Religious minorities in Portugal: a bibliographical review

Abstract

This article about the religious minorities in Portugal aims to present a bibliographical review of the sociological and/or anthropological qualitative studies about them, thus contributing to gather and analyze the mentioned studies, besides evaluating in the end the state of the art. For this purpose, an exhaustive analysis is carried out on the catalogs of the university libraries, the research centers' websites and the curricular data platforms, in order to collect the works of each doctoral author, opting whenever possible for the most recent, complete, and/or representative of the object studied. On the one hand, there are relatively well-analyzed religious minorities, such as some evangelicals (Evangelical Church of Philadelphia), some other Christians (Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Jehovah's Witnesses), Afro-Brazilian and African religions, Eastern Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews. On the other hand, there are religious minorities never studied, especially Evangelicals (e.g., Fraternal), other Christians (e.g., Mormon Church), and Eastern minorities (Buddhists) whose presence is most significant, or Protestants whose presence is less significant.