A survey released in January showed that the percentage of Catholics in Brazil continues to decline, while the proportion of evangelicals has increased at a higher annual rate in the past few years.

According to the private institute Datafolha, the proportion of Catholics in Brazil currently corresponds to 51%, while the percentage of evangelicals grew to 31%. In 2013, another Datafolha survey had shown that Catholics represented 57% of the Brazilian population, and Evangelicals amounted to 28%. The last official census produced by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics demonstrated in 2010 that the proportion of Catholics corresponded to 64.6% and evangelicals amounted to 22.2%. The institute will conduct the next census this year.

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Although the surveys produced by Datafolha and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics are not comparable — due to methodological differences — it’s clear that the number of Catholics is decreasing at a faster rate in the past few years, explained José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a demography expert who worked at the Brazilian Institute.

“From the end of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century, the Catholic Church lost about 1% of its followers per decade. From the 1990s on, it started to shrink about 1% per year,” he told the National Catholic Reporter.

Alves believes that this process has accelerated since 2010 and now he estimates that the current rate of Catholic decline corresponds to 1.2% per year — with 0.8% of annual evangelical expansion. If nothing changes, evangelicalism will surpass Catholicism in Brazil by 2032, he calculates.

That would be a major transformation in a country that has the biggest Catholic population in the world, with more than 90% of Brazilians identifying as Catholic in 1970.