Entre a Pensilvânia e o Amazonas: a trajetória do missionário Clinton Benjamin Thomas, a inserção protestante na Amazônia e a Igreja de Cristo em Urucará (1954-1970)

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to answer the following question: can the trajectory of a missionary help us understand some of the historical processes that took place in the Amazon between the 19th and 20th centuries? Our historical subject is Clinton Benjamin Thomas (1930-2007), a native of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and a missionary in the northern region of Brazil between the 1950s-1990s. Following your trajectory, we contextualize the Protestant history in Brazil, especially the insertion in the Amazon, when the first missionaries crossed the course of the Amazon River between Belém-Manaus, starting the first churches and paving the way for the current evangelical growth in the North Region. We also bring the arrival of the Restoration Movement to Brazil, through the Churches of Christ, through which Clinton and Phyllis Thomas emigrated to Brazil in 1956, dedicating themselves to missionary service in Belém and Macapá. Finally, we privilege his move to the interior of the Amazon, in small Urucará, in 1965, where he founded the first Protestant church in the city of Urucará, in the Lower Amazon region, at a time when the Catholic Church is restructuring itself to to fill the voids of Amazonian Catholicism, discussing emblematic events of the first two years of missionary activity in the interior of the Amazon. To understand these and other historical events that took place in what is known as the present time, this research dialogues with the memories and narratives involved in the trajectory of Clinton Thomas; so, we seek to question the official memory built about the Church of Christ and take advantage of the possibilities of the Oral History methodology, which allows the registration of the process of constrution of memories or shared memories through interviews with subjects who participated or witnessed in these historical events. Taking as a clipping the first years of Clinton Thomas' performance in the Amazon city, our choice for the study of memory and oral sources elucidates the important contribution that oral history offers to the understanding of the processes involving Protestantism in the interior of the Amazon, through subjects who were participants in the foundation and growth of non-Catholic Christianity in the region, as well as the transformations that took place in the region at that moment in the 20th century.