Religion in Venezuela
Before the arrival of Spanish missionaries, the people residing in the territory of modern day Venezuela practiced a variety of faiths.
[6] Jehovah's Witnesses claim 136,542 active publishers, united in 1,734 congregations; 319,962 people attended annual celebration of Lord's Evening Meal in 2020.
[10] In the past, representatives of the Catholic Church-affiliated National Laity Council have claimed that the government has at times pressured school administrators to not teach religious courses, but that in other cases teachers had autonomy to include religious education as long as their curricula were otherwise compliant with the Ministry of Education's standards.
Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that has its origins in the reform initiated by Martin Luther and other theologians as a critical response to the Catholic Church at the time.
In the following decades, various theological currents allowed the birth of various denominations, such as: Presbyterianism (which in turn became the official religion of Scotland, as the State Church de Kirk), Calvinism, Anabaptism in Switzerland and The Netherlands, Methodism in England, among others.
Motivated by poverty and in search of a better future, hundreds of thousands of northwestern Europeans[13][14] saw their destiny in the United States of America and made it their new home, where they practiced the Protestant faith from different perspectives.
That's why the existence of free evangelical (state) churches, regardless of denomination, with Swedish and Norwegian-Danish backgrounds,[15] in addition to the German, Dutch and also English-speaking ones.
"El Redentor" Presbyterian Evangelical Church is named as the oldest congregation of Caracas dating back to 1898, which merged from an earlier Methodist effort since 1878.
The evangelicals have had a big motivation for establishing schooling with Christian belief emphasis, just like the Christiansen Academy, in Rubio, Venezuela; as well as Colegio Americano de Caracas (Presbyterian).
The spread of evangelical proselytizing was organized into different regions by diverse pioneer works: The Christian-Evangelical Churches of Venezuela, today, are mainly segmented into six major branches:[21] and other Pentecostals groups Independent Baptists, Bible Baptists, and Reformed Baptists The Orthodox Church in Venezuela has existed in Venezuela with the purpose of satisfying the spiritual needs of this religious groups, mainly made up of Russian, Yugoslav (Serbian, Croat and Bosnian) immigrants who arrived in the country since the end of World War II.
Added to that group are the Greeks, Romanians,[22] and Ukrainians,[23] who with the passing of the decades their descendants have maintained that faith in the country.
When the oil boom ended in 1982, followed by devaluation of the local currency, many of the non-resident Indians decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
All of them have adapted themselves very well to their country of residence and are generally held in high regard by the local people on account of their hard work, expertise and non-political nature.
On the whole, the Indian community in Venezuela is quite prosperous and has a per capita income that is above the national average that is itself as high as US$8,300 in terms of PPP.
