Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro participates in an evangelical for Jesus in Brasilia, Brazil, on August 10, 2019. Adriano Machado (Reuters)
Brazil is a secular country in which religion permeates everything.
It is the country with the largest number of Catholics in the world and where evangelical churches arise in every corner of its territory and penetrate all levels of society.
That, without counting the strong influence of the African rites introduced by the slaves.
This religious force today acquires a particular characteristic due to its penetration into politics, since the set of votes of believers can decide elections.
At this moment in which Brazil, a few months before presidential elections considered one of the most dangerous for democracy in its history, the religious element becomes a fundamental factor, since the president, Jair Bolsonaro, of the extreme right, he has made religion the fulcrum of his policy.
It is worth asking then if there can be a fascist God.
A characteristic of Brazil is the strength of the religious element when it comes to winning votes in elections, to the point that deputies and senators have turned their cabinets in Congress into true religious altars with images of all kinds of creeds.
When the time of the elections arrives, from the most agnostic they make a pilgrimage openly or secretly through all the temples of religion, whether in search of blessings and votes.
In Congress, for example, the evangelical group is one of the strongest, along with the so-called "bullet group," the gun lovers.
I remember that the former president and former trade unionist Lula da Silva, who today is the strongest candidate in the next presidential dispute, confessed in an interview with this newspaper that "he would never have won the elections without the strength of the Catholic social movements."
Bolsonaro knows today that he would have no chance of being re-elected without the strength of the evangelical vote also disputed by the left.
The problem that afflicts Brazil is that its President has brazenly used the religious issue to get to the head of state, despite having been for nearly 30 years an obscure deputy who had only stood out for his actions in Congress in defense of the military dictatorship and the praise of its torturers.
It has been religion, seen through the prism of a fascist and violent faith, that has always guided Bolsonaro, who was first a Catholic and who, when he saw the strength of the evangelicals grow, threw himself into their arms;
It even came to be renamed with great fanfare in the waters of the Jordan River.
When he won the elections, Bolsonaro raised the Bible in his hands along with the Constitution and chose as his motto the evangelical phrase "the truth will set you free" and "God above all."
And today, while he continues to act with clearly fascist overtones and sometimes flirting with Nazism, he does not open his mouth without mentioning God.
Can there be a fascist God?
Today, faced with the fear of not being able to be re-elected, in addition to threatening to carry out an authoritarian coup, Bolsonaro protects himself under the shield of God, which in his mouth recalls one of the ten commandments, that of "not pronouncing the name of God in vain."
"Only God takes me out of power," repeats Bolsonaro.
What God?
Unless there is a fascist, violent god who hates women, who loves weapons, impassive in the face of violence perpetrated against the weakest, a God who ignores the despised, the powerless, those who cry and they die abandoned or a God who makes fun of those who died asphyxiated during the pandemic due to lack of oxygen that the Government denied them.
Brazil and its millions of poor people, who barely manage to feed themselves when they are not hungry, cling like a lifeline to God, whoever it may be, as long as they do not definitively lose their trust in something that protects them against the powers that thrive on his poverty.
Bolsonaro, despite not shining even worse in terms of intellectual sharpness, has understood that God, whoever he is, is a great wild card to grow politically and has no scruples in presenting to the less culturalized the image of a God who prostitutes essence of the Christian faith whose founder had sentenced: "Give to God what is God's and to Caesar what is Caesar's."
On the contrary, Bolsonarism is impoverishing Brazil culturally and religiously, presenting a God turned into a lover of weapons, a mockery of the Christian Jesus who allowed himself to be killed to defeat everything that the fascist power represents with his hatred and contempt. for freedom and for hope in a world of peace and solidarity.
No, the god of the Brazilians is not the fascist god of Bolsonaro but the God of those who still bet on the hope of better days.
And the believers who still vote for him are victims of the ambiguity of the evangelical sects, which promise the most marginalized a false "prosperity theology" and a god who will avenge and redeem them from the violence that their false prophets paradoxically impose on them. .
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the key information on current affairs in the region.
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber