ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of violence in the religious conversion of women to Pentecostalism in Brazil. It focuses on ethnographic data and interviews with female converts from a low-income, high-crime area of Sao Paulo, as well as literature analysing religious conversion in the Americas. The chapter examines that some women use religious conversion and continued spiritual practice as a strategy for dealing with everyday violence and especially domestic violence. It looks at current literature on conversion to Pentecostalism to set the scene and highlights the importance of this study. The chapter describes the reasons for women's conversion, in which domestic violence was found to be the overarching reason for conversion. It analyses the subsequent effects of women's conversion from a life-cycle perspective and the way in which religious conversion and spiritual practice were used in relation to violence.
