Kailane Frauches prays and sings at an Assembleia de Deus evangelical church service in Duque de Caxias, Brazil, on Dec. 21, 2025.
Photographer: María Magdalena Arréllaga for Bloomberg PursuitsForget Samba. Gospel Is the Soundtrack Behind a New Brazil
Latin America’s largest country is looking increasingly evangelical — a shift in faith that’s reshaping culture and power.
Ever since she was little, Kailane Frauches remembers the voice in her head telling her to sing. “It was something inside of me, as if God were just naturally there,” she says from her home in a sleepy town an hour’s drive south of Rio de Janeiro.
Today, at age 22, Frauches is a rising celebrity of Brazilian gospel music, one of the country’s most ubiquitous and fastest-growing music genres. Boasting a multiyear contract with a leading Christian music producer, she clocks 1.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 2 million followers on Instagram and fills arenas from Rio to the Amazon basin with odes to Jesus.