JESUS is a word mark in force in Brazil for goods such as water tanks. DEUS, the Portuguese word for God, is one for beers. “Assembleia de Deus” appears in 332 registrations in force spread across 251 owners.
No, none of this means that anyone owns Jesus or God. Understanding why the answer is no leads straight to a book that a small religious community refused to destroy. It also leads to the question Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court has agreed to decide.
The book Projeto Sião would not destroy
Maurício Artur Berger is a former member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the leader of Projeto Sião, a movement based in Palhoça, in the state of Santa Catarina. According to Berger and his followers, he received from the angel Moroni plates connected to the origin narrative of the Book of Mormon and translated its sealed portion.
In 2019 the group released The Sealed Book of Mormon, held a conference and promoted the work on websites, Facebook and Amazon. The Church saw a risk that the public would attribute to it a movement and a scripture it does not recognise. It demanded the removal of its signs, the cancellation of domain names, an end to distribution and the destruction of printed materials, plus damages.
In its reply to the notice, reproduced in the case file, Projeto Sião said it had removed “Mórmon” from the name of its official website and from its Facebook page. But it refused to destroy the book, which it regards as sacred scripture. The word left two channels; it stayed in the title of the belief.
The courts barred Berger and the movement from using the Church’s full institutional name as their identity, under a daily fine of R$10,000. At the same time, they allowed the scripture to circulate, presented as the movement’s own interpretation. The Rio de Janeiro Court of Appeals kept that separation: it protected the institutional name, treated “Mormon” as a possible reference to the religion and its doctrine in that context, and did not halt distribution of the book. The work remains available.
When no one keeps the whole word
The investigation searched for Jesus, Deus, Bíblia and Gospel alongside Oxalá, Ogum, Iemanjá, Exu, Xangô, Umbanda, Candomblé, Alá, Torá and Buda. Ambiguous expressions were admitted only when the sign, the owner or the goods and services supplied a religious context. “Espírito Santo” is also a Brazilian state; “Batista” can be a surname; “Universal” is not necessarily a church.
After those controls, the most eloquent picture came from “Assembleia de Deus”: 332 registrations in force, spread across 251 owners. The largest of them holds only 4.2%. Instead of a word fenced off by a single proprietor, the register shows an identity shared by many legal entities.
How a faith is organised leaves a trace at the INPI
“Adventista” draws a different landscape: 53.5% of its 86 registrations in force sit with the largest owner. Among the five registrations in force containing “Mórmon”, all converge on the same Church. The distance between 4.2%, 53.5% and 100% says nothing about who controls a belief. It shows how religious words can occupy very different institutional positions.
The structure of the traditions themselves appears to leave a trace in the register. The Brazilian Assemblies of God bring together countless legally autonomous ministries and conventions. The Adventist organisation presents itself as a worldwide network integrated in levels. And The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints administers its identifiers centrally. This is a correspondence consistent with the data, not a proven causal link. Caution is all the more necessary because the MÓRMON mark family has only five registrations in force within the set.
Two entities, the same mark, the same class
The word mark JESUS appears in three registrations in force held by Fortlev, in classes 17, 19 and 20. One of them, application 908745044, covers items such as non-metallic pipes, water tanks and roof tiles. It was granted in February 2018.
But there is an even more instructive coexistence. The Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer and the National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida hold identical word-mark registrations in force for DEUS CONOSCO, “God with us”. Both are in class 41 and both reach communication. One covers books, periodicals, texts and digital publishing; the other, television, radio, journalism and entertainment.
The official decisions publish no general theory for that coexistence. The documentary fact is simpler: neither the identity of the words nor the overlap of the class produced absolute ownership. What is protected depends on the concrete application of the sign.
The opposite happens too. In 2018 the INPI refused the word-mark application PALAVRA DE DEUS, “Word of God”, filed by Igreja Batista Cidade Universitária for religious education. The decision applied article 124, VI of the Brazilian Industrial Property Act: for that service the expression was in common use and lacked sufficient distinctive form.
A system that admits DEUS for beers, allows two Catholic entities to share DEUS CONOSCO and stops a church from reserving PALAVRA DE DEUS for religious education. The boundary does not separate permitted from forbidden religious words. It separates signs that can indicate an origin in a given context from signs that cannot.
Commerce speaks the language of faith too
There is a word-mark registration for DEUS covering beers, held by InBev Belgium. BUDA is a word mark owned by an agricultural inputs company for goods including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. OXALÁ and XANGÔ, two Afro-Brazilian deities, sit side by side in the portfolio of food manufacturer M. Dias Branco, for the same list of foodstuffs.
The records show that protection was granted; they do not prove that every product was actually sold under those names. The curiosity serves a larger idea: a sacred word can distinguish a commercial origin without ceasing to belong to the vocabulary of a religion.
In directly religious activity, the BOUTIQUE UMBANDA case shows how the line can swing. The INPI first refused the composite mark for lack of distinctiveness in the retail of religious articles. On appeal it reversed its own decision and granted the registration. The public record does not reveal which element changed the conclusion, so the turnaround cannot be attributed to the design of the mark.
The INPI’s current Trademark Manual does not automatically prohibit religious names. The Manual itself illustrates the care the examination requires with SÃO JORGE, Saint George: it admits the sign for candles and treats it as unregistrable for condoms, given the relationship between the sign, the product and the possibility of offending the faithful.
Sociedade Bíblica do Brasil, the Brazilian Bible Society, holds 144 registrations in force within the set searched. Casa Publicadora das Assembleias de Deus appears with 75. These figures do not necessarily cover all of their marks.
A church splits. The doctrine stays in the name.
The best of the 32 invalidity petitions identified began long before the INPI. According to the account taken to court, an attempt to remove a pastor from a congregation in Poços de Caldas, in 1993, ended in a rupture. The community became independent, but went on following Foursquare doctrine.
Decades later, the separation was still written into the name: Igreja do Evangelho Quadrangular Independente, the Independent Foursquare Gospel Church. The Foursquare Gospel Church argued that adding “Independente” did not remove the similarity, that both operated in the same field and that the signs could confuse the faithful. The breakaway church replied that “quadrangular” also names a religious doctrine and that the new whole made its autonomy clear.
After years of administrative decisions pointing in different directions, the independent community went to court. In 2025 a final ruling by the Federal Regional Court of the 2nd Region reinstated three registrations “so as to allow coexistence” with the earlier mark.
That word, coexistence, sums up the case better than its procedural maze. The community was able to keep in its name the tradition it had split from, while each organisation kept a trademark set of its own. The conflict that has now reached the Supreme Court was not born there; the INPI and the courts already draw this boundary every day.
The boundary reaches the Supreme Court
Berger’s case turned into a constitutional question what the register and the Foursquare history already showed in practice: protecting an institutional identity may require limits, but a religious tradition also needs shared language.
When the dispute became a constitutional question
On August 19, 2026 the Supreme Federal Court unanimously recognised the general repercussion of Theme 1,471. The merits have not been judged yet. In the opinion that took the case to the full bench, Justice Cristiano Zanin set two constitutional guarantees against each other: freedom of belief and worship, and the protection of trademarks.
In plain language, the question is this: if a registered expression is also necessary for another community to explain its origin, its texts and what it believes, how far can the earlier mark stop it from using that expression?
If the Church obtains broader protection, it gains leverage to stop publications, conferences, fundraising and derivative movements from appearing authorised or affiliated. If a narrower reading prevails, its registrations remain in force but may reach fewer confessional uses.
For Projeto Sião, a broad interpretation could mean renaming the work, altering web pages and no longer presenting itself as “Mormons of the Sealed Book”. For other communities born of schisms, it could limit the words available to tell their own genealogy. In the opposite direction, religious freedom without brakes could make it harder for an organisation to stop third parties from looking like its official continuation.
Faith needs words that can be shared. A trademark needs signs that can distinguish.
JESUS can stay on the trademark register for water tanks without that limiting the use of the name in faith, in devotion or in prayer. The difficulty begins when the same word has to say, at the same time, what someone believes and which organisation it came from. That is the boundary the Supreme Court will have to draw.
What the data does not show
There was no explosion of religious trademarks
Applications within the set grew 4.43 times between 2005 and 2025. The system as a whole grew 4.93 times. Their relative share fell from 0.279% to 0.251%. The phenomenon grew, but no faster than the trademark market around it.
How we got to these numbers
The analysis uses Brazilian INPI data maintained by TrademarkIQ, with a cut-off of September 14, 2026 and publications up to RPI 2905, of September 8, 2026. We searched 37 families, normalising accents and variants and separating substrings, whole words and exact signs. Of 21,422 lexical candidates, 13,113 entered the contextual set. That universe has false negatives and does not represent every religious trademark.
Registrations in force required a compatible status and an unexpired term. Owners were grouped by the root of their CNPJ, the Brazilian corporate tax number, where available, and by name otherwise. The invalidity network requires an identified petition and petitioner. The 32 petitions are not a probabilistic sample of all litigation.
Download the investigation dataset as CSVSources and documents consulted
About the author
Ricardo Vinhas
Founder of TrademarkIQ
Ricardo Vinhas is the founder of TrademarkIQ and a specialist in strategy and data intelligence. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Statistics from the Federal University of Bahia and a master’s degree in Statistics and Information Management, with a specialization in Marketing Research and CRM, from the NOVA Information Management School, NOVA University Lisbon, where he also completed a postgraduate program in Digital Enterprise Management. In 2026, he completed the Certification in Intellectual Property Law & Strategy from the WIPO Academy and INPI.