Brazil’s Evangelicals Take Over While Bolsonaro’s Allies Jump Ship
Evangelicals Take Over While Bolsonaro’s Allies Jump Ship
(Bloomberg) -- When the pandemic began, Brazilian evangelicals put their faith in President Jair Bolsonaro to get them through it. They knelt along city streets, spaced 6 feet apart, fasting and praying for the virus to go away, and gathered to chant their support of his plan to rely on an anti-malarial drug with unproven results. “Chloroquine! Chloroquine! ... I know you can cure me, in the name of Jesus!” they sang in front of the residential palace in May.
That belief in the president’s ability to keep them safe has taken a knock as Brazil’s death count has soared. But evangelicals remain a core pillar of the Bolsonaro administration, increasingly occupying space left by early supporters who have jumped ship.
Their backing is becoming all the more important as protests against the president start to take shape amid popular discontent over his handling of the pandemic, allied to political crises that have forced out key cabinet members and hurt his relationship with Brazil’s top court.
A former army officer, Bolsonaro has relied on the military to fill vacant positions in the administration, and more recently on centrist parties to ensure the support of congress. But it’s the millions of devotees who give him crucial popular backing. A handful of evangelical pastors joined him at the presidential palace on Friday to pray for authorities and the Brazilian people ahead of possible weekend protests.
“I believe in miracles; I had one in September and another in October,” the president said at the of the prayer, referring to his recovery from an attempt against his life during the campaign trail and his subsequent election in 2018.
In an interview, Pastor Marco Feliciano, the government’s deputy leader in Congress, described evangelicals as “the core of the government’s ideological identity.”
Conservative Agenda
Progressive policies from women’s, black, LGBT and environmental movements have effectively been put on hold, and in their place is a conservative agenda based on the nuclear family and traditional values.
Unlike other constituencies that are more interested in pushing their program by controlling government departments or state organizations with large budgets, evangelicals are focused on issues of identity politics that can be just as effectively pursued in the legal as the political arena.
When former anti-corruption star judge Sergio Moro resigned as justice minister, the president replaced him with a pastor, Andre Mendonca, who may be appointed to fill an upcoming vacancy at the country’s top court in November.
Even though evangelical leaders have had good relations with Brazil’s previous leftist governments, it was with Bolsonaro and his ultra-conservative views that they found unprecedented common ground and a full-throated voice in the executive.
Bedside Prayers
“Our alliance with Bolsonaro is so strong because we share the same values,” Pastor Silas Malafaia, one of Brazil’s most influential evangelical leaders, said in an interview. He cited Bolsonaro’s stance against abortion and LGBT rights as a role model. When Bolsonaro was stabbed in the abdomen during a campaign stop at the 2018 election, Pastor Malafaia prayed by his bedside.
That proximity between church and state is fanning concerns of an excessive evangelical influence on government. The current Minister of Human Rights Damares Alves, also a pastor, said back in 2016 that it was “time for the church to occupy the nation. It is time for the church to tell the nation that we have arrived ... It is time for the church to rule.”
That kind of sentiment represents a deep and expanding well of political support. Evangelical Christians are forecast to overtake the Catholic population of Brazil within 10 years.
That’s a warning sign to Jose Eustaquio Diniz Alves, a demographer who teaches at the National School of Statistical Sciences, linked to the country’s statistics agency IBGE.
“The country runs the risk of becoming a theocratic republic if they keep growing for a long time, and build a meaningful majority in Congress and get positions in the top court,” he said.
Becoming Majority
In a population of 210 million, Brazil’s estimated 65 million evangelicals are the country’s second largest religious group after Catholics. They skew slightly female and black, but there are just as many poor evangelicals as rich ones, and the broad spread of the group is part of its representative power in Brazilian politics.
Bolsonaro, whose wife is evangelical, started boosting ties with the religion over the past few years. While President Dilma Rousseff was being impeached in 2016, then-congressman Bolsonaro was being baptized in the River Jordan in Israel. (Brazil last year opened a trade office in Jerusalem, a first step toward following the Trump administration and recognizing the city as Israel’s capital.)
In the 2018 presidential election, the Catholic vote was split, but evangelicals may have been decisive in carrying the election for Bolsonaro. Some 11.55 million more evangelicals chose Bolsonaro over his leftist opponent; he won by 10.7 million votes.
A similar wave swept congress, and evangelicals now make up more than a fifth of the country’s legislature. Bolsonaro further cemented their support by offering five senior cabinet positions to them. At every pro-government protest, hand-drawn signs repeat Bolsonaro’s slogan “God above all,” and when he greets the crowds, supporters often fall to their knees in prayer for the leader.
Many of the most prominent names in the evangelical church of Brazil are also some of the country’s wealthiest people, including Edir Macedo, the billionaire founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.
But the religion has made strong inroads into Brazil’s most impoverished communities. Public housing developments often host evangelical churches on their properties, and in rural villages you’re likely to hear songs and screams of prayer echoing from backyard churches.
Political Power
With rising demographic weight comes a sense of self-confidence -- and power. The evangelical caucus, which gathers legislators from most parties, is one of the most influential in Congress. Some of the country’s largest media corporations belong to pastors, including Record TV, owned by Macedo.
But that source of strength could also become a liability if Bolsonaro fails to maintain his hold on the faithful. Municipal elections, scheduled for October but uncertain due to the coronavirus, will show their political sway.
The president’s approval rating has declined during the pandemic to just 26% on May 27, according to a poll by XP Investments, partly due to his refusal to adopt quarantine measures despite a surging death count.
Among evangelicals, who value life above money, the slide has been steeper, - to 31% from 44% - as the president’s focus on the economy and dismissal of the increasing number of deaths struck the wrong note with supporters.
A popular evangelical pastor, Ed René Kivitz, said the “fundamentalist religious wave” that swept Bolsonaro into power “won’t survive 2022,” the next presidential election.
Congressman Roberto de Lucena, another pastor, says the majority of evangelicals are not committed to Bolsonaro, but to a set of values. “If he steps away from these values, they will stick to the Bible, not the individual.”
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