses all over Australia and overseas in real time during services; and producing content for its own TV channel. Hillsong had also been well-known for the very high production value of all of its content as it extolls excellence, creativity and the arts (Wagner, 2020). Indeed, its (now online) College teaches music, dance, live audio production, and film and TV, in addition to theology and pastoral leadership to students from all over the world. Thus, its globally networked high-tech infrastructure had been in place before the government orders.

However, not only services started to be streamed online, but also all of its activities (kids’, youths’, and women’s programmes) as well as a new weekly Mega Prayer night which features Hillsong pastors from all over the world praying for followers’ requests and the end of the pandemic. While its overseas campuses streamed their own services in their own languages in different time zones, they also mixed the content produced by the headquarters in Australia. In non-English-speaking countries, English content was captioned in the local language. In the space of 1 week, the long-standing church motto, ‘One house, Many rooms’, that had been used to explain the global church structure, turned into ‘One house, Many (living) rooms’ to account for the fact that followers from all over the world were participating in the church from their living rooms due to Covid-19.

An important consequence of this switching to online streaming is that it created a much more visible and intensely personal and interactive global infrastructure within which Hillsong-branded content circulated. It enabled Brazilians and others outside Australia to watch services in real time at the Australian church headquarters, in addition to their own local services. They were also able watch services in every country the church has a campus by clicking on the list of countries on the church website. Moreover, for Brazilians who lived away from São Paulo city, where the church is located, it also meant that they could participate in its services. Many of them expressed their delight in joining the services for the first time on the church’s Brazilian Facebook account. A heightened sense of co-presence has afforded by the chat function on the social media platforms where the services and activities are streamed (e.g. YouTube and Instagram) which enabled followers to participate by writing comments in real time. Particularly in the Australian services, people from all over the world write comments (sometimes in their own language) and receive replies from the Hillsong team (at times, in foreign languages).

In other words, moving the church fully online gave followers the sensation they were participating in a ‘global church family’ (an expression dear to Hillsong), since it afforded co-presence with people from all over the world. An apt example of how the online church activity engenders a feeling of belonging to a global, affluent and cosmopolitan church was the streaming of Hillsong’s Easter spectacle in April of 2020. Created by Hillsong London, ‘King of Heaven’ was performed and filmed at the O2 Arena in London in the Easter of 2019. The O2 Arena is a London landmark and the second largest entertainment complex in the United Kingdom with seating capacity of 20,000. It hosts global music acts and sports, as well as the annual Hillsong London Conference. By choosing this venue, Hillsong was again making a statement that is part of popular culture, and global and affluent. The Easter spectacle was a 1-hour-long super production. King of Heaven was a cutting-edge, dystopian take of the passion of Christ. It included electronic music, powerful lightening, hip hop dancing, Roman soldiers in contemporary riot gear, black men playing Jesus and the apostles, and the faces of Pontius Pilate and the Pharisees projected on large black screens. As one follower commented on the YouTube chat function, ‘It ha[d] a Game-of-Thrones feel to it’.

King of Heaven was streamed on the church’s YouTube channel on the evening of Easter Sunday in Australia and at church campuses all over the world, where it was captioned in local languages. Followers were able to participate by posting messages on the chat function to which Hillsong replied, while it also posted announcements regarding its events, offering links for people to talk to a pastor, and connect to the church. Time differences still matter in a connected world, however. Many followers from other countries logged on to the Australian streaming because it happened before everywhere else in the world and they were eager to watch it. For instance, a Brazilian man from a country town in São Paulo state had a conversation in English with the church while he watched the spectacle:

Paulo Marins:

Watching from Pindamonhangaba, São Paulo, Brazil. May the Risen Lord bless you all!

Hillsong Church:

@Paulo Marins Happy Resurrection Sunday and welcome to church!

Paulo Marins:

@Hillsongchurch thank you Hillsong Church! You are incredible because of the Christ living in you!

When King of Heaven streamed by Hillsong Brazil with captions in Portuguese, all messages were positive with followers astounded by the production value of the spectacle and the modern take on the story. They wrote on the chat function that they had goose bumps, that they were crying, and that they had never seen anything like it. One follower compared Hillsong with Brazilian churches: ‘If only Brazilian churches understood how important art is to church!’. Another wrote, ‘I had blessed experiences at Hillsong London and Hillsong France’, indicating her upper-middle-class status and that by watching the play she had similar emotions to her experiences in the Global North. In addition, many wrote how proud they were to be part of the church. These powerful emotions (goose bumps, crying, and pride) were not only elicited by the content of the story, but also by the aesthetics used to tell this story and where it was filmed. Hillsong’s super production, akin to the award-winning HBO series, took the Passion of Christ out of the church and into popular culture using secular entertainment aesthetics and venue. As such, it moved middle-class Brazilians away from their position in the periphery of Christianity, and their shame to be associated with Pentecostalism in Brazil because of its stigma in the country (Rocha, 2017). By belonging to Hillsong they felt validated in their choice of religion, and were proud to belong to an international church that creates state-of-the-art productions as good as anything produced in by the American secular entertainment industry.

Conclusion

Pentecostalism has historically been a religion of the poor in Brazil, and for the past three decades, it has been making inroads into the aspirational lower-middle classes. Here, I explored the recent arrival of the so-called ‘Cool Christianity’, a kind of Pentecostalism that appeals to a more affluent, young, and hip congregation by adopting tropes, aesthetics, and methods of secular youth cultures and the entertainment industry. In this article, I used scholarship on material religion to investigate the ways in which infrastructures created by the Australian megachurch Hillsong, an exemplar of Cool Christianity, attract upper-middle-class Brazilians. I chose three significant infrastructures – its sound, overseas branches’ buildings and its online presence. I argued that these infrastructures communicate success, excitement, modernity, and cosmopolitanism in a country where Pentecostalism is associated with the poor, corruption, and marginality. Thus, I demonstrated how Brazilians make use of these infrastructures to distinguish themselves from the Pentecostalism of the poor in Brazil, to move (physically and virtually) away from their position of marginality in Christianity and geopolitics, and move into the central position that they feel Hillsong occupies.

Importantly, these religious infrastructures do not work separately, as single technologies, but as an architecture or a system through which people, religious ideas, practices, beliefs, and materialities circulate. I showed that these religious infrastructures evoke pride and excitement as they offer Brazilians the possibility to become modern and cosmopolitan, in a similar way that the secular state infrastructures built to bring about modernity elicit affect. Finally, these infrastructures also afford Brazilians the sensation of being co-present with like-minded others in other parts of the world, particularly in the Global North. Overall, this article called for a focus on human and nonhuman actors and infrastructures that move religion across borders, and a special attention to how imagination and power differentials shape mobility and immobility.