Current suppositions in light of the future-past that is knocking on the door!

When Jair Bolsonaro² won Brazil’s presidential election in 2018, I was immediately taken back to the fieldwork I conducted for my master’s in anthropology in the National Congress³ with the Frente Parlamentar Evangélica [Evangelical Parliamentary Front], between March and July 2010, when I participated in worship services, events, public hearings, and ordinary Commission sessions, especially those that involved political priorities of the group. I accompanied congressional aides in their daily activities and legislators in action in political activities (Duarte, 2011). Considering some knowledge that I acquired during the time that I moved through that space (Duarte, 2014), three questions arise and continue to hover in my thoughts.

The first concerns how Jair Bolsonaro’s speech and behavior, considered spontaneous and not concerned with being politically correct, were validated by a large portion of his electoral base (Solano, 2018). During the campaigns, he affirmed his political profile as a legislator of the so-called “low clergy⁴”, a defender of authoritarianism, of military and police forces, and of arming the population as a solution to the country’s problems. Supported by these agendas, he participated in commissions whose themes involved public safety, and was more likely to react to issues than make proposals in debates⁵.

The second question concerns how Bolsonaro successfully performed an anti-political representation without a need for a party affiliation (Solano, 2018), and which through a “digital political body” (Cesarino, 2019) presented alarmist messages, often not true, but which easily gained wide attention on social networks. Through his electors, who became followers, pre-existing moral values in Brazilian society were mobilized, expanding adhesion to Bolsonaro’s political campaign. According to Cesarino (2019), the process of constructing the “myth” (as he came to be referred to with reverence during the electoral campaigns), his political rise, and his electoral success is characterized by this digital populism.

This occurred largely because Bolsonaro was presented as an integral representation of “conservative, neoliberal grammar” (Cesarino, 2019: 549), distinguishing him from the “old right” by linking a defense of arms and severe punishment, a neoliberal economic foundation that emphasizes the self-made-man and a minimum state, support for international anticommunist action and a moral religious agenda that defends the patriarchal family (Lacerda, 2019). During the campaign, these themes stimulated fear, interests and aspirations and above all, religious and moral values that were affirmed while slandering and attacking enemies in hateful discourse presented as freedom of opinion.

My third question, which is as important as it is challenging, stems from a reflection on field data from my research about the Evangelical Parliamentary Front. What is the political importance of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front in the construction of the presidential candidate and his political success and governability?

Bolsonaro attained electoral success by connecting religious values with the political discourse that the Evangelical Parliamentary Front had been shaping and revising through the action of its members, particularly in congressional commissions that addressed issues of the family, customs, women’s rights, religious freedom, gender and sexualities (Baptista, 2009; Duarte, 2011; Trevisan, 2015, Vital da Cunha and Lopes, 2013).

As we will see, The Evangelical Parliamentary Front has been establishing relations between the sacred principles that they profess and the political positions that they defend through a politicization in reaction (Vaggione, 2006: 26) to agendas of feminist movements, and those to defend sexual and gender diversities and human rights . In part because their political capital appeared to be weak and they had few significant political gains until the 53^rd legislature (2007-2010), these legislators had minimal dialog with constitutional principles and participated in various political alliances to strengthen their moral agenda, (in support of the traditional heterosexual family, against legalization of abortion, for conservative social values and against the rights of women and for sexual and gender diversities).

Since the 54^th legislature (2011-2014), there has been a strengthening of the Evangelical Front, which based on moralist positions, was able to combine other conservative political positions to compose a new right-wing movement (Lacerda, 2019) capable of changing the direction of a government and a presidential mandate, while influencing social and electoral perceptions. Perhaps most importantly, it became the political base of a government for which a moral agenda is the backbone and a fundament of a new Brazilian state that is “terribly Christian”, extremist and conservative.

Although the objective of this article is not to analyze how and why Jair Messias Bolsonaro won the elections (cf. Cesarino, 2019; Almeida, 2019, Burity, 2018, Py, 2020a) or the ideological-political structure of his government, I want to affirm that moral values that organized his campaign and that are being instrumentalized to maintain the fidelity of the religious bases of his government, originate from the actions of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front which, since it was established, has demanded that the state accept the values of the Christian majority for all of Brazilian society.

In this context, I provoke my own anthropological analyses about the evangelical participation in the legislature, understanding that it no longer involves disputes for space within a plurality of political voices and representations, but the solidification of an alliance of conservative sectors in Brazilian politics to form a base for a government that is self-entitled Christian, which conceives the state as a sounding board of a single “truth” to which all others must submit.

This involves a new governability which is closely affiliated to the Evangelical Parliamentary Front and its religious bases. The technique employed proliferates fear and hate, doctrines and dogmas, under the cloak of political theories and discourses that threatens social pluralities and constituted and emerging rights, rejects scientific knowledge and challenges anthropological presumptions.

Present pasts: reconsidering some legislative actions of the Evangelical Front

The causes and effects of evangelical participation⁶ in public life, the forms of social, cosmological and ritual organization of evangelical churches and their relations with the times of politics, with disputes over concepts of the secular and religious and secular freedoms as well as their effects on religious, legal and political fields, have had effects beyond the political field and that are highly influential in society, in the social sciences of religion and in the anthropology of religions and politics.

I consider it important to ponder a certain surprise over this sociological novelty (Duarte, 2017) because for centuries the Roman Catholic Church has been hegemonically part of national political life, formulating principles for constitutions, supporting and capillarizing religious values in society, influencing policies and making demands on the state⁷. It is important to recall that historic Protestant sectors also participated in political life in the republican state (Campos, 2010).

In any case, as Baptista (2009) highlights, in the 1950s and 1960s Pentecostal groups were ignored by Brazil’s intellectual and political elites and seen as alienated from political processes, despite their strong adherence to the military regime (Cowan, 2014). Nevertheless, until the 1980s, evangelicals broadly followed a religious sectarianism in relation to the world (Freston, 1993). For this reason, their representations in the legislature and in the National Constituent Assembly (ANC)⁸ were reserved, as has been indicated by Freston (1993) and Baptista (2009). If in the past they had been ignored, today they are leading and not secondary figures (Freston, 1993) in our analyses, due to the political capitals that they have conquered and their effects on politics in the country, the public expression that they have attained, as well as their numeric growth in each census⁹.

The theological turn in the early 1980s when evangelical sectors, particularly those religious corporations with a significant number of faithful, such as the Assembly of God¹⁰, ran “candidates of the church” in the elections of 1986 to dispute the religious field with Roman Catholics, seats in institutional political spaces, relevance in the political debates about projects and moreover, guarantees of benefits from the state for the groups that they represent. Given a “new national pact” (Baptista, 2009: 160) that would establish a new foundation for Brazilian society after the National Constituent Assembly, the argument “evangelicals do not get involved in politics” shifted to a biblical reading that justified a new undertaking: participating in the Constituent Assembly allowed the evangelicals to “rewrite” Brazilian history, reshaping the place of the “People of God” in society (Freston, 1993). How prophetic!

A Front of many Fronts

The Evangelical Parliamentary Front¹¹ was only established in the National Congress in the 52^nd legislature (2003-2006), on 18 September 2003 in a special session in honor of the National Day of Missions. Deputy Adelor Vieira¹² (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party/Santa Catarina) was elected as the first president, and the executive board was composed mostly of deputies affiliated to the Assembly of God. At that ceremony, Deputy Pedro Ribeiro (Party of the Republic, Ceará) acclaimed “by the mercy of God and in the name of Jesus” the establishment of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front of the National Congress and prayed for the life of the legislators and for “unity” among them¹³.

The strategy adopted by its leaders was of partisan plurality to expand the capillarity of the evangelicals in the Congress to attain the political objectives of the group, the defense of the family, morality and good customs (Duarte, 2011: 55-56, Baptista, 2009). To do so, deputies Adelor Vieira, Raimundo Santos and Pedro Ribeiro proposed the realization of weekly religious rituals¹⁴ when they could engender both a “strategic mobilization” (Baptista, 2009) around the agenda of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front, and promote evangelization and evangelical conversion in the legislative space.

I conducted field work among the daily legislative activities of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front at the end of the 53^rd legislature (2007-2010), which had lower Evangelical presence due to the so-called “scandal of the leaches¹⁵” in the previous legislature (2003-2006). It was early 2010, at a time of heightened political activity due to the presidential elections that would be held in October. Nevertheless, even with only 56 legislators¹⁶, the Evangelical Parliamentary Front established its presence in the House, especially through opposition to the National Human Rights Program-3 and through representation of a controversial bill known as the Statute of the Unborn Child.

On my first day of research, I encountered a worship service, during legislative hours, in one of the rooms of the Commission. Even taken by a disorienting shock to my certainties about forms of political representation and participation and their sacred agencyings (Duarte, 2014), over time, I began to understand the importance of that ritual as an “anthropological find” (Duarte, 2012). Due to long experience with ethnographic analysis of evangelical services and their policies (Damasceno, 2004), I considered their worship services as one of the spaces for the Front to establish their presence, because it involved an “effective performance of [religious] discourse” (Bourdieu, 1996: 82) that provided those legislators with capital needed to conduct alliances, defend bills, benefit their churches, influence policy and the religious field itself.

To do so, they often used the metaphor of “being a missionary in the legislative House” which gave meaning to the radical defense of life from conception, the traditional family and moral values that represented the nation. However, they affirmed they should also be “servants of Christ”, marking other abilities that they should grasp to justify their political vocations. As servants, not public, but of Christ, they serve their bases and churches and would be the leaders in the constitution of a society “redeemed by the lamb”.

In this way, they occupy politics through a “war of images” (Latour, 2008) between religious values and the pernicious values raised by feminist movements, intellectuals and relativists, establishing emblems, constructing their reputations, evoking feelings and producing religious truths to fight against bills, groups and themes that are enemies of the Gospel. Since then, the Evangelical Front has been developing a technical staff specialized in political action not only in the legislature, but also in the executive and judiciary branches to act in the name “of life” as is the case of Minister Damares Alves¹⁷.

The moral agenda was the calling card of the Evangelical Front in its radical action in the legislature “for life and for family”, especially because it was always more closely aligned historically to conservative positions towards customs and economic liberalism. Nevertheless, at the time of my research, the executive branch was highly conciliatory, but did not consider itself Christian. Thus, the Evangelical Front, in various ethnographic situations invested in the need to be “players” in the legislature and no longer “beggars” (Vital da Cunha and Lopes and Lui, 2017: 126), to make their moral agenda not only a bargaining chip in exchange of votes, but an influential tool in the House, in public policies and in society.

The political action of the Evangelical Front was not limited to citing biblical verse in bills, members understood that they had to learn the political strategies needed to play to win. As we saw, they instrumentalized legal principles so that religious moral precepts would be validated in bills proposed, thus exploiting the conservative trend in a population extremely discriminatory towards social changes and new cultural, sexual and familiar parameters. For example, they evoked moral panic by affirming that the government would teach children in school about sex, to oppose discussions about gender. And they were able to gain adhesions, particularly in moments of economic and political crisis as Brazil experienced since 2013, and above all in electoral periods characterized by divisions, threats, and conflict and more recently, by the proliferation of hate on social networks and radicalization of political polarizations.

Ideologization and religious truth, moral majority, modalities of secularism and human rights in the discourse of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front: previous notes, but current questions

21 December 2009

The Secretariat of Human Rights of the government of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva published a decree that approved the National Human Rights Program-3 (PNDH-3)¹⁸ which sought to strengthen principles in the Brazilian Constitution and ratification by Brazil of international declarations and pacts about human rights. Reactions in opposition from part of the Congress were immediate and endorsed and promoted by major media outlets, which in name of freedom of the press, opposed a proposal to create a legal framework for radio broadcasting supported by a culture of human rights and with possible warnings about violations. The newspaper headlines in Brazil strongly accused the government of attempts to censor the press and control the news. Evangelical and Catholic groups and their religious supporters in Congress also manifest their support for freedom of religious expression and in defense of the family and life.

17 March 2010

It was my first day of fieldwork. After the service, the National Human Rights Program-3 was the topic of political discussion that generally followed the sacred time of the religious service. One of the aides to the Evangelical Front warned the deputies that on the following Wednesday after the religious service, a meeting would be held among evangelical leaders to discuss the National Human Rights Program-3 and develop strategies. The president of the Evangelical Front made a point of emphasizing “the Front’s victory” in removing three points of interest of the religious community from the National Human Rights Program-3. In that election year, the National Human Rights Program-3 prompted indignant reactions in Congress, not only from religious sectors, but also from representatives of agribusiness and military interests¹⁹ who mobilized sufficiently effective opposition to shake inter-ministerial relations and the Lula government and influence the 2010 campaign. They may have given origin to the rhetoric that lifted Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency and that in many ways support him politically in power (Solano, 2019).

24 March 2010. Seminar “Family, Church, and the National Human Rights Program-3 (PNDH-3)”

The Evangelical Parliamentary Front held the seminar in conjunction with the National Program in Defense of Life and Family and participants included federal deputies, senators, various local political representatives, and those with an evangelical and Catholic base. The objective was to promote a Christian union against the “lascivious content of the National Human Rights Program-3” which was a threat to the Brazilian family, as Deputy Henrique Afonso (Green Party/Acre) proclaimed. The event included among its organizers then aide to Senator Magno Malta (Liberal Party/Espírito Santo), now Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves²⁰.

Given that the electoral campaigns were approaching, the tone of the discourses evoked the Christian responsibility to vote in candidates committed “to life”. Then president of the Evangelical Front João Campos (Brazilian Social Democratic Party/Goiás) emphasized that the evangelical base must demand that candidates be committed to “Evangelical issues”, and to those of the churches present at the important political moments and also to monitoring the campaigns of candidates to executive positions.

In this sense, the Evangelical Front sought not to be limited to aggregating or trading votes in the legislatures, but to act as a negotiator capable of earning benefits from the support offered to candidates and influencing important political decisions. For this reason it is pertinent to review some of the rhetoric used at that event about the National Human Rights Program-3, to understand how the Evangelical Front constructed political capital needed to influence the 2010 elections. This marked its break from the (impious) Workers Party governments, and the formation of a new Christian right-wing political force that would later become capable of winning an executive election for a candidate known to be from the far-right (Burity, 2018; Almeida, 2019).

The first was the ideologization of the National Human Rights Program-3 through the theology of Spiritual War (Mariz, 1997), which is particular to Pentecostal and Neopentecosal denominations, which believe that religious and political disputes involve a conflict of good against demons (personified in other religions, political ideologies, social movements), which act in the lives of evangelicals through difficulties, scarcities, illness and addictions. Thus, the decree was the work of the enemy, which was articulated to leftist political and social sectors - “post-modern culture”, cultural relativism, intellectuals, the non-religious - who promote the moral decay of the population by ignoring the nation’s religious values. In this context, legislators and religious leaders emphasize the need for prayer and the intercession of religious communities to undermine the spiritual forces behind the National Human Rights Program -3.

Nevertheless, a political mobilization of the evangelical bases was also necessary, especially because this diabolical ideology that supported the National Human Rights Program-3 sought to establish a communist dictatorship in the country to “muzzle” religions and suppress the religious liberties of the moral majority. The theological rhetoric about the enemy to be fought was combined with attacks on “post-modernity”, atheist humanism, intellectualities and the equally atheist sciences, because they were ideologies that did not respect religions and supported the “culture of death” promoted by intellectuals and feminist and LGBT+²¹ movements, in detriment to the “culture of life” that religions defend. Relativism and cultural relativism at times were used to affirm that non-religious culture is dangerous because it threatens Christian values.

Thus, the National Human Rights Program-3 was depicted as a document made by “a bold intelligence” (Bishop Rodovalho, Progressive Party/Distrito Federal) that by using a language permeated by “evil, misleading and lying words”, sought to “oppose the truth” (the only one, the exegetically fundamentalist Christian religious truth). “They do not say that it is homosexual marriage. No! It is a homo-affective union of people of the same sex. Homo-affective! 90% of the Brazilian population will not know how to interpret this. They are sophisms!”, shouted Deputy Miguel Martini.

Based on the presumption that the National Human Rights Program-3 sought to implement “a dictatorship of minorities” through ideas that would be gradually spread through society and become “natural”, these legislators determined it was necessary that Christians fight that evil not only in the legislature, but in their own spaces of faith. This is because many religious people were already seeking, according to the deputy, “anti-Christian ideologies, borrowed because they no longer believe in the ideology of the gospel”. This would be one of the reflexes of atheist intellectualism in society.

Thus, the National Human Rights Program-3 was considered by the Evangelical Front to be a text of the militants of the “dictatorship of relativism” (Duarte, 2011) that would attack the secular (not atheist), democratic state (which respects religions) and the moral values of the majority of the population. That is, relativism as a paradigm of post-modernity appeared to relativize various customs, except religious ones. For this reason, projects such as the criminalization of homophobia²² would be seen as mechanisms that, appearing to defend secularism, promote “the gagging of people who dare to express a different opinion, and even religious ministers who dare to teach the Bible, teach the word of God about this”, as congressional aide José Duque affirmed. Edward Luz²³, in his talk at the Seminar, and various legislators of the Evangelical Front at other events that I witnessed, affirmed that democracy is the government of the majority and therefore, it would be up to them to legislate for and according to its values that represent the nation. Thus, the legitimate national Brazilian culture (Ranquetat Jr., 2012) must be respected by all of society. It was this population that the Evangelical Front imagined to be moral and mostly religious that must be served by the state.

During the campaign, Bolsonaro affirmed that he would have “a government of the [Christian and conservative] majority” and that minorities would have to submit. This discourse, which some described as “Brazilian Christofacism” (Py, 2020a), was based on a Manichaeistic theology of spiritual war and an authoritarian and violent rhetoric that decreed a war must be “sustained in the memory of Christ, European and colonizer: sacrificial and atoning of social minorities” (Py, 2020a:25). It is with this reading of Christianity that the evangelical bases - the result of the recent configuration of the conservative Christian right that affirmed that its religious truth and conservative moral values were representative of the nation, while denying rights to diversity and those of social minorities - nourished the current Brazilian government, but also broad portions of society.

Correlated to the idea of the moral majority are the modalities of secularism²⁴ (Giumbelli, 2008) formulated and used by the Evangelical Front in their debates and proposals in Congress. The first affirms the validity of the secular state that, not being atheist, should embrace the participation of religions in public and political space, which Zylbersztajn (2016) calls this “separation with collaboration”. For this reason, they refute criticisms of their presence in politics, because if feminist movements can propose bills and laws, as representatives of the majority, they can as well²⁵.

The second conceptual modality of secularism used by the Evangelical Front denies a number of democratic principles, while affirming that their equality before the law and right to freedom of expression guarantee that Evangelicals are free to profess their faith. In this way, when they defend religious liberty, the Evangelical Front uses secularism as an absolute principle to serve the moral majority, while denying the rights of other peoples and groups.

The final modality of secularism defended is that a state that does not encompass the convictions of religions would impose a “secular dogma”, violating its own principle, given that the state must respect religions (Christian ones of course). Also based on the argument of the moral majority, they understand freedom of expression and individual liberties to be absolute rights, correlating them to biblical texts taken out of context, either to demonize other religions or to affirm that religious leaders can preach what is written in the Bible, even if this violates the laws of other people²⁶.

Given these dangers, Henrique Afonso (Green Party/Acre) from the Evangelical Parliamentary Front had no doubts when he affirmed that the “prophetic voice of the People of Christ” should rise against the evil points of the National Human Rights Program-3 which would lower the Holy Bible in detriment to non-religious culture.

We must position ourselves as protagonists in the construction of a Brazil that is different for each of us. A different Brazil, afflicted by the hope given to Brazil by the announcement of the Gospel, of law, of love, of the complete establishment of justice, that is, of a redeemed Brazil. A Brazil whose politics can be redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. An economy redeemed by the lamb. The communication media, art, literature, education, healthcare, leisure, culture, that is, all aspects can be at the foot of the cross and be redeemed. We are thinking of a Brazil that can simultaneously be subject to the concrete establishment of the good news of Gospel here on earth!” (Duarte, 2011: 100)

In this way, Henrique Afonso made clear the need of the church not only to vote, but to begin to exercise citizenship through more active participation in politics and government taking to these spaces the words whose “truth is unquestionable”. For this reason,

This seminar must raise the word of God and say that this truth belongs to yesterday, and to today and will be eternal. That this truth is light for our paths and a lamp for our feet. And that the nations that look to this truth, and have this truth as light, as a lamp for the construction of their society, will be a nation like a spring of water, will be a nation like a garden irrigated by God and will be a nation that will extend its hands to the poor, to those treated unjustly and to the afflicted. It will be a nation that will look to the children even from the maternal womb and will give dignity to children, offering the right to be happy from the maternal womb. This nation that looks to this truth, raises the Gospel and sees this word as a light and a lamp, concluding, she will ride, but she will ride in high places of the earth. And the Lord will call to say: my nation, sheep! And we will be a redeemed people, a redeemed nation. A nation where one can look to the future and say: we are in the hands of Our Lord. This is the reason for this Seminar (Duarte, 2011: 111).

The word of God, as he says, has the power to construct the society desired by Christians, and for this reason, they should go to the world and preach the Gospel so that all people know the truth, not that of the relativists, but the only truth - which for fundamentalist hermeneutics is atemporal, unerring and undebatable - which will free the nation. Despite using rhetoric based on the biblical text to justify political action against the National Human Rights Program-3, deputy João Campos emphasized that evangelicals were not opposed to human rights, but opposed to certain points “that do not have our agreement, our conviction”.

He thus made clear that he supports “a human rights policy for all”, as long as it follows the interpretations of the conservative evangelicals. Contradictorily, the Evangelical Parliamentary Front also positioned itself, at that time, as a defender “of those people who depend very intensely on public power and on the social security system” (Duarte, 2011:100), and to be against criminality, corruption in politics and in public service, social injustices, social inequalities, the non-distribution of income and for respect for children and the elderly²⁷.

The Bolsonarist bases (a term coined by defenders of Jair Bolsonaro) also do not consider themselves to be against rights, but conceive human rights partially: in that they only apply to “good citizens ²⁸” (Solano, 2019; Kalil, 2018). This idea gained strength in Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign, which depicted his followers as a representatives of the patriotic population that worked for the country’s development and who do not benefit from public policies, particularly, those created by the Workers Party government. Thus, a new group rose as a government priority, which saw itself represented in the candidate who joked about his intolerance, hate, racism, discrimination and even promoted violence, and presented this as a legitimate way to conduct and participate in politics.

This polarized logic distinguishes between those who conquer material gains on their own merit and those who benefit from state policies. The Bolsonarist bases also demonize other mediators among individuals, knowledge and political participation - teachers, intellectuals - thus moralizing the “public debate, presenting adversaries as enemies not only of political order, but also of moral and religious order” (Solano, 2019:17).

This evangelical political action declared that its enemies wanted to spread evil through the world created by God and subvert the moral values of society by anti-religious political proposals. This also stems from connections between politics and religious truths, which are not the same, made by the Evangelical Parliamentary Front in various political times and spaces where it effectively defended an absolute right to life from the moment of conception and that the sole model for the family is that established by God.

Anti-gender and pro-life: how non-people become protected by law and how those protected by law become non-people

20 April 2010, Chamber of Deputies, Hearing with the Minister of the Secretariat of Human Rights of the Presidency of the Republic, Paulo Vanucchi²⁹.

Christian religions were supported, in various historic spaces and times, by patriarchal cultural bases that affirm a biological difference between the sexes that “naturally” establishes asymmetrical roles and places for men and women in societies. These standards and stereotypes of men and women continue to be reproduced in contemporary religious communities and reified in schools, churches, policies and in the ways that people organize gender repertoires. Supported by this theological hermeneutic of inequality, most Christian communities (but not all) have refused to discuss agendas raised by feminist movements, given that gender equality has been understood to be contrary to biblical principles and to religious moral values.

However, the intensity of the defense of a binary sense of inequality by conservative religious sectors grew in response to the expansion of social movements that defend the rights of women and rights to sexual diversity. Over the decades, this articulation has intensified social fears, particularly in conservative families that consider it important to maintain authority and control over the education of their children. The expression “gender ideology” - formulated in the 1990s by the Vatican - has been promoted as an evil proposal of women’s’ and feminist movements and sectors of the left interested in contradicting the binary order of the sexes and imposing a new order (considered to be disorder) on relations between men and women.

In a hearing with the Minister about the National Human Rights Program-3, the Catholic Deputy Paes de Lira (Christian Workers Party/São Paulo) affirmed that the decree included a “pernicious expression” - “deconstruction of heteronormativity” - and thus sought to impose “gender ideology” on families, denying parents their right to educate a boy as a boy and a girl as a girl. For these groups, sexual and gender diversities, personified in gays, lesbians, transvestites, bisexuals, transsexuals, transgenders and others identities, are deviations from what is normal, moral and naturally established by the word of God and accepted by the broad majority of society.

As Biroli (2018) and Machado (2016) indicated, since the numerous debates in governmental and non-governmental spaces in the 1990s about public policies to support sexual and gender diversity, conservative religious sectors, above all Catholics, raised their voices against the rights of women, and sexual and reproductive freedoms, which they saw as attacks on religious morality. These conservative religious groups thus began influencing, although in lower intensity in that decade, political agendas raised by the feminist movements. Since the middle of the decade of 2000, to counter the influence of international conferences in support of human rights, there was an international alignment of conservative forces to compose a global policy against gender equality and sexual diversities and to affirm the sanctity of the “traditional and natural family”. This has been an important front in the political battle of these sectors.

Junqueira (2017) affirmed that the formation of an anti-gender lexicon among ultraconservative Catholic groups established the foundations these groups needed to politically counter the agendas of sexual diversity and gender in government policies and social spaces such as schools. By stigmatizing feminism as a negative political movement that is opposed to religious beliefs and moralities, feminist theoretical formulations are “captured, decontextualized, homogenized, drained, reduced to a theory, distorted, caricaturized and imbued with grotesque elements to finally be denounced and repelled” (Junqueira, 2017: 29).

For Junqueira, this can create an opening in society to support “antisecular, antifeminist, and antidemocratic concepts, values and dispositions” (2017:47) reviving male domination, gender norms of a heterosexual matrix and mainly establishing “moral, religious, traditional, dogmatic, intransigent and antipluralist marks” (2017:48) as legitimate values for the political action of the secular state.

The anti-gender lexicon incited the structural misogyny of our society and consequently gender violences and the legitimations of gender inequalities. At the heart of debates in 2014 about new guidelines for the National Education Plan, religious and conservative sectors made considerable noise and were able to bar use of the term gender, preventing a variety of discussions in schools. Opposition to use of the term gender supported by the Evangelical Parliamentary Front is present in the current presidential policy. One of the main guidelines of the Bolsonaro Government to the Ministry of Foreign Relations is that public agents who represent the country in international forums not approve agreements and guidelines that contain the word gender.

It is important to say that Minister Damares had solid relations with the Catholic caucus and conservative groups in Congress to establish a Christian unity “for life and for family”, which is now reflected in a ministry that has abolished the term gender from its policies and promoted an international ideological anti-gender crusade. Soon after she became Minister of Women the Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves affirmed: “this is a new era for Brazil!: boys wear blue and girls wear pink”. She thus used “a rhetorical tool to demonstrate that from that point on, the rigid division of criteria for sex without other variations of gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation, would be the concept that would guide her human rights policy” (Camurça, 2020:98). In this way, in dialog with the fears of the evangelical bases, she distanced Brazil from the broad international human rights agenda and brought it closer to conservative theocratic countries that are highly violent towards women and sexual and gender diversities.

In this sense, it is by making gender a tool for moral panic in the religious fields and in society that these groups have challenged women’s movements and the conquests of women in society. It is by instrumentalizing conservative ideas, in a society still permeated by the political influence of truly patriarchal religious truths, that these conservative evangelical sectors, organized around the Evangelical Parliamentary Front, continue to have a perverse influence on the human rights agenda and particularly on the rights of women. Their political effectiveness has substantially increased because since 2019 they are aligned with and are participants in a government that has instrumentalized these moral positions even more, thus nourishing its bases of support.

28 April 2010, “Government officials for life”, held by the Parliamentary Front in Defense of Life and against Abortion, in partnership with the Evangelical Parliamentary Front, the Catholic and Spiritist caucus and “pro-life” entities. Vote on the Statute of the Unborn Child in the Commission on Social Security and Family of the Chamber of Deputies.

The event “Government Officials for life” was organized to improve relations among the religious and conservative sectors of Congress and society to prevent the direction given to the question of sexual and reproductive rights in the National Human Rights Plan-3 and to guide to religious bases in relation to the 2010 elections. The national campaign “Legislators and Government Officials for Life - Life depends on your vote” held by the National Citizens for Life, Brazil without Abortion Movement, was launched to warn voters about the positions of all candidates about abortion. Thus, as proposed in the Seminar of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front, about the National Human Rights Program-3, the objective was to unite the evangelical bases to pressure not only Congress, but the candidates, to influence the elections.

On the same day as the meeting, evangelical and catholic deputies were warned that the Statute of the Unborn Child would be voted on that day in the Commission of Social Security and the Family (CSSF). As soon as they were warned that the proposal would be voted on, I ran with them to the commission meeting. The arguments followed those presented in the public hearing about the National Human Rights Plan-3: life begins at conception and this is not a religious position but is scientifically validated. The issue was voted on and defeated in the Congress.

Catholic deputies in particular led debates to affirm the importance of Christians committed to “that little person in the mother’s womb” that “is not an embryo, is not a fetus, but a human” (Deputy Paes de Lira; Duarte, 2011: 134), to continue to oppose bills that may be deliberated on in Congress to support legalization of abortion. The fact is that the government withdrew its recommendations for abortion legislation in the National Human Rights Program-3 even before the beginning of the electoral campaigns.

The meaning given to the category life by the Evangelical Parliamentary Front uses Catholic natural law according to which a person, even before their concrete existence, is already materiality, and therefore their right to live precedes any law of the state. Therefore, Catholic natural law is given precedent over rights established by modern democracies and cannot be legislated by human will and by cultural changes. Thus, the family (patriarchal, in the singular) is seen as a natural entity that results only from the relationship between a man and a woman, that life is given by God, and a human being is created at the moment of fertilization.

The Statute of the Unborn Child gained considerable attention in the news not only because it intended to guarantee the right to life of the fetus, from the moment of conception, making it an absolute unconditional right, but because the sole paragraph of article 13 of the proposal emphasized “if the genitor is identified, he will be responsible for the food support referred to in clause II of this article; if he is not identified, or if he is insolvent, the obligation falls on the state” (notes to the bill). Deputy Jô Moraes (Communist Party of Brazil/Minas Gerais) argued: “suddenly we have created mechanisms that nearly decriminalize rape”. He added: this law “establishes the right of a rapist to provide support to a child! The poor rapist! [...] This is a Rape Grant!”. The proposal was approved in the Commission for the Family and Social Security, marking an important victory for the religious caucuses.

In the first round of the presidential election of 2010, the issue of legalizing abortion became central to the debates and campaign ads of candidates José Serra/Brazilian Social Democratic Party and Dilma Rousseff/ Workers Party (Duarte, 2011; Vital da Cunha and Lopes, 2013). Right-wing political sectors and some Christian denominations (Catholics and evangelicals) campaigned nationwide “for family values” and “life since conception”. There was thus a division even within religious and political sectors because affiliation to one of candidates was justified by a commitment to the “culture of life” or the “culture of death” (Duarte, 2011).

That war of images (Latour, 2008) in 2010 marked not only distinct political projects and positions disputing their amulets, but how through well-oriented rhetoric and strategies, the conservative ideas that compose the nation drove public controversies that steered the election. Since then, religious opposition to the legalization of abortion has become increasingly more critical. I had conducted an ethnography of the defense of Statute of the Unborn Child - which would not only influence elections, but the lives of women and girls - but I could not imagine how the argument of the “life itself” of the embryo, in detriment to the rights of women, would become even more dogmatic in the current conservative religious movements that seek to setback the law of legal abortion³⁰.

A ten-year-old girl was made pregnant by an uncle who authorities said had abused her since she was six. Although the interruption of a pregnancy in the case of rape is legal, the girl was forced to take a via crucis through state institutions to have an abortion. Even after attaining a judicial order, the procedure could not be realized in her state and she had to travel 1,000 kilometers to have the procedure. Religious groups were convoked on social networks to demonstrate at the hospital, local legislators and religious leaders stood at the entrance door to prevent the girl and her mother from entering. They prayed for the life of the fetus and repeatedly shouted “murderer”!

Unfortunately this case of a girl from Espírito Santo state is not an exception in a country with high rates of sexual violence³¹, including against children, but points to new forms of instrumentalizing and debating the concept of life, seeing it in a dogmatic manner not interested in scientific arguments (Machado, 2010), based on a religious truth whose power disciplines bodies and creates discourses capable of dehumanizing women by naturalizing their places and opportunities as citizens. For this reason, if this rhetoric was previously fighting at the margins of the state, to reach the center of power, and often seen in the public debate as absurd, it is now made legitimate by federal government positions, and brutal and misogynous state policies³².

I understand that the religious legislators have taken a radical position against precepts of “post-modern culture” (which defends contraceptives, abortion, sexual relations outside of marriage), so that the state exercises techniques of behavioral control and control over polices related to sex, gender and reproduction to produce the “society that they want” and the women that they want. Perhaps that society is composed by the pain of the rapes and sexual violations to which we all are subjected to daily in a patriarchal society, which is ideologically misogynous and that establishes as a woman who “follows the nature that God gave her” (not feminists, lesbians, bisexuals, transexuals, those without children or deviants).

In this sense, the woman in the singular, separated from that which may cause a deviation, theologically and socially becomes a receptacle of semen, a body without desire and will, an exemplary mother, the caretaker of the home, a submissive wife, qualifications that appropriate her self, through means symbolically promoted in society and reorganized and reverberated as the force of truth by religious groups. It is this woman that the Ministry of the Woman, Family and Human Rights of the current government appears to protect³³. Once again, it involves a gender perspective that has strong dialog with the evangelical bases still broadly shaped by patriarchal and fundamentalist readings of the biblical text, which are even used to legitimate violence against women in the name of God (Vilhena, 2011).

Current pasts: evangelical ruptures and reconfiguration in political alliances in Congress

The Evangelical Parliamentary Front has been able to more strongly counter the demands of feminist movements and those of LGBT+ people, influencing the political debate through the dispute over democracy and legality, influencing interactions in Congress, and local elections, including those for executive branch positions. Beginning with the 54^th legislature (2011-2015), the Evangelical Parliamentary Front improved its articulation as a block and with other congressional fronts³⁴ in the so-called “Bancada da Bíblia, do Boi e da Bala”³⁵ [the Bible, Cattle and Bullet Caucus] to defend the neoliberal agenda of the economic, political and media elite that finance campaigns and political mandates to guarantee that their agendas are approved in the national Congress.

Articulating the rules of Brazil’s political process with partisan demands, social fears and requests from electoral bases, the Evangelical Parliamentary Front, for example, was able, in alliance with the Workers Party government, to install Deputy Pastor Marco Feliciano (Social Christian Party/São Paulo) as president of the Commission of Human Rights and Minorities. Acting according to the agenda of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front and its religious bases, and later, also through accusations against the Workers Party, Feliciano, through this Commission, articulated various conservative positions in contradiction to the Commission’s objectives. Even if the adherence of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front to Workers Party governments had been marked by conflict and contradictions, especially given the greater insertion of identity politics in the government and policies of State, the Evangelical Front came to mobilize religious bases to participate more actively in political spaces for discussion of bills of its interest, making its religious and moral values increasingly resonant in Congress and increasingly challenging the government (Py, 2020a).

The new political articulation of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front through extremist actions gave new impulse to its “moral agenda”, mainly in an innovative and technological manner with a broad reach on social networks. In 2016 the Evangelical Front broke with the Workers Party government and supported the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. This initiated the construction of a new neoliberal alliance with right-wing parties, with a “massive and unanimous launching of the candidacy of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, as an essential and decisive ally, which made the group now shift to a far-right political spectrum” (Camurça, 2020: 83). Despite occasional support for and participation in more progressive governments, it is not possible to deny the historic evangelical affiliation to religiously and socially conservative positions (Burity, 2018).

In recent elections, not only did the evangelicals support Jair Bolsonaro, but sustained and incorporated the discourse of hate against the Workers Party and the rhetoric of its administrations and of the entire political field of the left, declaring identity politics, social policies and distribution of income, universal school access, etc. as “diabolical representations” (cf. Almeida, 2019).

For this reason, the politics of hate also promoted by and through religious bases had effects on the new configuration of Congress, which, despite having an indigenous deputy, more women, a higher number of blacks and young representatives, is considered the most conservative of the past 30 years³⁶. The majority of legislators in the current congress are liberal from an economic perspective, fiscally austere; and conservative from a perspective of values, more to the right on the ideological perspective and recalcitrant in relation to the environment and human rights (DIAP, 2018: 29).

The Evangelical Parliamentary Front of the National Congress in the 56th legislature (2019-2023) had 85 members, 44 of them new, 41 reelected and two who returned to the house. Only 19 were women. The Senate has 7 evangelical senators (DIAP, 2018). Once again, a broad majority are from Pentecostal and Neopentecostal churches. It should be emphasized that recently, Pastor Marcos Feliciano of the Podemos [We can] Party/São Paulo, was chosen by Bolsonaro to be the vice-leader of his government and has taken an evangelical agenda to the president through participation in worship services and in church events and through declarations supporting the evangelical segment³⁷.

During the campaign, Bolsonaro’s base of support came from leaders of large Pentecostal and Neopentecostal churches, while his government has a strong presence of historic protestants³⁸, particularly Calvinists. Theologist Fábio Py (2020b) affirms that while religious leaders linked to a moral agenda and business-prosperity like Bishop Edir Macedo and Silas Malafaia gain more attention, traditional Protestants, such as Baptists and Presbyterians, have held various government posts, because of two ideological priorities: one that is “legal-educational” and another indicative of “authoritarian policies”. They occupy the Ministries of Education, Foreign Relations and of Women, Family and Human Rights, and lead the Coordination of Improvement of Personnel in Higher Education/CAPES, one of the main agencies for support to technology and science in the country.

I understand that the choice of historic Protestants for certain positions is a result of the alignment with the Evangelical Parliamentary Front and with a clearly right-wing policy, because Bolsonaro guides his direction towards them and they wind up supporting the indications of Christians. Given these new connections between religion and politics in Brazil, some authors emphasize the effects of this neoconservatism for the human rights agenda (Lacerda, 2019; Machado and Motta and Facchini, 2018; Machado and Motta, 2019) while other studies examine the meanings of religious conservatisms and their impacts on Brazilian politics and society (Almeida, 2017, 2019; Burity, 2018).

In this context, what will be the position of evangelical groups that support the leaders of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front and that elected and have supported the Bolsonaro government in positions that support the weakening of the welfare state, with an investment in neoliberal individualism and a reduction of labor and social rights? These agendas do not benefit these groups that are mostly poor and who hold more precarious, low-paying jobs. The controversy arises through some finding that perhaps the society desired by a broad majority of Christians is composed of the wills of a single God whose truth provides support and care and not by government policies. More God, less state, may be the slogan of Bolsonaro’s campaign in 2022.

Final considerations - The present that destroys the future: a terribly extremist Brazil and not at all evangelical³⁹!

As we saw, since its creation, the Evangelical Parliamentary Front has used interpretive modalities of legal principles to affirm that it is up to religious legislators to propose laws that support a social order, whose cultural base is Christian and informed by a fundamentalist exegetic reading of the Bible. In various moments of parliament, to the degree that they dispute the religious field, the range of evangelicals act in politics together with other religious and conservative groups to combat a supposed “devil’s agenda”.

According to Pereira (2014: 44), Brazil as a nation-state was forged by hegemonic Western interpretive models whose religious ties are expressed in a colonialist, exclusionary and sexist manner. For this reason, two facts must be emphasized. The first is that Christian religious values were never absent from the legislative, political and public debates in Brazil and broadly influence democratic values of the state as well as the political, ethical and social values of the population. The second is that Brazil never experienced a process of political and social secularization or a consolidated welfare state as intensely as some European countries. These two facts are widely raised and discussed in the Brazilian social sciences.

For this reason, the concept of secularism that supports the privatization of the religious in democratic contexts, as an interpretive paradigm of modern reality, is incapable of grasping the strong presence of religiosity in public space. The advent of the Brazilian Republic (1889) separated Church and State, but religiosity and church participation make their presence clear and act not only in private but also in public spaces. While the Brazilian Constitution does not regulate or explicitly mention secularism, it does not establish a relation with any religion. Secularism is implied, but not made clear, therefore, it is in dispute. Especially in a society that has little experience with political and participatory formation and whose democracy still needs to be more democratized and intensified (Souza Santos, 2013).

In this light, the Christian religions have always participated in political decisions. However, the novelty of the years that follow the Workers Party governments is the intensity of the success of the conservative evangelical sectors against the agendas of “fundamental rights” present normatively in the Constitution, and until then maintained as a reference in public space. In Brazil today, an agent of the state can declare they are “terribly evangelical”, affirming that the church occupies politics and legislates in its interest, because “God is above all”.

Perhaps for this reason, the slogan of Bolsonaro’s political campaign - “God Above All!” - is aligned to a Brazilian history marked by the action of religious groups to legitimate their values by presenting them as clauses of bills, public policies and other government pacts (Miranda, 2013). It is necessary to consider this historic and controversial public presence of Christian tradition in the formation and construction of the democratic state and in the social values of our country, while recognizing that the connections between religion and politics have changed.

Since the last elections, we perceived some indications that some of these religious groups conducted a process of ideological formation of their bases that allowed greater capillarity in the propagation of their conservative proposals and ideas, resonating the moral agenda of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front in the churches. This capillarization went beyond the churches, reaching other non-religious, but conservative social groups. For this reason, the social networks were an important tool for promoting that there is “a single truth” for overcoming the fears, afflictions, and apprehension stemming from uncertainties and rapid changes. This same truth is also the route to improving economic, political and social conditions. The biblical verse “Know the truth and the truth will set you free” [John 8: 32], became a motto of the Bolsonaro campaign, which announced the “monoliptic” evangelical truth (merging monopoly and apocalyptic) which they sought to make exclusive in the state and in society.

God is above all and “there is only one truth” is the new social pact of a state whose political project places a centrality in God - who is white, male, heterosexual, a provider, who possesses and controls women, the head of a traditional family - who publicly appears to be authorized to not recognize the rights of social pluralities. The effects of this participation, not because they are religious conservatives, but because they base themselves on truths that validate extremist actions that do not recognize these pluralities, can be perverse for the agenda of strengthening and expanding the democratic state of law. And also for the sciences, knowledges and education.

For this reason, I believe that there is no fakery or distraction in the public speech of agents of the Bolsonaro government, especially when they raise a moral agenda, given that Brazil is a country of low democratic intensity and high fundamentalist religious intensity that has consequently slipped in the process of construction of a broad and participatory democracy. The effects of this anti-politics that describes itself as “terribly Christian” may be perverse because it uses the political structure of the state and benefits from it, while it criminalizes and demonizes issues raised by its political adversaries. In this situation, politics has been attacked, democracy drained of meaning and the state reduced by its own political agents to solidify the moral and religious values forged by representatives of “the majority of the population” allied to a highly liberal and individualist economic agenda as the core of this new Brazil.

As Machado and Motta (2019) affirm, the advance of intolerant, authoritarian conservativism is not restricted to Brazil but appears here as the voice of a past to be revived and marked by order, hierarchy, morality, traditions and proper behavior. In this context, for Machado and Motta, anthropology is provoked and questioned by this new conservatism whose political adhesions are strongly engendered through social networks, occupying politics to bar new discussions, concepts and social proposals, especially to oppose an expansion of rights in support of social diversities⁴⁰.

For anthropology, as a social science and political insertion, the challenge remains to create new forms of approximation and dialog with these fears and social uncertainties and the truths and forces proclaimed by religious groups whose moralizing precepts have historically formulated subjectivities, experiences and social and political constructions of the broad majority of the Brazilian people with which we are politically concerned. The epistemological presumption of anthropological studies consider subjects, with their territories and ways of life, as citizens who have the right to demand that their diversities be considered by the state. Politically, through our ethnographies, we can support the defense of human rights and the understanding of human diversities, correlated to cultural traditions. And we can analyze the political challenges in relation to persistent inequalities, violences and social, racial and gender injustices. But, what is the reach of our presumptions and contributions for lay society in general?

Anthropological work has been criminalized recently in Brazil and criticized by religious agents (Machado and Motta, 2019). Our studies point to the need for a democracy that is not abstract, but concrete and plural and that guarantees the right to exist and disagree, without being eliminated or ignored as a citizen. Anthropological studies are constantly facing the challenge of continuing to place the political rights of diversities on the agenda, even under governments with projects for state and society that seek to pacify conflicts and erase differences. We are also confronted in these cultural wars by a government that chooses to be antidemocratic and anti-anthropological.

The new facet of participation of Christian groups, both conservative evangelicals and Catholics in various spaces of politics, congregates many people beyond political leaders in legislatures and federal, state and municipal executive branches, who understand that they are exercising their right to political citizenship, which perhaps they never had the chance to do before, even in progressive, scholastic or scientific spaces. Moreover, their rhetoric affirms that those who are not aligned with their positions do not have rights, besides that, demonstrate a strong disdain for the sciences and secular and critical scholastic knowledge.

In this way, these new imbrications between religion and politics made by the Evangelical Parliamentary Front and its bases, but not only by them, must be seriously analyzed and considered. Above all, they should provoke reflections by anthropologies of religions, politics and gender so that we can promote partial relativisms capable of communicating with the conservative portion of the population and also hearing the other diversities that occupy the religious field that will perhaps allow us to repopulate, not only our ethnographies, but our political beliefs.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my friend Chirley Mendes who suggested important revisions that made the text more fluid.

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Notes

Author notes

Email: tatianedosantosduarte@gmail.com