The present article aims to question the widespread (but not discussed) idea that Brazil would have experimented, under the Constitution of 1891, a period of strong secularism, with a rigid separation between State and religion in many different areas, in a manner that a model of approximation between these two spheres (specially with the Catholic religion) adopted by the next Constitution (1934) would have been a kind of an answer to such experience. Assuming this premise, as the doctrine has done, would imply to recognize that a model of separation between State and religion has already been experimented and rejected in brazilian constitutional history, which could, somehow, legitimate the model of approximation adopted in 1934 and kept, in broad sense, till the present. Showing the misunderstandings of this approach, on the other hand, allows comprehending that in Brazil there were always a strong approximation between State and religion, which resulted in a weak idea of secularism that has been argued nowadays.
secularism; Republic; freedom of religion