Nicolás Maduro strengthens his ties with evangelical churches

A truck with chairs, sound equipment and paint arrived at one of the building complexes that the Venezuelan government built years ago inside the Fuerte Tiuna military base in Caracas.

The materials were for the evangelical churches Anointing of God and Psalm 32. There were words from officials, prayers with raised hands and a group of young people dressed in white did Christian choreographies.

This is how the first dispatch of the new government program My Well-Equipped Church was completed a week ago, announced a few days ago by President Nicolás Maduro, during the celebration of the Day of the Evangelical Pastor and Pastor, created by Maduro himself in 2019.

The Venezuelan president has strengthened his ties with a sector of the evangelical church that has formed a political movement to support him.

Maduro has referred to it as "the true church of God", to oppose it to the Catholic hierarchies, with which Chavismo has historically had friction, and to the more traditional sectors of the Pentecostal churches.

His son, Nicolás Maduro Guerra, whom the pastors call brother in public events, keeps track of this relationship as a political and government objective, from the Vice Presidency for Religious Affairs of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Venezuelans, for the most part, are Catholics.

It is estimated that 17% consider themselves partly evangelical, a number that has been growing as the humanitarian crisis has worsened in the oil country.

“We pray a lot for the president who has carried a very heavy load, we cry out for him because that was the man that God put to govern Venezuela.

We submit to the authorities that are set by God and he, seeing our support, has dedicated himself to blessing the Christian church”, said Pastor Isabel Molina de Fernánde a few days ago, in an interview on state television VTV.

Chavismo, at its worst political moment and after cornering the opposition, has managed to slightly raise its approval in the midst of a fragile and uneven economic recovery and its international repositioning with the reestablishment of relations with some countries.

Polls from November 2022 showed that they had 28.7% support.

Since last year, Maduro has been campaigning and has even proposed advancing the presidential elections to 2023 and not to the end of 2024, as would correspond according to the Constitution.

In the acts with the so-called Evangelical Christian Movement of Venezuela (Mocev), Maduro usually emphasizes that they group eight million evangelicals, a number that leaders of this church question and about which they warn of an attempt to politicize the faith and use religious ceremonies as propaganda.

Last year, 2,500 houses of worship were remodeled with government aid and 13,000 registered pastors received a bonus equivalent to almost 10 dollars in the first days of 2023 through the Patria System.

The bonus was called The Good Shepherd.

“We believe in the Church-State separation, with which the church does not impose its figures.

That is a historical principle since 1517, from the Protestant Reformation up to now," Pastor César Mermejo, president of the Evangelical Council of Venezuela, founded in the 1940s and which brings together more than three thousand churches, told EL PAÍS. the country.

“Public funds should not be made available for the advancement of particular religious or ideological creeds.

The churches build their own temples and we support the social programs with resources and donations from the churches themselves.

What is being done is catapulting a particular community into a pre-electoral scenario and at a heated moment between the Government and the Catholic Church”, he adds.

These contributions to the churches occur at the time that the union of teachers, health workers and basic companies are holding protests over precarious salary conditions.

And the Venezuelan Episcopal Conference has spoken about this in a statement in which they reacted to this new approach of the Government to these faithful.

"More than worrying about requesting the construction and/or equipping of our temples, our prayers accompany the citizen's clamor for the equipping of hospitals, schools, salary adjustments for teachers, doctors, among others, and other matters that are urgent as priority issues for the good of the Venezuelan population.

In addition to the church equipment plan, the Government has also distributed electrical appliances to public sector workers at election time.

Maduro asked Conatel, the body that controls telecommunications, to give the evangelicals more stations than they already have on the radio, one of the media that has suffered the most from the rigors of censorship.

More than a hundred stations were closed last year.

Going around the dial in any city in the country realizes that there are very few news, opinion and debate programs, compared to the extensive entirely musical programming, in favor of the Government or Christian.

Maduro also proposed creating a television program called Corazón Cristiano.

In 2018, in the contested elections in which Maduro was re-elected and began to shake his legitimacy, he had an evangelical pastor as a contender.

Javier Bertucci campaigned by distributing soups at his rallies and took out almost a million then.

He made his way into politics with the El Cambio party.

Today he is a deputy to the National Assembly along with 20 other parliamentarians who are also evangelicals, four of them from the government party.

Bertucci, a preacher from the Maranatha Church, represents a moderate opposition that has agreed with the government and also aspires to be a presidential candidate again.

This is how the rapprochement with these groups is accelerated by a Maduro, who in his youth declared himself an atheist, later subscribed to Eastern beliefs such as the cult of Sai Baba and later declared the country Christian.

Chavismo has come closer to the evangelicals, but it also winks at the Catholics, giving impetus to the beatification of the popular doctor José Gregorio Hernández, who also cuts across spiritualist beliefs.

“There is a feeling of growth in the power of influence of the evangelical movement, but it is not monolithic,” says political scientist Guillermo Aveledo.

“There is also a

of Chavismo and Nicolás Maduro around the figure of the stable family.

He is selling himself as the candidate for order and peace, who survives the covid, the interim government, and contact with the religious and, above all, the evangelical, he is ordered to do to achieve this.

He is the conservative status quo candidate.”

For the academic, this approach also makes sense in the midst of "the conservative and authoritarian route" that other countries in the region are already following, especially in Central America and in the Brazil of Jair Bolsonaro.

The penetration that these religious groups have, especially in popular sectors of Venezuela, in an environment of social fragmentation and depoliticization, can be a mobilization route for Chavismo, Aveledo points out.

“If the PSUV brand dries up, there are these Pentecostal churches,” he says.

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