Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Religion is shaping Brazil's presidential election – but its evangelicals aren't the same as America's

Amy Erica Smith, Associate Professor of Political Science as well as Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Professor, Iowa State University
Mon, September 26, 2022

Pastor Silas Malafaia, second from left, prays alongside President Jair Bolsonaro, far left, at the Assembly of God Victory in Christ Church in Rio de Janeiro. AP Photo/Bruna Prado

With one week to go before Brazil’s presidential election, the two front-runners are battling for the religious vote.

Last month, first lady Michelle Bolsonaro told an evangelical church service that the presidential palace had been “consecrated to demons” under previous presidential administrations – a gibe against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, and his center-left Workers’ Party.

Lula is running again in this year’s election, whose first round is Oct. 2, 2022, and has joined the fray. In his official campaign kickoff in August 2022, for instance, he alleged that the right-wing current president, Jair Bolsonaro, is “possessed by the devil.”

Lula has been heavily favored to win the election and retake the office he held from 2003 to 2010. In polls, he currently runs about 15 percentage points ahead of Bolsonaro.

Religious voters are an important part of the story. Bolsonaro – whom international media dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics” for his persona as a conservative firebrand, his anti-democratic streak, and his ability to attract a Christian base – garnered 70% of evangelical support in the 2018 election. Scholars, including me, argue that without the evangelical vote, he would have narrowly lost.

However, as a political scientist who has written a book about religious politics in Brazil, I see these comparisons between the U.S. and Brazil as also glossing over key differences. Yes, Bolsonaro and Trump are very similar in how they use religion. Yet the ways evangelical communities work and how religion shapes politics is different in each country – and my own research suggests that conservative Christians will not be as consistent a base for Bolsonaro as they are for Trump and the Republican Party.

Who’s who

One key difference is the language used: who “evangelicals” are in the first place.


In Latin America, traditionally a Catholic stronghold, the Spanish and Portuguese term “evangelico” is applied to nearly all non-Catholic Christians, including Protestant denominations that are usually classified as “mainline” or even “progressive” in the U.S. Estimates indicate that around a third of Brazilians identify as evangelical today, up from just a few percentage points in 1970. In the same period, the percentage of Catholics has fallen from over 90% to right about half.

By contrast, in the U.S. the term “evangelical” is reserved for theologically conservative Protestant groups, as well as Christians who have had a “born-again” experience of religious awakening. Americans also increasingly apply the term “evangelical” in a political sense, to refer to predominantly white political conservatives who are affiliated with Protestant churches.


Evangelicals pray and dance during a campaign rally for former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro on Sept. 9, 2022. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

As a result, the group of people termed “evangelicals” is much more diverse in Latin America than in the United States – and it’s politically quite diverse, too. All this said, many evangelicals in Brazil do have some tendency to adopt theologically conservative beliefs, such as interpreting the Bible literally.

Dozens of parties


A second major difference is the lack of strong partisan affiliation on Brazil’s religious right. Since the 1970s, many Americans are used to associating evangelicalism with the Republican Party. The founding of groups such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority helped spur evangelicals to become a strong base for political conservatism.

However, there is no political party in Brazil that can claim such a strong link to evangelicals as a whole. Brazilian politics is famously fragmented, especially on the right, and there are dozens of parties in Congress at any given time. Many parties – mostly conservative ones – court evangelicals, but none have shored up strong loyalty across the wide spectrum of evangelical denominations and churches.

Jair Bolsonaro personifies this weak partisanship. Bolsonaro ran for the presidency in 2018 under the Social Liberal Party, but then left the party to attempt to form his own party in 2019 after taking office. Those efforts ultimately failed, and he joined the Liberal Party in late 2021.

Evangelicals may support Jair Bolsonaro, but polls have shown they have little loyalty to whatever party he is affiliated with at the moment. As a result, the president cannot count on his voters to also elect his political allies. Ultimately, this very weak partisanship in the electorate weakens presidents, since they have to negotiate with a highly fragmented Congress.

Key issues

A third difference between evangelicals in Brazil and the U.S. relates to their views on political issues. Like their counterparts in the U.S., religious conservatives in Brazil feel very strongly about issues related to sex and gender. In a striking parallel to recent controversies in U.S. public schools, Brazilian evangelicals mobilized politically over the past decade to oppose efforts to teach children and teenagers tolerance on LGBTQ issues.

However, Brazilian evangelicals are much less conservative than their American counterparts on many other issues. This is particularly the case for topics on which U.S. evangelicals often follow cues from the Republican Party. For instance, my research shows that Brazilian evangelicals from a wide range of denominations are highly supportive of environmental action such as preventing deforestation.

Many Brazilian evangelicals have historically tended to come from poor areas and communities of color, leading them to support issues such as welfare policy and affirmative action. About 1 in 3 Brazilian evangelicals identifies as white, versus 2 in 3 in the U.S.

As a result, they are likely to be attracted to President Bolsonaro for his conservative stances on gender and sexuality. However, they may penalize him for his very weak record of environmental protection as well as what is generally recognized as poor performance on the economy and COVID-19.

Electoral merchandise with images of former President Lula are displayed on a street in Brasilia, Brazil, Sept. 20, 2022
. AP Photo/Eraldo Peres
Tea leaves

What does this mean for the upcoming presidential election? Bolsonaro is again attracting evangelicals, though not yet as strongly as in 2018. New evidence indicates that only about a quarter of evangelical churches are getting involved in the campaign so far this year – a substantially lower share than what my co-authors and I documented in 2018.

However, particular churches are still taking a strong stance. Brazil’s most politically engaged Pentecostal church, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, is urging its followers to begin a monthlong “fast” from secular news sources. This will presumably increase the political influence of church leaders, including the church’s head, Bishop Edir Macedo, who is an ardent Bolsonaro supporter.

Like their U.S. counterparts, Brazilian evangelicals tend to be highly religious and believe that religion should influence politics. What that means in 2022, however, is harder to divine than ever. After Bolsonaro’s four years in office, evangelicals may well judge him by his track record, not just by his promises – which could be both a blessing and a curse for him.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Amy Erica Smith, Iowa State University. The Conversation has a variety of fascinating free newsletters.

Read more:

Brazil’s economic crisis, prolonged by COVID-19, poses an enormous challenge to the Amazon

White Gen X and millennial evangelicals are losing faith in the conservative culture wars

Amy Erica Smith currently receives funding from an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, as well as a Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Professorship at Iowa State University. Research reported in this article was previously funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, a Luce/ACLS Fellowship in Religion, Journalism, and International Affairs, a Wilson Center Fellowship, and a Seed Grant from the Global Religion Research Initiative. She sits on the Research Council of Instituto Civis, as well as the editorial boards of a number of journals, including the Journal of Democracy. She also sits on the Ames Community School Board in Ames, Iowa, USA.

Lula challenges Bolsonaro's grip on Brazil evangelical vote


Former Brazilian President and presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva holds a rally during the presidential campaign in Curitiba


Tue, September 27, 2022 
By Jimin Kang

RECIFE, Brazil (Reuters) - When Ariel Nery left the pews of her conservative evangelical megachurch for the floor cushions and hammocks of the progressive Igreja Mangue church four years ago, the backlash from her family often left her in tears on Sunday nights.

For the same reason, the 25-year-old is avoiding a chat with her parents, stalwart supporters of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, about her plans to vote on Sunday for his leftist rival, ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

"I'm afraid because I don't want to ruin my relationship with my family," Nery said.

She is far from the only evangelical Christian in Brazil dancing around that delicate matter.

Although Bolsonaro and his allies have worked to transform Brazil's fast-growing evangelical churches into the bedrock of his political base, this year's campaign has shown the limits of that electoral strategy.

After Bolsonaro won the evangelical vote two-to-one in 2018, many more evangelicals — especially poorer women — are weighing a vote for Lula, whose legacy of generous social programs speaks powerfully to Brazil's less affluent evangelical voters.

The two were running neck-and-neck among evangelical voters until a few months ago, according to pollster Datafolha. Even as Bolsonaro has built up an advantage over Lula in the heat of the campaign, he struggled to break past 50% of the evangelical vote in recent Datafolha surveys.

Looking to bolster the 'shy' Lula vote among evangelicals, the Workers Party (PT) is partnering with leftist pastors like Paulo Marcelo Schallenberger, whose sermons aim to counter the party's "demonization" in evangelical circles.

"We receive huge numbers of people in the church who are going to vote for Lula, but don't admit it ... because if they do, they will be persecuted by their churches and cast away," Schallenberger told Reuters, reflecting on his own experience of being ostracized by colleagues for his politics.

Indeed, many of Brazil's evangelical churches and their high-profile pastors have embraced Bolsonaro, who defends traditional family structures, vows to fight abortion rights and casts rivals as communist "demons" in Cold War-style rhetoric.

"Bolsonaro indisputably defends the most conservative ideals along with the conservative evangelical Christian population," said Renato Antunes, 41, a traditional Baptist pastor and city councilman in the northeastern city of Recife. To show his opposition to abortion, he uses a plastic figurine of a life-size fetus as a paperweight for his office Bible.

Bolsonaro has peppered his public schedule with near daily events alongside religious leaders. His campaign has created a prominent role for his third wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, who wears her evangelical Christian faith proudly on the campaign trail.

"We will bring the presence of Lord Jesus to the government and declare that this nation belongs to the Lord," she told the March for Jesus in Rio de Janeiro last month. "The gates of Hell will not prevail over our family and the Brazilian church."

But for plenty of evangelical Christians, the fiery partisan rhetoric from conservative pastors is turning them away from traditional megachurches and their powerbroker pastors.

Political polarization is contributing to the roughly 20% of evangelical Brazilians who called themselves "unchurched" in the last census, according to Rodolfo Capler, a Baptist pastor and researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo.

As the evangelical population grows quickly – from 20% of Brazil in 2010 to roughly 30% now and on pace to outnumber the current Catholic majority in about a decade – it is also becoming more diverse, Capler said.

"Independent churches are opening a path for new generations. They are creating freer environments where people can express their thoughts, sexualities, and political beliefs," he said.

While congregants pray stoically on pews at Recife's Assembleia de Deus megachurch, the scene across the Capibaribe River at Igreja Mangue tells a different story: young adults share their life stories during worship as a barefoot pastor in a t-shirt sits among them.

"It's a refuge where I can be myself among so many different people, understanding that the kingdom of God is not about uniformity, but diversity in unity," said Nery.

(This story deletes extra words 'in Recife' in penultimate paragraph)

(Reporting by Jimin Kang; Editing by Brad Haynes and Alistair Bell) 

Brazil election: ‘We'll vote for Bolsonaro because he is God’

Katy Watson - BBC South America correspondent, in Recife
Tue, September 27, 2022 

Jair Bolsonaro is seeking re-election after becoming president of Brazil in January 2019

In the first of two profiles of the leading candidates in the race to become Brazil's new president, Katy Watson asks if incumbent Jair Bolsonaro is - as his fans argue - a great leader, or someone who disdains democracy.

Wherever Jair Bolsonaro goes, he likes to stir controversy - but few were expecting him to do so on the eve of Queen Elizabeth II's funeral. As world leaders flew to the UK to mark her passing, President Bolsonaro saw an opportunity to do some campaigning.

While British mourners accused him and his fans of lacking respect in a period of mourning, he was undeterred.

"We're on the right path," he told his supporters from the balcony of the Brazilian residence, saying Brazil did not want to discuss the legalisation of abortion or drugs, with cheers from the crowd in response. And he repeated his often-cited slogan: "God, homeland, family and freedom".

Another familiar mantra at his campaign events is the chant: "Mito, mito, mito."

He is, to his fans, a "myth" - a legendary leader - and they are convinced their man will be re-elected in October.

Despite polls showing his main rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in the lead, nothing will deter Mr Bolsonaro's greatest supporters from believing the president, who has himself denounced the polls as a lie, is the only man to lead the country.

Pastor Laura Almeida, at the Mustard Seed Ministry in the north-eastern city of Recife, is one of his most committed fans. Standing in front of her Sunday congregation, she sings his praises.

"We'll vote for Bolsonaro because he is God," she tells her members. "He defends the same principles as us in accordance with the word of God."


Pastor Laura Almeida says she believes that President Bolsonaro is the saviour who will ease the people's suffering

After the service, she explains her thinking to me.

"Whenever people are suffering, when they believe in an all-powerful creator, I think God raises up a saviour," she says.

I ask her if that saviour is President Bolsonaro. "Yes," she replies. "Today in Brazil, I think that's him."

Mr Bolsonaro sings from the same song sheet as many evangelicals. He preaches the importance of family, he is vehemently against abortion and he is known for his homophobic comments.

And it was congregations like Laura's that got him elected in 2018.

"Evangelicals are growing in Brazil," says Prof Vinicius do Valle, Director of the Evangelical Observatory information service in Brazil. "They are now about 30% of the population - only two decades ago, it was about 15% so they are increasing very quickly and it's changing the way we do politics here."

But it is not the same way that the church has traditionally been involved.

"The Catholic Church played a democratic role in the past decades," says the professor, referring to the Church speaking out during the military dictatorship. "But that hasn't happened when it comes to evangelical churches. They are playing a role in Bolsonaro's election and against democratic institutions in Brazil - we see ministers calling people to go to protests against democratic institutions."

Mr Bolsonaro does not separate politics from prayer. His campaign language is littered with religious references. Even lifting himself up to a godly status.

He hit this year's campaign trail in Juiz de Fora, the city where he was stabbed in 2018 - the place where, in his own words, he was "born again".


Gilson Machado describes the president as an "old uncle"

But in the north-east of Brazil, he has a tough job on his hands to convince voters he is the man for them. This is not Mr Bolsonaro's natural stomping ground. In fact, it was the only region where he lost in 2018.

The poorest region in the country, it is where Lula was born and with which he has been associated for all of his political career. For that reason, it has become the ultimate challenge for President Bolsonaro to gain ground here.

Gilson Machado is an affable local politician. A former tourism minister under Mr Bolsonaro, he is perhaps most well-known - or infamous - for his love of playing the accordion. Now, he is running for senate in Pernambuco, but he is also head of Mr Bolsonaro's national campaign in the north-east, and is a great friend of the president.

"He's an old uncle and he likes football, he doesn't drink, he loves his family, he's a Christian and he's a hard, hard worker," he says. "He's the man for the world - the biggest right-wing president of the world right now."

That feeling is shared by nuclear medicine doctor Mitchell Lewis. Although it is not shared by his medical school friends Geraldo Aguiar and Kalina Sá, who are sitting with him at his dining table, enjoying a glass of wine.

From left to right: Geraldo Aguiar, Kalina Sá and Mitchell Lewis - friends with opposing views

In such a polarised political contest, it is surprising the three remain friends. So many relationships have fallen foul of politics in Brazil these past few years.

"What makes you a Bolsonarista [a Bolsonaro supporter] is when he speaks directly to your heart, to your soul," he says. "Bolsonaro freed this voice from all these people you see in the streets screaming 'Mito!'."

Geraldo says he is going to vote for Lula. Mitchell shakes his head.

"Bolsonaro lost a great opportunity to be seen as responsible and confront this pandemic in an intelligent way," Geraldo says, criticising how he behaved during the pandemic. "I don't think he has the emotional intelligence for this."

Kalina though, is on the fence after having voted for Bolsonaro in 2018.

"I am totally against [Lula's] Workers' Party, but I don't think Bolsonaro was a good leader," she says. "He has not listened, and with that, he lost my vote. Those who support Bolsonaro do so no matter what, independently of what he does."

Ultimate commitment or blind adoration? Mitchell has the last word.

"I'm not a religious person, I am an atheist, but when Bolsonaro says that he has a mission from God, I start questioning my lack of belief."


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