Singing the “Wondrous Story” in Portuguese: The First Official Brazilian Baptist Hymnal, Cantor Cristão

Abstract

This paper discusses the history of Cantor Cristão, the first official Brazilian Baptist hymnal, published in 1891, revealing important aspects of the development of Protestant hymnody in Brazil. It also exposes a web of long-distance connections, multiple linguistic and cultural elements, and distinct perspectives of those who chose to do missionary work and those who chose to welcome them. More specifically, I describe and reflect on the contributions of Solomon L. Ginsburg, an Orthodox Jew from Poland, converted to Christianity in England, and turned Evangelical missionary, who played a crucial role in the history of Cantor Cristão as publisher, author, and translator of hymns. In my analysis, I adopt a historical ethnomusicological perspective and utilize the concept of musical localization, as well as the complementary notions of negotiation of proximity and ethics of style as interpretative lenses. I am drawn to a more nuanced view of the legacy of the mission enterprise, one that is not blind to issues of power, ethnocentrism, and wealth, but makes room for a robust examination of all sorts of capital transfers and investments (economic, cultural, and social), and the real phenomena of musical localization and individual agency.

1. Introduction

The publication of Cantor Cristão in 1891 by missionary Solomon L. Ginsburg (1867–1927) marked the beginning of a lasting and meaningful relationship between Baptists in Brazil and their hymnal. Over the years, Cantor Cristão (“Christian Singer”) has been revised and expanded—the thirty-seventh edition was published in 2007—but it remained the only official Baptist hymnal for 100 years.1 Although a second Brazilian Baptist hymnal, Hinário para o Culto Cristão was published in 1991, Cantor Cristão is still in use today. More than a collection of hymn texts in Portuguese, Cantor—as the hymnal is sometimes called—comprises the core hymnic repertoire embraced by Baptist congregations all over Brazil, past and present. This paper discusses the creation and changing nature of Cantor Cristão throughout its long and influential history, and reflects on the impact of the hymnal’s repertoire on the very identity of Brazilian Baptists.

My interest in this topic arises from my personal, academic, and church ministry experiences. I was born in Brazil and grew up as a religious minority, a Baptist. Although most of my maternal relatives were Baptist, my father’s side of the family was Roman Catholic, as were my neighbors and school mates. In a city of over a million inhabitants, I was an invisible minority. Despite the fact that there were no missionaries serving in any capacity at my home church—First Baptist Church of Recife, a fiercely independent Brazilian Baptist congregation2—I grew up singing from a hymnal comprised of mostly American hymns translated into Portuguese; singing in church choirs (translations of American choir pieces); and participating in missions education classes for children, youth groups, and Sunday School, typical elements of American Baptist congregations. It is worth noting that my church was just a few city blocks away from North Brazil Baptist Theological Seminary, the oldest Baptist theological seminary in Latin America, led and supported by the then powerful Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board.

In my early twenties, I moved to the United States and joined a Baptist church. Despite my limited English, I attended services, sang in the choir, and played in a handbell ensemble. When I started college a few months later, I attended Baylor University (a Baptist school) and was taught by many professors who, like me, were Baptist, or at least Protestant. Compared to my life in Brazil, in terms of religion, I was now in the mainstream.

Finally, for the past eighteen years, I have lived and worked immersed in the Mexican and Mexican-American communities of San Antonio, Texas. From 2003 to 2020, I taught music and worship courses at a small Hispanic Baptist college and since 2008, I have been a member of a bilingual Baptist church and use the Spanish language on a regular basis, directing both the church’s congregational music and its choirs. Here again, my Baptist identity is central to my day to day living but so is my experience as a member of a religious minority in Brazil. Although there are many Baptists in San Antonio, most Mexican immigrants and the Mexican Americans here are Roman Catholic.

One common thread linking all these experiences is congregational music: the hymns I learned in Brazil I now sing in the United States, both in English and in Spanish. The North American missionaries who established the Baptist denomination in Brazil did take their music along with their doctrines. Baptists in Mexico, around the same time, were taught the same repertoire by the American missionaries who crossed the Southern board of the United States.

Interestingly, the members of my congregation in San Antonio do not question the origin of the music we sing in our worship services; neither did my fellow church members in Brazil. To the members of both communities, the hymns and songs that comprise their congregational music may indeed have been written by foreign authors and composers, but that does not prevent them from claiming those hymns as “their own.” The repertoire of Cantor Cristão played a vital part in my formation and development in a Portuguese-speaking Baptist church in Brazil; this same repertoire, sung in English or Spanish, continues to be a part of my congregational life in the United States today.

Three particular concepts helped me in my consideration of the place of Cantor Cristão in the life and identity of Brazilian Baptist congregations: musical localization, “negotiation of proximity,” and “the ethics of style.”

In Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide, editors Ingalls, Reigersberg, and Sherinian define musical localization as “the process whereby Christian communities take a variety of musical practices—some considered ‘indigenous,’ some ‘foreign,’ some shared across spatial and cultural divides; some linked to past practices, some innovative—and make them locally meaningful and useful in the construction of Christian beliefs, theology, practice, and identity.”3 This concept suggests a dynamic approach to understanding the very complex interactions that occur in transnational musical encounters and exchanges.

Ethnomusicologist Timothy Rommen’s complementary notions of “negotiation of proximity” and “the ethics of style” provide a helpful framework for our discussion of Cantor Cristão’s significant place in Brazilian Baptist life, as well as for our understanding of the history of mission hymnody.4 Missionaries introduced new elements in Brazilian cultic life such as graded choir programs and the use of hymnals, along with an organizational behavior framework that contrasted with the local culture. These practices are connected to what Kimberly Jenkins Marshal refers to as Protestant moral modernity and Webb Keane terms the “moral narrative of modernity,” practices that “highly value the written word, order, cleanliness, and other material manifestations of modernity.”5 This characterization resonates with the Protestant ethos I was taught growing up as a member of a Baptist community in Brazil, which valued orderliness, purity, self-improvement, and individual responsibility.

Rommen’s “ethics of style” and “negotiation of proximity” concepts are particularly useful in explaining many of the congregational music choices in my past and present cultural contexts. His “ethics of style” “focus attention on the process by which style becomes the vehicle for a multifaceted discourse about value and meaning, but also identity formation.”6 He also suggests that embracing a repertoire with foreign, far-away origins (in the case of Brazilian Baptists, mission hymnody translated into Portuguese), allows the locals to sidestep immediate and potentially problematic associations while also connecting the local congregation with the invisible, universal church.

These concepts foreground the phenomenon of individual agency, which is central to my view of the missionary enterprise: a view that is not blind to issues of power, ethnocentrism, and wealth, but makes room for a robust examination of all capital transfers and investments (economic, cultural, and social).7

I organize the paper into three sections. First, I describe the Brazilian context surrounding the origins of the hymnal; next, I provide a brief history of the hymnal including information on content, editions, editors, writers, translators, and composers. In the final section, I apply the concepts proposed by Ingalls et al. and Rommen to explore possible reasons for the acceptance of Cantor Cristão’s imported repertoire by Brazilian Baptists.

2. Historical Background

In order to understand the history of Cantor Cristão, it is first necessary to consider the historical context in which this hymnal was published in the last decade of the nineteenth century in the city of Recife in Northeast Brazil. Following the short-lived presence of the Huguenots in Rio de Janeiro (1555–1560) and the frustrated attempt of the Dutch to establish a colony in Northeast Brazil (1630–1654), Protestantism began to take root in Brazil during the reign of Dom Pedro II (1825–1891).8 Especially after 1850, political and economic reforms, immigration policy, and the tight control that the state exerted on the Catholic Church (interfering “even with the Church’s most basic functions such as formation and maintenance of a competent clergy and the effective religious instruction needed to guarantee the doctrinal orthodoxy and doctrinal purity in the country”) together formed the context in which Protestant groups began their work in Brazil.9

During that period, the country actively recruited immigrants from Europe and North America, even offering to pay for their travel expenses. As a result, whereas only an estimated 2072 immigrants arrived in Brazil around 1850, in 1888 alone, their number increased to 133,253. Furthermore, between 1891 and 1900, an average of 112,500 immigrants arrived in Brazil every year.10 Only a small number of the new immigrants were Protestant; protected by imperial laws, these few Protestants were free to practice their particular form of Christianity in their new home country of Brazil.11

This was the South American field that Robert Reid Kalley (1809–1888) and his wife Sarah Poulton Kalley (1825–1907) entered in 1855.12 A self-financed Scottish medical doctor, Kalley was an experienced missionary who had already served on the Island of Madeira (where he had learned Portuguese), in Ireland, Malta, Palestine, the United States, and England.13 His first wife died while they were in Palestine (she was buried in Beirut), and soon after he married Sarah Poulton, a wealthy “linguist, musician, painter, poetess, and Sunday School teacher.”14 In 1858, they established the Igreja Evangélica Fluminense15 (“Fluminense Evangelical Church”) in Rio de Janeiro, the first Portuguese-speaking Protestant church in Brazil.16

Foremost among the many accomplishments of the Kalleys in Brazil is the preparation and 1861 publication of the first Brazilian Evangelical hymnal, Salmos e Hinos (“Psalms and Hymns”), followed by an 1863 edition with music, Salmos e Hinos com Músicas Sacras (“Psalms and Hymns with Sacred Music”).17 These volumes were used by most Portuguese-speaking Protestant groups in Brazil until the publication of Cantor Cristão thirty years later in 1891.18

It was also in the second half of the nineteenth century that American immigrants founded the first Baptist church in Brazil in 1871, in Santa Barbara d’Oeste, in the state of São Paulo. That church, however, was established by and for American immigrants (also known as “Confederate exiles”) who had established a colony in Brazil after the American Civil War.19 Only ten years later did the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention decide to send missionaries to work among the Brazilian people outside the American immigrant colony. In 1882, the first Baptist church “for Brazilians” was founded in Salvador, Bahia, with five members: Southern Baptist missionaries William Buck (1855–1939) and Anne Bagby (1859–1942), Zachary Clay (1851–1919) and Kate Taylor (1862–1892) and one Brazilian convert, Antonio Teixeira de Albuquerque (1840–1887).20 By the end of the nineteenth century, Brazilian Baptist work had reached multiple regions in the country, comprising fifty-eight congregations (twenty-three of them fully established churches), with a total of 1524 members.21 Similar to the United States, today there are several Baptist denominations in Brazil. The largest is the Brazilian Baptist Convention, founded in 1907, comprising 1,682,278 members in 9941 established churches and 4905 congregations.22

From the beginning of Baptist work in Brazil, hymn singing has been used not only as a central tool in missions and evangelization, but also as a resource for Christian education and devotion. In his doctoral dissertation titled “Early Hymnody in Brazilian Baptist Churches: Its Sources and Development,” Isidoro Lessa de Paula discusses the importance early missionaries and Brazilian writers and pastors gave to hymnody.23 Both Anne Bagby and Kate Taylor translated and consistently used hymns as part of their missionary efforts.24 Hymn singing often served as the means to connect with the Brazilian people and in some cases, to diffuse hostility among the people when they incited trouble against the missionaries, especially in rural regions of Brazil.25 The significance of hymn writing, translating, and singing is evident in the lives and work of eminent missionaries such as Solomon Ginsburg, author or translator of over one hundred hymns, and William Edwin Entzminger (1859–1930), an American who, in the early 1900s, led the Brazilian Baptist publishing house responsible for the edition and dissemination of Cantor Cristão, and who translated or authored seventy-two hymn texts.26 Likewise, Manuel Avelino de Souza (1887–1962), an early Brazilian pastor, educator, poet, and denominational leader, contributed twenty-six original hymn texts and three adaptations to the hymnal.27

3. The Changing Nature of Cantor Cristão

The successful trajectory of Cantor Cristão began with Solomon Ginsburg (1867–1927),28 a cosmopolitan figure and world citizen, who was an Orthodox Jew turned Christian convert whose path traversed Poland, England, and Portugal before he arrived in Brazil.

Born to Orthodox Jewish parents, Ginsburg fled his home in Poland—escaping an arranged marriage planned by his father—and went to England. He was then only fourteen years old. There he lived with his uncle, who also hired him as an assistant bookkeeper.29 However, when Ginsburg converted to Christianity, his uncle made him leave his house and fired him, refusing to recognize him as family.30 He found shelter in a place called the Home of Jewish Converts, where he learned the art of printing—which turned out to be essential to the work he would eventually do as a missionary in Brazil.31 After a few years at that institution, Ginsburg felt the need for further Christian education. He attended Cliff College, a branch of the Regions Beyond Missionary Training College, and started working among the Jews. It did not take long for Ginsburg to realize that his calling was to preach “not to the lost tribes of Israel, but to those who know not God, the true God and his Saviour Jesus Christ.”32 Soon after, he accepted an invitation from the Congregational Mission to work in Brazil as a self-supporting missionary. On his way to South America, he spent the early part of 1890 in Portugal studying Portuguese. He supported himself by writing and selling tracts against the Roman Catholic Church with incendiary titles such as “Saint Peter Was Never a Pope,” and “The Religion of Rags, Bones and Flour.”33

Ginsburg arrived in Rio de Janeiro in June of 1890. Once in Brazil, he moved several times around the country and eventually decided to “throw [in his] lot with the Baptists,” as he put it. He was baptized again, this time by immersion, and soon after was ordained into the ministry.34 In 1891, he moved to Recife, the capital city of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where he published a collection of sixteen hymn texts that became the first edition of Cantor Cristão.35

Although there are no known extant copies of the first three editions of the hymnal, contemporary sources announced their publication and described their contents.36 The monthly Evangelical Newspaper O Bíblia, for example, jointly published by Ginsburg and Fernandes Braga in Rio de Janeiro, made reference to the first edition of Cantor Cristão (1891) in both its September and October issues. Based on his archival research, Rolando de Nassau speculated that Cantor Cristão was published in either July or August of that year.37 (See

Table A1. Hymns in the first edition (1891) of Cantor Cristão83.

Portuguese Title and CC Number	Translation Place and Date	Author (A) and Composer (C)	Original Text and/or Tune	Source
“Chuvas de Bênçãos” (1971 CC #168)	Rio de Janeiro, 10 June 1890	Daniel Webster Whittle (1840–1901) (A); James McGranahan (1840–1907) (C)	“There Shall Be Showers of Blessings”/SHOWERS OF BLESSING	Ira Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos and Sankey-Bliss’s Gospel Hymns
“Tão Perto do Reino” (1896 CC #5; 1971 CC #237)	Pernambuco (PE), 11 May 1891; 1971 CC Translation by Ricardo Petrowsky	Fanny Crosby (1820–1915) (A); Robert Lowry (1826–1899) (C)	“So Near to the Kingdom”	Sacred Songs and Solos
“Avançai!” (1971 CC #446)	Recife, PE, 24 May 1891	Ethelbert William Bullinger (1837–1913) (A); McGranahan (C)	“Trusting in the Lord, Thy God”/ONWARD GO!	Christian Choir
“Vinde a Mim! Ao Vosso Salvador!” (1971 CC #218)	Olinda, PE, 26 May 1891	Nathaniel Norton (1839–1925) (A); G. C. Stebbins (1846–1945) (C)	“Come unto Me! It Is the Saviour’s Voice”	Sacred Songs and Solos
“Do Deus Santo Somos Filhos” (1971 CC #364)	Escada, PE, 27 May1891	Whittle (A) McGranahan (C)	“Sons of God, Beloved in Jesus”	Christian Choir
“Conta-me a História de Cristo” (1971 CC #196)	Cabo, PE, 28 May 1891	Crosby (A); Sankey (1840–1908) (C)	“Tell Me the Story of Jesus”	Christian Choir
“Cantarei a Linda História” (1971 CC #44)	PE, 1891	Francis H. Rowley (1854–1952) (A); Peter P. Bilhorn (1861–1936) (C)	“I Will Sing the Wondrous Story”/WONDROUS STORY	Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs and Solos
“A Cruz Ainda Firme Está” (1971 CC #197)	Recife, PE, 1891	Horatius Bonar (1808–1889) (A); McGranahan (C)	“Hallelujah for the Cross!”	Gospel Hymns
“A Mensagem do Senhor” (1971 CC #198)	PE, 1891	William August Ogden (1841–1897) (A and C)	“I’ve a Message from the Lord, Hallelujah!” LOOK AND LIVE	Probably E. O. Excell’s Triumphant Songs
“Cristo, Meu Salvador, Veio a Belém” (1971 CC #200)	Goiana, PE, 1891	[Perhaps A. Nettleton (A)] E. E. Hasty (1840–1914) (C)	“Seeking for Me”/”Jesus My Savior to Bethlehem Came”	John Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music
“Oh! Vinde à Fonte de Sangue” (1971 CC #215).	PE, 1891	Crosby (A); Stebbins (C)	“Come to the Fountain”/”Come with Thy Sins to the Fountain”
“Ó Corações, Considerai” (1971 CC #233).	PE	Eliza Reed (1794–1867) (A); Sankey (C)	“Oh, Do Not Let the Word Depart”
“Cristo Salva o Pecador” (1971 CC #234)	Maceió, Alagoas AL, 1891	Erdmann Neumeister (1671–1756 (A); McGranahan (C)	“Jesus nimmit die Süunder an!”/”Christ Receiveth Sinful Men”	Evangelischer Nachklang; Gospel Hymns
“Oh! Vem Divina Luz!” (1971 CC #263)	AL, 1891	Solomon L. Ginsburg (1867–1927) (A); William Howard Doane (1832–1915) (C)	“O Light of Light, Shine In”
“Eu Ouvi a Voz de Deus” (1896 CC #13); later removed from Cantor Cristão		Gisnburg (A)
“Oh! Que Farei Pra Me Salvar?” (1896 CC #29); later removed from Cantor Cristão	Recife, PE	Ginsburg (A)

in the Appendix A section, indicating the contents of the inaugural edition of the hymnal).

The issuing of each subsequent edition of the hymnal, along with its contents, was recorded in O Bíblia (later renamed O Christao),38 and later in the Brazilian Baptist newspaper, O Jornal Batista. Nassau, a contributing writer to the denominational paper, published a series of articles listing the various editions of Cantor Cristão. He composed those helpful lists based on his own examinations of a variety of sources such as Antonio Neves de Mesquita’s História dos Batistas do Brasil, Ginsburg’s autobiography, O Bíblia, O Christao, records from the Brazilian Baptist Publishing House (Casa Publicadora Batista), O Jornal Batista, and the writings of Henriqueta Braga.39

The first edition of Cantor Cristão contained three hymns that Ginsburg had written in Portuguese; the other thirteen were his translations of hymns written by Fanny Crosby (“Tell Me the Story of Jesus”), Daniel Webster Whittle (“Showers of Blessings”), and Francis H. Rowley (“I Will Sing the Wondrous Story”), for example.40 The second edition, published in the same year, contained twenty-three hymns, suggesting that the demand for such a publication was high.41

The use of Cantor Cristão was not limited to Brazil, and sources attest to its transnational influence among Portuguese-speaking Christians. Copies of the third edition were brought to the United States by Methodist Episcopal missionary George Benjamin Nind (1860–1932) to be used by the Portuguese-speaking immigrant communities in New Bedford, Massachusetts.42 Nind had worked for ten years in Brazil as a self-supporting evangelist and teacher; he returned to the United States in 1892.43

Within ten years of its first printing this evangelism-aid booklet with sixteen hymns grew to include 225 hymns. By 1915, Cantor Cristão included 450 hymns and in the following decade it grew to 578 hymns. In its 36th edition, in 1971, the hymnal comprised 581 hymns.

Ginsburg himself was responsible for the publication of the earliest editions of Cantor Cristão, sometimes using his personal printing press and on other occasions contracting with a local publishing house to produce the hymnal. Thus, the place of publication frequently depended on where Ginsburg was working at the time: Recife, Salvador, Niterói, or Campos, for example. He continued to serve as its editor even after Casa Publicadora Batista (Baptist Publishing House), began publishing Cantor Cristão in 1903.44 In 1911, The Brazilian Baptist Convention adopted Cantor Cristão as the official Brazilian Baptist hymnal, a position it would hold until the advent of a second Baptist hymnal, Hinário para o Culto Cristão, in 1991.45

Although the Brazilian Baptist Convention had planned to release the first edition of the hymnal with music in 1915, World War I prevented Ginsburg from making that deadline.46 In 1917, he resigned from his position on the editorial committee due to disagreements with fellow missionary Entzminger, director of the Baptist Publishing House, about the planning for the music edition of the hymnal.47 Despite his dissatisfaction with the manner in which the hymnal’s edition was being conducted, Ginsburg continued to work at the Casa Publicadora Batista until 1920.48

Preparations for the edition with music finally began in 1922, and in 1923, the Brazilian Baptist Publishing House issued a sampler containing the first fifty-one hymns of Cantor Cristão. This was certainly a momentous occasion, given that already in 1907, missionary A.B. Deter included the following paragraph in his report of the Publishing House submitted to the Southern Baptist Convention: “Brother S. L. Ginsburg has revised and enlarged our Baptist hymn book, the ‘Cantor Christao’ (Christian Singer), adding over fifty new hymns to it, making it one of the best, if not the best, hymn book in the Portuguese language. We are printing a 10,000-word edition and are praying that the Lord may send us money to print a music edition.”49

A comparison between the contents of this sampler and a copy of the eighteenth edition of Cantor indicates that the order of these hymns is the same in both publications. I have been able to examine both personally: Seminário Teológico Batista do Norte do Brasil (North Brazil Baptist Theological Seminary) owns a copy of the sampler and A. B. Deter’s great grandson, Paul Oliver, lent me Deter’s personal copy of the eighteenth edition of Cantor Cristão.50 Furthermore, the 1971 edition I used as I was growing up in Brazil still maintains the same order of hymns. This detail has significant consequences for the connection Brazilian Baptists of many generations have to their hymnal. To this day, in more traditional Baptist circles identifying hymns by their numbers is as common as identifying scripture passages by their chapter and verse: those who are deeply involved in the community will understand; those numbers are ingrained in their memories.

The first complete edition of Cantor Cristão with music was finally published in 1924 under the supervision of Ricardo Pitrowsky. This edition also incorporated the textual revisions included in the eighteenth edition of Cantor and was labeled as the “definitive text.”51

Nassau indicates that it is sometimes unclear whether a new publication was in fact a new edition or simply a reprint.52 Nevertheless, he continues his chronology as follows: 2nd and 3rd editions with music, 1930 and 1935, respectively; 28th in 1941, and 29th in 1954; 30th edition, 1956, with 578 hymns. The next edition available to the public (the 34th) was issued in 1964 and contained 580 hymns. Interestingly, the 31st, 32nd, and 33rd editions circulated only among the Baptist Convention leaders; the 35th edition may simply have been a reprint of an earlier edition.53

In 1971, the 4th edition with music (the 36th edition overall) was published under the direction of missionary Bill H. Ichter. This edition stood out in the long history of Cantor. It contained numerous improvements, including corrections in the harmony of hymns, textual revisions incorporating official orthographic changes to the Portuguese language required by a 1971 law, eight indexes (the previous edition had four), and expanded documentation. Ichter was then the director of the Music Department of JUERP (Junta de Educação Religiosa e Publicações or Board of Religious Education and Publications, the publishing arm of the Brazilian Baptist Convention, formerly known as the Casa Publicadora Batista).54 Several people assisted him with this project, including the Brazilian hymnologist Henriqueta Braga, and music students from the South Brazil Baptist Theological Seminary, under the guidance of missionary Joan Sutton, among others.55

As noted by Carlos Ichter in 1987, “[e]ven if a new hymnal is published, the 1971 edition of the Cantor Cristão marked an entirely new direction in Brazilian Baptist Hymnody. The documentation found in its pages will be extremely valuable for any committee wishing to devise a new hymnal. Although [Bill] Ichter made many contributions to church music in Brazil, perhaps none is quite as lasting and significant as the revision of the Cantor Cristão.”56

In 2007, thirty-six years after Ichter’s edition, in commemoration of the centennial of the Brazilian Baptist Convention, a new edition of Cantor came out, officially called the “thirty-seventh edition of Cantor Cristão, revised”.57 The preface to the hymnal opens with the following quotation: “Cantor Cristão is a rich inheritance that belongs to Brazilian Baptists. The hymnal, the second of Evangelical Brazilians (the first, Salmos e Hinos, was published in 1861), appeared in 1891 and its initial edition contained only sixteen hymns.”58 These are the same opening words used in the preface of the 1971 edition, and written by Bill Ichter.59 The 2007 edition’s editors also explained the reason why the Publishing House decided to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Convention by preparing a new, revised edition of the hymnal: “the way we see it, there is no publication by JUERP, in all of its hundred years of existence, that is closer to the heart of our people than this hymnal which, having been edited sixteen years before [JUERP’s] creation, has become, since then, one of JUERP’s main trademarks.”60 It should be noted that, in describing the revisions adopted in 2007, the editors point specifically to the editorial work done for the second Brazilian Baptist Hymnal, Hinário para o Culto Cristão, published in 1991 and seen by some as a threat to the hegemony of Cantor. In reality, Cantor Cristão has not been replaced by Hinário; if anything, it has been renewed by it. Moreover, the 581 hymns from the 1971 edition are all found in the 2007 edition, in the exact same order and with the same numbering.

Commenting on the 1971 edition, De Paula points out that Cantor Cristão “contains more than 200 translations or adaptations of American gospel songs by approximately 123 American authors. In addition, there is a considerable body of original hymn texts written by Portuguese-speaking authors set to gospel song tunes. This means that Brazilian Baptist hymnody is almost totally based on the American Gospel song!”61 This is not surprising if one considers the strong influence of the revivalist styles of Ira D. Sankey on both sides of the Atlantic, which coincides with the work of early Southern Baptist missionaries in Brazil.62 Brazilian hymnody is not unique in this respect. As noted by Robert Stevenson, “Gospel melodies of the Sankey-Bliss-Stebbins-Doane type have been the staple of evangelical hymnals published for use in mission areas”63, hence the similarities between the content of Cantor Cristão and the repertoire I have encountered in congregations of Mexican Baptist immigrants in Texas.

In my ongoing examination of the changing nature and history of Cantor Cristão, I have engaged with a variety of sources and perspectives, considering rationales and processes that assured the production and distribution of various editions of the hymnal over a period of more than a century, including the role of publishing houses, national and international initiatives, and institutions. In the following section, I attempt to interpret the facts and events presented thus far, through the lens of musical localization, and the complementary notions of “negotiation of proximity” and “the ethics of style.” By keeping an ethnomusicological focus on the interplay of human agency, I hope to shed some light on our understanding of the significant place of Cantor Cristão in Brazilian Baptist life.

4. “This Is My Story, This Is My Song”

In O Celeste Porvir: A Inserção do Protestantismo no Brasil, Brazilian historian Antônio Gouvêa de Mendonça indicates that pioneer pastors, evangelists, and missionaries frequently had to settle for sporadic contacts with their congregations given the size of the country, the available means of transportation, and the small number of workers in the “field.”64 In the period between these visits—which could be months, in some cases—these congregations would continue to practice their new faith in spite of the lack of formal religious leadership to instruct and guide them.65 Mendonça proposes that, in the absence of written liturgies, prayers, creeds, and sermons, hymnals and song collections used by these congregants are in fact indispensable documents in our quest to learn about the history of these early Brazilian Protestants. In the specific case of Brazilian Baptists, there is no better source than Cantor Cristão which, in spite of its 130-year history, remains near to heart of the Brazilian people. My ethnographic research in Recife uncovered a number of deep connections between this old hymnal and fellow Brazilian Baptists who readily shared with me their memories of singing hymns from Cantor Cristão with relatives at home and with other Christians at church, of reading hymn texts as a way to learn about their new-found faith, of finding comfort when, in a strange place, they recognized familiar melodies. I have also heard testimonies about the importance of the hymnal from Brazilian Baptists from other regions. Recently, a man in his mid-fifties shared that when he first joined a Baptist church in São Paulo, Brazil, he used to read his words-only edition of Cantor Cristão while riding the bus to and from work, as a way of exploring both the doctrines and the faith vocabulary of his new church. Being unfamiliar with the melodies of those hymns did not prevent him from engaging this repertoire. On the contrary, he recognizes that his “studying” of hymn texts contributed greatly to his faith formation.

As mentioned above, De Paula stated that “[t]he hymnody of Brazilian Baptist churches, despite contemporary contributions, has remained basically static since 1924, when the first edition with music of the hymnal Cantor Cristão was published. The decision not to add new hymns in subsequent editions of the official denominational hymnal has resulted in a partial stagnation of Brazilian Baptist Hymnody and its limitation to a single basic style.”66 Given his choice of words—“static,” “stagnation,” and “limitation”—De Paula’s evaluation strikes me as tinged by a certain degree of pessimism. From my perspective, Cantor Cristão’s lasting influence is directly related to these features, which could also be described in positive terms: stability, familiarity, consistency. The adoption of Cantor Cristão as the official Baptist hymnal in 1911 by the Brazilian Baptist Convention created the conditions for this repertoire to become deeply connected to Baptist life in Brazil.67 With each new edition, more and more foreign hymns were introduced to Brazilian congregations who in turn would embrace them as their own. Even when Brazilian authors did write an original text, it would usually be set to a readily available American hymn tune. This phenomenon is explained by the concept of musical localization, a model that acknowledges that much congregational music that is considered “foreign” or of non-indigenous origins can become locally useful. Recent examination of ethnographic case studies of Christian music-making “show the complex interweaving of political, ethical, aesthetic, and theological rationales in the localization of congregational music, and how musical styles marked as ‘foreign’ help communities achieve their goals, often of local power negotiation, more effectively than styles understood to be ‘indigenous.’”68

For instance, in her research among the Yolngu in Northern Australia, Fiona Magowan has examined the way in which hymns and evangelical songs introduced in the 1920s by Methodist missionaries remain a meaningful element for the Yolngu to this day. Magowan suggests that the musical exchange that took place between the missionaries and the local people could be explained by a series of interrelated processes—encounter, reorientation, reception/agency, and leadership/independence—handled with cultural sensitivity and appropriateness, over a significant amount of time.69 She concludes that “the practice of hymn-singing has facilitated collectivizing principles of care, concern, and respect for one another, by embodying long-lasting principles or relational continuity between missionaries and Yolngu. Methodist hymns have thus acquired an ongoing significance within Yolngu generations because singing hymn texts evokes personal and spiritual efficacy through emotional relationships of the past[.]”70

Similarly, for Brazilian Baptists, the repertoire of imported hymns contained in Cantor Cristão was not considered foreign for long; through musical localization these alien melodies and translated texts found in the hearts and minds of Brazilian converts an inviting soil to thrive. “Inviting” is a crucial term here, one that expresses the agency of those who chose to embrace this repertoire and much more. For, along with gospel hymns they chose to accept behaviors, vocabularies, schedules, and the priorities involved in becoming a Protestant, a “nova seita” (literally, “new sect”), a “Bibleman,” or even a “goat,” as some have been called at different times and places.71

In my assessment of this process of transplantation of mission hymnody into the Brazilian Baptist context, I wish to stress three important points. First, Protestant missionaries, Baptist or otherwise, did not displace an “untouched” indigenous culture when they arrived in Brazil in mid-nineteenth century. By then, Brazil had been a colony of Portugal from the 1500 to 1822, when it became an independent empire; Brazilians spoke Portuguese, and Roman Catholicism was the religion of the land. Thus, the goal was not converting Brazilians from “paganism” to Christianity but rather from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.72 Second, Protestants did not form a homogenous block. For example, Ginsburg’s decision to leave the Congregationalist denomination and become a Baptist was not made lightly. His description of this change reads almost like a new conversion experience,73 hence the importance of Cantor Cristão’s status as the first official hymnal of Brazilian Baptists, and the only one for 100 years. In this role, Cantor Cristão not only preserved a highly stable repertoire but also functioned as an emblem of the Baptist denomination in Brazil. Third, because Brazilian churches do not have hymnals available to those attending services; each person purchases his or her own copy. My research has confirmed the significance of personally owned copies of Cantor Cristão that hold great value for their owners, where names of family members and dates of important events are recorded, lovely dedicatory notes are handwritten, and pictures are kept, so that the book itself functions as a keepsake. As noted by Christopher N. Philips, personal copies of a hymnal could “have a talismanic power for many owners, creating a bond through hand, eye, and voice to God, to worshiping communities, to friends and neighbors, and to family and departed loved ones.”74

Considering mission hymnody in the context of mission history is also instrumental in providing a more nuanced view of this repertoire. As noted by Dana L. Robert, “mission history is the story of those who spread the gospel message, and those who respond to it. The missionaries and converts are like the two sides of a bridge, the anchors for the span across which faith travels.”75 Lamin Sanneh’s distinction between proselytes and converts also highlights local agency in the process of conversion: “Converts were not cultural orphans or undiscriminating neophytes; rather, by virtue of the choice they made, converts were involved in judgement and discernment at the same time that they were involved in appropriation and assimilation.”76 Missionized Brazilian Baptists embraced Christ’s command to “go into all the world,” understanding that no Christian was exempt from the work of missions. They sent their first home missionary in 1899 and, in 1911, their first international missionary was sent to Portugal.77 In this context then, examining “the forces on the ground,” as suggested by Sanneh,78 may help us calibrate the characterization of Christianity as a “henchman of colonialism,” and Christian missions as “a tool of Western domination.”79 Successive generations of converts as well as those brought up within the Brazilian Baptist tradition have affirmed again and again that the hymns contained in Cantor Cristão were eminently useful for their individual and corporate spiritual lives.

Timothy Rommen’s complementary notions of “negotiation of proximity” and “the ethics of style” are also connected to the process of musical localization, and I believe these concepts may shed some light on the lasting appeal of mission hymnody to contemporary Brazilian Baptists. To explain the widespread appeal of North American gospel music among Protestants in Trinidad, Rommen describes the “negotiation of proximity” as “an exercise in deflection and disfiguration whereby the near is made far and the far becomes immanent and useful.”80 Styles that are local have problematic associations that lead to division within and among churches, who do not agree on local styles’ acceptability or appropriateness for worship; however, styles and songs coming from a geographical and cultural distance are embraced because they lack these problematic associations. Thus, the North American origin (far) of the predominantly gospel hymnody that comprises the repertoire of Cantor Cristão made it automatically “superior” to, or “holier” than, any indigenous songs produced locally (near). Because missionaries, evangelists, and pastors were the ones introducing this repertoire in the context of a worship service, Bible study meeting, or an evangelistic campaign, the only association Brazilians had with this repertoire was exactly that. As missionaries, evangelists, and pastors baptized believers into Protestant communities, their songs were “baptized” as well.

In addition, according to Rommen “[s]tyle […] is an important vehicle through which individuals reaffirm or change (articulate) the status of their relationship to community. The ethics of style is thus intended to focus attention on the process by which style becomes the vehicle for the multifaceted discourse about value and meaning, but also about identity formation.”81 The appeal to make a decision to accept Christ’s salvation, the “altar call,” so characteristic of Baptist services, included the understanding that in order to follow Jesus one needed to abandon the “things of this world” (coisas mundanas), adopting a radically different way of living. In the case of Brazil, among the most obvious changes in behavior would be the allegiance to a close-knit congregation, consistent church attendance, the serious study of scriptures, hymn singing, and the rejection of drinking, smoking, and dancing. Witnessing would also be encouraged and one of the simplest ways to do so would be to adopt the visible signs of carrying a Bible—and frequently a copy of Cantor Cristão—in public.

5. Conclusions

In 1891, pioneering missionary Solomon Ginsburg used his printing skills and emergent knowledge of Portuguese to compile and publish a booklet containing sixteen hymns he titled “Cantor Christão.”82 This modest collection eventually became the first official Brazilian Baptist hymnal, and the only one for the next one hundred years. For most of the twentieth century, the Bible and Cantor Cristão stood as the two essential religious artifacts in the lives of devoted Brazilian Baptists, and although only one of those books had the word “sacred” written on its cover—Bíblia Sagrada (literally, sacred Bible)—in practice these volumes shared a similar status.

The immensely popular nineteenth-century North American hymnody, already embraced by Ginsburg even before his arrival in Brazil from England via Portugal (thanks to the Moody–Sankey evangelistic campaigns), represented the preferred style to which Baptists would subscribe as yet another sign of their distinct religious identity. That this music came from afar lent it this “otherworldly” quality and set it apart from the “secular” music of the predominantly Catholic social context from which Baptist converts walked away. Consequently, it is essential that anyone attempting to evaluate this particular repertoire consider, in addition to any of its textual-musical-theological features, the specific religious minority context in which it has been used in Brazil for over 130 years.