The missionary Protestantism that was established in Brazil, from the second half of the
nineteenth century, gradually expanded throughout the country and began to be represented in
the most different Brazilian population contexts. Therefore, this work, using the travel report
of the Scottish Protestant missionary Archibald Macintyre to the valleys of the Araguaia and
Tocantins Rivers, in 1920, aims to analyze his religious discourse, in order to understand the
historical constitution of the missionary narratives about the populations of the Central Cerrado
in the first half of the 20th century. For this, we use works that deal with Protestantism from
Europe and North America and we seek, from the ideological and ethical assumptions of
missionary Protestantism, to understand categories and concepts such as morality, civility,
conduct and modernity, present in the missionary's social vision of the population groups of
Northern Goiás, today the State of Tocantins. The study, supported by anthropological works,
seeks to consider the social practices of the populations with which the missionary sought
interaction. We observe that the missionary's narrative, when compared with studies that focus
on understanding historical and anthropological aspects of backlands and indigenous groups,
indicates that there was a proposal to spread elements of his religious culture among northern
populations. For the missionary, the acceptance of the Protestant faith would cause changes in
the social, moral, and religious behavior of the interior populations, that is, the expression of
those values which are typical of European and North American Protestantism.
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