Supporters of the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, during the assault on Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court in Brasilia, on January 8. TON MOLINA (AFP)
The attempted coup by the far-right fascists that ended with the material destruction of the headquarters of the three State powers and their works of art and history, has already been analyzed throughout the world down to the smallest details.
The statements of the more than 1,000 Bolsonaro supporters, who ended up in jail and are being tried, recounted a detail that had not yet been known.
During the scenes of war, with the apparent connivance of the military and the blindfolding of the police, today it has been known that "religious songs" also took place.
Even to God the coup leaders got involved in the barbarism perpetrated in the light of the sun.
This detail of the religious songs mixed with the noise of the destruction of everything that the coup leaders found before their eyes, including precious works of art, must still be analyzed since it was due to the massive presence of believers from the numerous evangelical churches that ended forming a true Bolsonaro army subjugated by the motto of "God above all".
Yes, it will not be possible to study the extreme right-wing neo-fascist movement brought by Jair Bolsonaro, who was expelled from the Army at a very young age for his coup impulses within the barracks, without the support he had to choose himself from the millions of evangelicals who they chose him as a leader and myth called by God to fight a "communism" that certainly does not exist in Brazil.
It is known that today more than 30% of Brazilians are evangelicals who already had 178,000 temples last year frequented by 70 million faithful who voted almost en masse for Bolsonaro.
They faithfully follow the dictates of their pastors who are usually raffled off even by Catholics when it comes to going to the polls.
And evangelical pastors, some of them, like the creators and managers of the largest churches, are powerful and appear among the richest businessmen in the country and even on the lists of the world's greatest millionaires.
The president, Lula da Silva, immediately understood when he threw himself into the ring against Bolsonaro that the religious world, even part of the Catholic world that in the past voted for him, had emigrated to the Bolsonaro extreme right.
And this because a strong point of the neo-fascist program was to convince the millions of evangelicals that if the "communist" Lula won the elections, he would end up closing the evangelical temples and persecuting their faithful, at the same time that he would liberate abortion and favor the gay marriage.
Lula was so convinced this time that it would be difficult for him to be elected without a helping hand from at least some evangelical churches less fanatical of Bolsonarismo that he mobilized those who had some connection, even a personal one, with evangelical groups to scratch at least a few thousand votes. votes.
It is still not possible to know the rate of evangelical votes that Lula managed to move towards him or what arguments he used to convince them to follow him.
It must have been, however, this time of a certain size since one of the first things he has done, something that would have seemed unusual in his past governments as well as in Dilma's, has been to give a position in his new government, Pastor Paulo Marcelo Schallenberger of the Assembly of God.
The pastor who will work in the presidential palace close to Lula will have the mission of attracting followers to the new government, especially from the small churches that are very numerous and that are not so tied to the big confessions and are less politicized.
The evangelical pastor, Paulo Marcello, was already active in the midst of the small but numerous evangelical churches during the electoral campaign and will now be part of the Government, which may mean an open gap, for the first time, within a religious field that has always been far from of the progressive electorate.
Catholicism, which came to have 80% of believers, belonged in the past rather the poorest, sponsored then above all by the movements of the then alive Theology of Liberation that managed to act among the masses of the most disinherited .
It was a field that was taken away little by little by evangelism, which managed to connect with the millions of people exiled to the large suburbs of the cities, while Catholicism became bourgeois and concentrated in the wealthy centers of the country.
According to the newspaper
O Globo
, there are a whopping 78,500 evangelical churches in Brazil that do not belong to any of the major confessions.
And it is in these churches that Lula, now supported by an evangelical pastor in his government, wants to penetrate to win their consensus and to fill the gap left for him by the Catholic Church, which has become more of the confession of the upper and middle class. today closer to Bolsonaro liberalism.
It has been the evangelicals, in effect, who have inherited the millions of faithful lost by the Catholics and that Lula wants to win back.
The issue for the new government is delicate and will mean slow groundwork that can only yield positive results in the future.
The religious songs, which were sacrilegiously mixed with the noise of the destruction of the political palaces of Brasilia during the coup attack, were symptomatic.
They have ended up making the political class reflect and scaring those who still bet on democracy as the best found form of coexistence and progress and defense of all the disinherited of society and condemned to barbarism.
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