Why Brazil is called to be an evangelical country and a theocratic State

Brazil has been and still continues to be the country with the largest number of Catholics in the world.

Even when?

According to experts in religious sociology, within 10 years the religious majority of the country will be evangelical.

It is a fact that worries and deserves an analysis from both the point of view of faith and politics.

Perhaps that is why studies, publications, and debates multiply every year on the not only religious but also political consequences that this advance of evangelicals means.

One of the latest analyzes still in the study phase, advanced by Ruth de Aquino, is that of film director Alberto Renault, who is preparing a series titled

Evangelicos

.

It is a field experience, with interviews with evangelical families in the various states of the country, supported by anthropologist Juliano Spyer, witnessing various important moments in their lives such as weddings, baptisms, birthdays or burials.

This is a study on evangelism from a humanistic point of view.

The problem in Brazil of the growth of evangelicals to the detriment of Catholics is not only religious but social, although strong doses of politics end up infiltrating when it comes to disputing, right and left, the votes of those more than 30 million people.

The new studies attempt to analyze from a point of view close to evangelicals the differences in the type of personal relationship of families with Catholic priests, their churches and with evangelical pastors and their temples.

Regarding the latter, fundamental differences that concern the lowest classes of society stand out.

Catholic churches are majestic, rich in sacred objects and complicated liturgies for the culturally less privileged.

In these temples and cathedrals the poorest feel a certain unease, as if they had been invited to a rich family's banquet.

The difference with evangelical temples is total.

With the exception of some monumental buildings in large cities with capacity for up to 3,000 people, 99% of the rest of the evangelicals are the closest thing to a humble family's house: it can be a garage, a simple living room with plastic chairs, a old cement warehouse.

In them the poor feel more comfortable.

And the shepherds?

Another abyss between Catholics and evangelicals.

To reach the priesthood in the Catholic Church it takes about 14 years of study.

Many of them have attended several universities.

To be an evangelical pastor it is enough to know how to read and write and some courses on biblical topics, but they know better the language of the poor.

With a crucial difference: Catholics are obliged to celibacy, which prevents them from not only forming a family but also from deeply understanding their problems and dramas, much less the poorest ones.

And perhaps this is the reason for the shameful scourge of the abuse of minors in schools and seminaries.

The diaspora of Catholics towards evangelicals had been understood by the creators of Liberation Theology with strong social accents and dialogue with the proletarian classes and their apostolate in the poor suburbs of large cities.

Curiously, the decline, due to condemnation by the official Church of Rome, of the so-called theology of the poor coincided here in Brazil with the decline in the number of Catholics, which is increasingly reduced to the middle classes.

It may seem like a paradox, but many of the characteristics that the vital base communities of Liberation Theology among the poorest possessed are what today enriches many evangelical churches, such as feeling like a family, where their little ones and their big ones are heard. dramas, because evangelical pastors also have families.

And the problem of millionaire pastors, owners of radio and television networks in cahoots with politics?

It is another thorny issue because it goes from human-religious issues to political issues, both local and national.

Just look at the efforts that the Catholic Lula is making to get the millions of votes from evangelicals by granting his pastors fiscal and economic relief, which ends up being a privilege for these churches that are fundamentally conservative and afraid of new gender policies, focused as they are many times on their own subsistence.

It is not possible to forget that the vast majority of the 30 million evangelicals, 90%, belong to the poorest and least literate classes of the population.

A problem that concerns the differences between Catholics and evangelicals is that, of the latter, their pastors can act in politics.

Perhaps in the current Parliament one of the strongest factions that influences the creation of laws is the so-called “Bible bench”, made up of evangelical pastors who rub shoulders with the Bala bench, made up of military and police officers.

On the contrary, the Catholic Church has never allowed the direct participation of the clergy in active politics.

A paradox if you think that the Vatican itself has always had a very strong influence on the governments of the world, generally closer to dictatorial regimes than to democratic ones.

It is enough to remember the open help of the popes to the Franco dictatorship, which they loaded with privileges, starting with the power to appear in religious processions for Generalissimo Franco under a canopy, something that was always done with the Eucharist.

The underlying problem of the growth of evangelicals is that their representatives in governments and parliaments advocate for a theocratic and non-secular State as is the current one, which is why they struggle, as the ultra Bolsonaro did, for a change in the Constitution to make it confessional.

If Lula succeeds in his third government, he will have to take very seriously the metamorphosis that is taking place in the complex world of faith in Brazil.

It will not be enough to shower the pastors of these churches with privileges, but rather to address, without electoral calculations, the most eminent danger that the most Catholic country in the world, which has always coexisted with a secular regime, could end up co-opted by the most dangerous: that of being able to become one more theocracy than those that already devastate the world.

Subscribe here to the

EL PAÍS América

newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in the region

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_