1

Religions in the contemporary polis: evangelicals, politics and digital activism in

Brazil
Magali do Nascimento Cunha
1. Introduction
One can no longer ignore or deny the visibility that religions have achieved in public
space in the present time. Religions are in evidence both in the everyday context
(cultivation of religiosity and its plurality of practices), in terms of access to media and
media interaction (acquisition of spaces in traditional and digital media, production
and consumption of content, constitution of their own (such as publications, films,
telenovelas) as a market segment (consumption of goods, services and
entertainment), in the sphere of representation and institutionalized political
participation or not (religious leaders and religious institutions searching for the
occupation of public offices, political activism and actions of extremist groups, with
Islam on the spot), in debates on civil rights (body, gender, sexuality, reproduction,
biopolitics, freedom of belief ).
The approaches of human
and social sciences on the
decline of religions due to
the processes of
secularization and
modernization, introduced
from the eighteenth
century, then demanded
revisions (BERGER, 2001).
The religions, which in
modernist and humanism
enlightenment ceased to
be regulators of collective life, being relegated to the domain of the private, of the
individual and of subjectivities, show themselves in contemporaneity as deprivatized,
claiming occupation of the public space in its different dimensions.
This deprivatizing context, that publicizes religions, gives more visibility to religious
plurality and religions as components that constitute multiple and plural identities
that mark contemporary societies. Therefor, it makes possible both the emergence of
new forms of communication and dialogue as well as reactions with manifestations
of violence and intolerance.
Particularly in Brazil, transformations in sociocultural and political frameworks,
especially from the end of 1990s to the early 2000s, have intensified the attention of
scholars and people interested in issues involving "religion" in Brazil.
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We can identify in this transformation the articulation of five interconnected

phenomena:
(1) the strengthening of the Pentecostal Christian segment, with the appearance of
an innumerable number of autonomous, autochthonous churches, which
transformed the scenario of Christianity by provoking significant growth of the
Protestant population, both numerically and geographically, which is reflected in a
sharp decline in the number of Catholics;
(2) the expansion of the
presence of evangelical
churches, mostly
Pentecostal, in
traditional media, and
the extensive
participation of the
different segments of
this group in digital
media;
(3) a greater
occupation of space by
evangelicals in political parties, with the consequent consolidation of the evangelical
caucus in the National Congress, and the expansion of efforts by some churches for
more presence and participation in the public place;
(4) the growth of the religious marketplace and the advancement of religious
marketing, which consolidates Christians as a commercial segment, by offering
products and services specially designed to meet their religious needs, whether they
consume goods or leisure and entertainment;
(5) expansion of cases of religious intolerance, with a greater incidence against people
and groups linked to Afro-Brazilian religions, which provokes a more intense presence
of these groups in the public space with claims of the right to religious freedom.
This presentation is dedicated to the undestanding of the expansion of the occupation
of space by evangelicals in national politics, with emphasis in the role of the media in
this process. Attention is focused on a particular phenomenon: the emergence of
evangelical political activism. The objective is to demonstrate how the mediatization
of religions, specifically the process involving the evangelical faith in Brazil,
potentializes this phenomenon, provoking the emergence of evangelical digital
political activism.
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It is important to note
that this approach
focuses on the
relationship between
evangelicals, politics
and the media
interpreting it as a
cultural phenomenon.
Joanildo Burity (2016a)
draws attention to this,
when he recognizes
that as culture is more
than the way of life of a
group, being a field of disputes over the horizon of an alternative order, religion has
not come only to occupy a place in the public space but to build what he calls public
religion.
In this understanding, not only is religion projected beyond the frontier of the private,
through personal and collective experience, through informal and institutionalized
religious practices, but it becomes a collective action in the public space as a culture
and as a discourse on values. Therefore, it has become a public religion.
In Brazil, in the second decade of the 2000s, evangelicals show themselves as a
deprivatized group, who left the condition of an invisible minority for a publicized
visibility through a close relationship with the media and through political
participation with the accomplishment of social projects in partnership with the
public power, with voice in the debates of broad themes and in the mediation of social
conflicts, with professionalization of the political action and establishment of
strategies.
This new attitude and image is located in the context of what I call gospel culture
(CUNHA, 2007), with the recreation of the evangelical religious identity and the
extension of the frontiers outlined in the past between sacred and profane. A culture
that is driven by the triad: musical worship, consumption and entertainment.
The political participation in interaction with the public space is a central element in
this process.
The concept of public space in this presentation is related to the concept of polis, as
recovered from Greek philosophy and re-signified by Hanna Arendt.
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It is an understanding that transcends the geographical and territorial notion related

to the public space of the city, the State and the Nation, as well as the vision that links
it to the modern State, to citizenship, to democracy, to mobilization, to engagement
and participation in politics , discourse and public opinion (HABERMAS, 1984). Arendt
refers to polis as a place of appearance and interaction, "no matter where [people]
are":
Strictly speaking, the polis is not the city-state in its physical location; it
is the organization of the community that results from acting and
speaking together, and its true space lies among people living together
for that purpose, no matter where they are. 'Wherever you go, you will
be a polis’: these famous words not only became the password of Greek
colonization, but they expressed the conviction that action and discourse
create amongst the parties a space capable of being properly situated in
any time and place. It is the space of appearance, in the broadest sense
of the word, that is, the space in which I appear to others and others to
me; where men assume an explicit appearance, rather than content to
merely exist as living or inanimate things. (ARENDT, 2009, p. 211).
Here the place of media
and the process of the
society in mediatization is
highlighted. We recognize
that it is not possible to
understand the
deprivatization of
Brazilian evangelicals and
the construction of public
religion by this Christian
segment, without
considering the
accelerated and diverse dynamics of interaction between different Protestant groups,
among themselves and with others (religious and non-religious) through different
media. Paraphrasing José Luiz Braga (2012), we see the processes of mediatizing
interactivity-ness by stimulating the ways in which evangelicals communicate and, as
a consequence, tentatively organize themselves in public space, in a movement that
takes them out of the church isolation to the visibility of the mediated polis.
2. Evangelicals in politics: from churches to the polis
The close relationship between religions and politics is not new. We can retake in
history the Romanization of Catholicism and its constitution as cultural and political
power; the cultural and political disputes involving Islam and the Asian religions; the
emergence of contextual theologies that seek to respond to demands of social
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identity movements (black theologies, feminist theologies, liberation theologies -

Latin American, Dalit, Minjung, African, for example).
In the Brazilian case, in
addition to being
important to consider
the power of
Catholicism and the
place of contextual
theologies, it is
necessary to recognize
that there is a
consolidated place of
religions in the public
space, which delineates
forms of relationship
between religion and politics in the country, which includes participation in political
parties but goes far beyond it.
We could list several elements that demonstrate political participation: numerous
social programs in partnership with governments, with NGOs and social movements
and the presence of religious in councils of rights, of policies and of management of
specific social policies; actions of religious groups in networks and articulations of civil
society; participation of religions in the economy not only with the internal trade of
products of the religions but with the growth of the offerings of religious
entertainment (tourism and leisure around the religion); intense presence in all
media.
The annoyance and uncertainty caused by this "reappearance" of
religion has gradually been articulated to redefine the concept and
scope of democracy as a political form of social inclusion and
justice through citizenship and recognition. On the one hand, part
of the multicultural policies was directed at the incorporation of
religious identity into the role of the legitimate forms of
affirmation of cultural difference. On the other hand, a growing
number of religious activists have settled accounts with the
democratic discourse, and building their spaces of visibility within
the democratizing struggles (BURITY, 2016, p. 27-28).
Therefore, in the contemporary demands around cultural policies, collective
identities, affirmative actions, pluralism, consumption, social movements, networks
of social articulation, party politics, there is an intense presence of religions that must
be recognized and must be evaluated in a positive, critical or relativized way.
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Besides this "return" of the religions to

the public space, they are also places of
affirmation of identities and daily
practices that structure life, producing
community, integrating socially,
inculcating values. It is in this sense that
religions are culturally inscribed in the
public space and (re)legitimize their
public function (BURITY, 2016). Thus,
personal and collective, informal and
institutionalized experience of religious
practices is more retained on the border
of the private, but also projects itself
through public space as a collective
action, as a culture and as a discourse on values, forming a public religion, as already
mentioned here.
Public religion means taking religion beyond its institutional and symbolic boundaries,
allowing the other-religious and non-religious to interact in religious life. The religious
goes to the secular and the secular goes to the religious, in an exchange that
sometimes leads to confrontations, sometimes leads to the formation of alliances
previously unthinkable. Here is an important characteristic of the public religion: to
be constituted of permeable, transpassible, fluid boundaries.
It is in this sense that we can affirm that the configuration of the public religion among
Brazilian evangelicals takes place in the context of the dynamics of the society in
mediatization.
We call upon Roger Silverstone (2006, p. 168-169, free translation) in the
understanding that mediatization is "a fundamentally dialectical, if not always equal,
process by which institutionalized media form part of the general circulation of
symbols within the social life". Therefore, we identify that new communication flows
- the circulation of meanings and values through porous religious boundaries - give
new meaning to the experiences and practices and to doctrines rooted in Brazilian
evangelical religious traditions, as we will reflect now.
2.1 New significations
This presentation refers to Protestants as all non-Catholic and non-Orthodox
Christians who make up the Brazilian religious field. Regardless of the peculiarities of
the different groups that form the segment, Brazilian Protestants have been
classically identified in religion studies (CUNHA, 2007) for:
(1) a predominantly fundamentalist (literalist) reading of the Christian Scriptures, the
Bible;
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(2) an emphasis on personal piety in the quest for the salvation of the soul (influenced
by the puritanism and pietism of the pioneer missionaries who came from the South
o the United States);
(3) a frequent rejection of non-Christian cultural expressions of the country (as a
result of the same missionary action);
(4) an isolation of social demands (resulting from the spiritualization of the questions
of individual existence) among them political participation.
The very name with which this group preferred to be identified in the country,
"evangelicals", reflects these characteristics. The first term used to differ from
Catholics in the process of evangelization by missionaries, "believer", was then,
gradually, replaced by "evangelical" to designate non-Catholic and non-Orthodox
Christian and churches.
The term "Protestant" is, until today, rarely used to identify Christian churches and
groups historically linked to the Reformation. It is most commonly used in academic
spaces.
Those who were not
evangelicals were named as
"people of the world" or
"worldly" In this sense, the
"world" is identified with life
outside the church, and
church, a place of refuge,
which could protect and
preserve believers until the
second coming of Christ.
As described earlier in this
presentation, transformations in the Protestant Brazilian culture, from the turn of the
twentieth century to the twenty-first, have provoked changes in this framework.

One of these contemporary transformations can be identified in the overcoming the

isolation of social demands. From the 1990s onwards, there was a change in this
situation and the emergence of groups, especially Pentecostals, with proposals for
occupying the public space through media, the marketplace, entertainment (gospel
culture) and political participation. The Evangelical Caucus is created and
consolidated in Parliament in the period. In 30 years, after numerical ups and
downs, as a result of cases of corruption and physiology, the Evangelical Caucus has
been consolidated as a force, getting to be, in 2019, the largest parliamentary seat.
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These elements make up the framework that today puts evangelicals as a leading
religious group in the ongoing political process in Brazil, which results in the intense
visibility and emergence of non-institutional political activist religious leaders with a
strong presence in digital social networks.

3. The Evangelicals-politics relationship and the media

This trajectory, described above, leads to an understanding of the communicational

processes that involve the widespread occupation of traditional media spaces by
evangelicals in the last 30 years through public concessions of broadcasting media. It
also goes through the understanding of the meanings around the popularization of
the presence of evangelicals in the mainstream media in news and entertainment
spaces, as part of the phenomenon "gospel culture" (CUNHA, 2007). It also includes
an assessment of the
relationship of the (new)
evangelical political activism to
the strong presence of
individuals, institutions and
individuals linked to this
religious segment in digital
media with numerous websites,
blogs and profiles in social
media.

It is a fact that the dimension of the participation and the transformation of the
receivers into emitters, through processes of interaction made possible by the new
media, especially through the internet, has changed the framework of the
relationship between media and churches, in an expressive way.

When we reflect on social media, an infinity of articulations and spaces is clear.

Churches and Christian groups move from media users, with the aim of presenting
the Gospel and giving visibility to participants of a space beyond the boundaries of
the sacred and the profane - the mediatic polis, a space of mediated appearance
(SILVERSTONE, 2010), a reality that does not replace lived experiences but trespass
and represents them. A space in which individuals and groups appear to others and
others appear to them.

In this sense, churches and Christian groups can establish community, articulate,
promote sociability, expose positions on social demands and discuss them.
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On the other hand, churches are no longer in control of the sacred and of doctrine
as they were before (HOOVER, 2014). The openness to participation and for anyone
who professes a faith, whether or not formally bound to a church, to freely express
their ideas, reflections and opinions, has taken control of the disseminated contents
of the leaders' hands. It is enought to have a simple blog in the innumerable free
digital spaces, or a free account on the most popular social media, and space for
free manifestation is guaranteed. This process also promotes the emergence of new
religious authorities – celebrities (priests and media pastors, gospel singers),
Bloggers and Youtubers – who become a reference for the way Christians think, act,
and see the world.

The media researcher Venício Lima

instigates an understanding of this
phenomenon, when he calls attention
to the important role that media play
in socio-political dynamics: the long-
term power they have in the
construction of reality through the
representation that they make of
different aspects of human life and,
particularly of the politicians and of
politics. "It is through the media - in its
centrality - that politics is constructed
symbolically, it acquires a meaning"
(LIMA, 2009, p.21). In this way, it can
be affirmed that the relationship
between evangelicals and politics in
the present time, in Brazil, is
characterized by a process of social
mediatization.

We cannot forget in this reflection the positive and the negative arguments
regarding the place of the internet in promoting political participation in democratic
societies (GOMES, 2005), but it must be recognized that the occupation of this space
has allowed some progress in the limited political visibility of these minority
evangelical groups , with effects in traditional media, which instigates the analysis. It
is an "arena of visibility" that forms the "sphere of public visibility" (GOMES, 2014)
of evangelicals in Brazil.
Evangelicals place themselves in the arena as an organically articulated block.
Evangelicals are no longer "the believers" or the closed groups of the past. Social
separation, "from the world", ceases to be an evangelical value inherited from the
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fundamentalist-puritan tradition: they are today a group that develops the culture
of "normal life" combined with a religion that has a presence in the media, has its
own fashion, artists and celebrities, has insertion in the world of trade and
entertainment. In addition, this religious segment is strengthened as a social
fragment that has its own claims and can elect its own representatives to the spaces
of public power.
To these paradigmatic
situations, a new and
expressive element is
added: evangelical
political activism, which is
no longer restricted to
election periods, with the
activity of candidates'
electoral cables in their
respective churches. This
activism comes to fruition
from 2010, with the involvement of religious leaders and believers, both in electoral
periods, predominantly (and curiously) in campaigns on opposition (for not voting in
certain candidates, mainly those of the left), and around themes such as the
occupation of the presidency of the Human Rights Commission of the Parliament
(2013), the project to reduce the age of criminality (2015) or the impeachment of
President Dilma Rousseff (2016).
This activism has taken place presentially on the streets (at the annual March for
Jesus and in demonstrations specifically called by evangelical leaders, such as the
March for the Traditional Family in the federal capital, 2013) or in public acts at
strategic locations (such as the ones promoted by the Evangelical Front for the Rule
of Law, against the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff). Nevertheless the evangelical
political activism takes place, mainly, at distance, through multiple manifestations in
the internet, especially in digital media.
This process of expansion of evangelical political activism coincides with the period
of strengthening of the Evangelical Caucus in Parliament, between 2002 and 2004,
and the intense campaign of conservative groups, in 2010, against the election of
Dilma Rousseff to the Presidency of the Republic. Surprisingly, from now on, and
even more so after 2014, evangelicals of different Protestant denominations,
identified with the discourse assumed by leaders of the Evangelical Caucus and by
celebrities of the religious scene, begin to publicly identify themselves as
"conservatives" and "right-wingers". This group was crucial in the campaign that led
the far right politician Jair Bolsonaro to the Presidency of the Republic in 2018.
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It is possible to identify that it is in the space of mediatic polis that political life has
developed with more intensity and passion, with the construction and re-
construction of world visions (imaginary) through discourses made public and calls
for collective actions.
Here we have what Fausto Neto (2010) calls "complex games of offering and
recognition". Through them certain moral values are legitimized and others are
delegitimized. In the world of religion this is very intense, as we observe the offering
of the religious discourse of "salvation of the family that is at risquem", against
proposals and campaigns for sexual rights by women and LGBTs.
This offer promoted the identification and the recognition of conservative
evangelical and Roman Catholic to the point, for example, to consolidate, through
digital media spaces, the pejorative term "gender ideology" (as definition for gender
rights) as a delimiter of a new identity frontier.
In this sense, the logics of loyalty and "contracts of reading" (Fausto Neto, 2010) are
put in check. Evangelicals who, historically, condemned Catholics as idolaters and
heathens, break this frontier through the media and break the classical logic through
associating combat against a common enemy.
Concluding Notes
Evangelical digital political activism is a new component in the way Brazilian
evangelicals are culturally inscribed in the polis, as a deprivatized religious group, the
builder of a public religion. This activism becomes a prominent element in the process
of political participation of this religious group. It emerges from the processes of
mediatization experienced by the evangelical segment in Brazil, say, of the circuits
created and recreated by the intermediation of media that enable interaction among
evangelicals and between evangelicals with other religious and non-religious groups
interested in discussing themes, conducting campaigns and actions around the
country's political themes.
From the point of view of political participation, the presence of evangelicals in the
media polis, while enhancing the visibility of this religious segment, amplifies the
feeling of existence and belonging, reaffirms political-ideological identities and
identifications, and redraws institutional and symbolic boundaries.
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