Brazilians are scared by the hate and fake newssown by religious, social, political, economic and territorial extremism, and will decide on the future of the new president in a climate of multiple fractures.
The northeast of the country, which territorially has an area greater than that of Colombia and groups 10 states, supports the leftist candidate, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvaand the center-south, more developed, to the current president, from the right, Jair Bolsonaro.
Religions in Brazil made a dangerous mix with politics: the evangelicals support Bolsonaro and the Catholics, Lula da Silva. “It is frightening if Lula wins or Bolsonaro is re-elected”, the religious polarization is extreme, renowned analyst Mario Osava admits to EL TIEMPO.
Bolsonaro was ahead of Lula among evangelicals, with 63 to 31 percent, and Lula, to Bolsonaro among Catholics, with 60 to 34 percent, according to the latest survey by the Intelligence Survey and Strategic Consulting Institute (Ipec, by its acronym). in Portuguese) released in October.
53 percent of Brazilian voters declared themselves to be Catholic and 27 percent Evangelical, which would explain Lula’s victory in the first round for the presidency of Brazil on October 2, when he won 48.43 percent of the votes. valid votes against 43.2 percent of Bolsonaro. That means Lula has an advantage of 6.18 million votes.
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But “the evangelical vote is courted in each campaign by candidates of all parties and their deputies establish alliances and forms of political blockade to avoid more liberal laws regarding abortion or same-sex marriage,” according to the Latin American magazine New Society.
That, “while churches and pastors advance in various fields: in politics, business, communications, and consolidate as a powerful sociopolitical force,” he says.
Although Brazil continues to be the largest Catholic country on the planet, evangelicals are advancing strongly and it is estimated that the two religions will have the same number of believers in 2030, according to the same publication.
But demographers project that due to the current growth and progress of evangelicals in Brazil, who have doubled their faithful in the last 20 years, they will be in the majority of Catholics before 2050.
The ‘anything goes’ policy
We need a religious identity. Either we are evangelicals or we are Catholics.
Bolsonaro has not only tried to legally penalize pollsters who make mistakes in their calculations, he has also tried to play between evangelicals and Catholics. He tried to take advantage of massive catholic rallies to win votesbut failed to be rejected for the abusive use of politics and religion.
“We need a religious identity. Either we are evangelicals or we are Catholics,” said the Catholic Archbishop of Aparecida, Orlando Brandes, in reaction to Bolsonaro’s intention to participate in the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Aparecidathe patron saint of Brazil, on October 12.
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“Maria defeated the dragon. We have many dragons that she will defeat: that of hate, lies, unemployment, hunger and disbelief,” the archbishop added.
Bolsonaro calls himself a Catholic, but he was baptized by the evangelical rite six years ago in an act of political nuance in the Jordan River, in Israel, celebrated by the ultra-conservative pastor of the Assembly of God and president of the Christian Social Party, Everaldo Pereira.
His three sons, dedicated to politics, and his wife, Michell, are also evangelical, but analysts affirm that the president maintains his religious ambiguity only for electoral reasons.
Luis Santamaría, Spanish theologian and member of the Ibero-American Network for the Study of Sects, affirmed in a recent meeting at Casa de América that one in five Latin Americans today is a member of religions other than Catholic and that it was in the 1960s 20th century when there was a great growth of evangelicals.
The reasons for this development are, in his opinion, contextual changes in the social, political, economic and cultural spheres and are also due to a popular attempt to abandon all the legacies of the oligarchies and the Catholic religious culture.
He explains that some evangelical groups engaged in very strong marketing and have created political parties, especially in Brazil, where the evangelical bench is very powerful and, practically, it is influencing the destinies of the country.
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Their progress in Latin America has also taken place, among other things, because they preach under the parameters of a basically capitalist ideology, in which the poor are not content just to get out of poverty, but to be much more productive.
In his opinion, the presence of evangelicals in Latin American parliaments “is one of the most surprising events recorded in the region in recent times.” “In Latin America there is an increase in Protestantism in the 18 countries that I investigated“, it states.
Until the 1980s, with virtually no religious competition, Brazil was the largest Catholic country in Latin Americabut, according to surveys, currently 25 percent of the population declares itself evangelical, which has transformed the relations of these groups with power.
Brazilian evangelicals today are able to elect their own candidates for Congress because, in addition to religious power, they are also growing in other sectors.
Do not mix
The polls place Lula as the favourite, but by a narrow margin
However, mixing politics and religion, more than dangerous, can become explosive. “The fanaticisms never left good things in the history of America and the world. It was seen in the Middle Ages with the Crusades, and history repeated itself again with Israel and Palestine or the Islamic State (Isis)”, admits a document entitled ‘Politics and Religion’, released on the web seven years ago.
This mixture has been increasing in Latin America since the 1980s, when the process of democratic opening in the region “expanded and facilitated the entry of new political actors as a consequence of the decrease in the costs of entering the party system,” he says. in a book also entitled Religion and politics, which has just been published by the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE).
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That refers to the increase in the evangelical presence throughout the region. “Although the links of some churches with established parties date from the 19th century, especially with those of liberal ideology as in the cases of Chile, Colombia and Peru, religious change promoted the feeling of marginality and exclusion rooted among these minorities to be displaced by numerical consciousness and the need to be recognized as an actor with authority in the face of moral and religious issues”, affirms the MOE.
In this year’s electoral debates in Colombia, for example, God also came to the fore as part of a political party. “God is from the right,” Margarita Rosa de Francisco wrote on her Twitter account, to which former priest Alberto Linero replied: “Using God to make some vote for a political party is an old and deplorable tactic. that today we must unmask. The coordinates of God are others”.
Apparently there is a concern among Catholic sectors in the loss of parishioners as a result, above all, of what seems to be an overwhelming advance of the evangelicals. Last year, the Colombian Catholic Church held a seminar aimed at young people interested in politics and social issues to begin training the new generation of Catholics interested in contributing leadership and commitment.
But other researchers consider that the States and the churches should remain in the field that corresponds to them. The States, in offering well-being to the citizens, and the religions, in offering them a transcendental salvation proposal.
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More gasoline to the candle
In Brazil, the ideologies of the left and the right, mixed with religions, have split the country in half and the hatred generated by these extremisms is frightening as the day of the final decision on the presidency approaches, which will be morning.
“Brazil will have a territory of the left or center-left, progressive in any case, and another of the extreme right. Bolsonaro said that the people of the Northeast vote for Lula because she is illiterate, which reactivated a prejudice that seemed almost erased in Brazil against the Northeasterners. If Lula wins, that right-wing wave against the northeast will intensify a lot”, says Osava.
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Jair Bolsonaro has also sold his image of attachment to the national team to win popular votes.
MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP
The northeastern region of Brazil it is one of the five that divide the country, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. It has the second largest population and is equivalent to that of Italy. It also has the second electoral college.
Osava maintains: “We will not manage to divide the country because in Sao PauloFor example, almost half of the voters voted for Lula. But the hatred against the northeasterners on the part of the Bolsonaristas will be accentuated.”
If you look at the current electoral map of Brazil, it is easy to spot the division: the northeast is red, for Lula, and the center-south, blue, for Bolsonaro, and that warms the mood on both sides.
But analysts maintain that an eventual re-election of Bolsonaro would not mean a new impetus for the growth of evangelicals, since fatigue is already detected among their faithful due to the overflowing politicization of the churches.
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