With its minimalist black and white aesthetic and invitations to “exceed yourself”, the Atitude Baptist Church in Brasilia looks like a state-of-the-art gym, one of those that abound in Brazil. But this is the temple of former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, wife of the defeated ultra-conservative president.
Like her church, Michelle Bolsonaro -candidate to replace the former president at the head of the Brazilian right- seems like a woman of the 21st century. She has a fashion and makeup consultant who recommends dresses inspired by Letizia or Kate Middleton. She flies to Miami alone every two or three weeks to see her husband in exile in Florida. On her last visit, her first stop was the Prada store in Orlando.
But behind it hide ideas that are not at all modern. “He has blood in his eyes”, he often says in reference to the new president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to whom he has declared a “holy war” of “light against darkness”. “Singing! Cantarasuia! ”, he shouts when he celebrates a victory for the evangelical project.
Born in a favela in a satellite neighborhood of Brasilia, Michelle Bolsonaro is a role model for many of Brazil’s 50 million evangelicals out of a population of 207 million. There will be 100 million in 2032, according to the latest demographic projections.
According to the newspaper O Globo, more than 100 churches are opened every week in Brazil, either by independent pastors or by franchises of mega-denominations that are very active in politics, such as the Assembly of God or the Universal Church, founded by billionaire pastors like Edir Macedo, owner of the evangelical television network Record TV.
On the one hand, the cathartic rites of salvation (and exorcism) practiced in neo-Pentecostal temples seem to serve as therapy in a country with 30 million hungry people. On the other, the so-called “prosperity theology” attends to the needs of a new, albeit precarious, middle class. “Paradoxically, the rise of neo-Pentecostalism has a lot to do with Lula’s social achievements at the beginning of this century,” writer Luiz Eduardo Soares said in an interview.
It is, indeed, a paradox, because two decades later, evangelicalism is the main force of the Bolsonaro right. “In Brazil they learned from the American manual, although neither Bolsonaro nor Trump are exactly good Christians,” says Kristin Kobes du Mez, author of the book Jesus and John Wayne, which has just been published in Spain.
In front of the Atitude church, in Brasilia, an evangelical woman explains why she doesn’t like carnival. “If you like to party, it is difficult for you to be evangelical.” The streets were filled with samba and traditional Afro dances, but evangelicals gathered in alternative retreats, horrified by the “satanic” celebration. “It’s not just about religious intolerance but about racism,” summed up the teacher of a samba school, interviewed in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.
This racism comes from the same churches as Michelle Bolsonaro’s. The first evangelical missionaries were other Southern Baptists, white supremacists who came to Brazil from the Confederate South after the American Civil War (1861-65) and during the subsequent decades of segregation and lynching under so-called Jim Crow laws.
In Brazil, where slavery lasted until 1888, Southern Baptist missionaries “felt right at home,” explains João Chaves, in his new book Jim Crow Global Southern Mission. Of course, the Brazilian miscegenation was “an aberration even less human than blacks.”
Not all Brazilian converts accepted the ideology of the Ku Klux Klan. Gilberto Freyre, the most important Brazilian sociologist of the 20th century, grew up in a Baptist family, but “was so horrified by the racism he encountered at Baylor University (run by the Baptists, in Waco, Texas) that he left the denomination.” Chavez explains.
Later, “Freyre dedicated himself to elaborating a theory that would forge a new Brazilian national identity,” adds Chaves, referring to cultural syncretism and the so-called “racial democracy” that became the discourse of the left-wing nationalist president Getúlio Vargas (1930- 54).
Although racial democracy never became much more than a good intention, the Vargas governments “prohibited explicit racism and claimed African heritage, especially in samba and carnival,” explained sociologist Jessé Souza in an interview held in Brasilia. . “Freyre raised the cultural superiority of the ‘good mestizo'”.
A century later, in the discourse of the new Bolsonaro evangelicalism, “racism returns in disguise,” says Souza, and adds to the conservative counterattack of feminism, gender rights and, in general, the socially liberal state.
Led by the right, the evangelical advance already covers the entire continent, from Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay to Central America. There are already 150 million evangelicals in a region of 660 million. And it doesn’t stop at the Atlantic. “Evangelical ideology is exported on a global scale, from Uganda to Jamaica to India,” Kobes said.
It even reaches the secular old European continent. Various evangelical groups “have already donated $50 million to right-wing organizations in Europe,” says Kobes. “If there is a recovery of religious faith in Europe, it would be logical to think that it will come from evangelicalism.”
Following the Trumpist model, the president of the Madrid community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, met with Latin American evangelical leaders in Madrid last month seeking votes for the May elections. This global evangelical march goes in tandem with mass new movements built around conspiracy theories like QAnon. And just like in the Jim Crow period, the factory of toxic ideas is the United States.
Thirty million Americans – 20% of the population, most of them evangelicals – already believe in the central tenets of QAnon, specifically in an imminent doomsday for social liberalism. For QAnon, Democratic progressivism is “a demonic force that traffics, tortures and sexually rapes children,” explains Chris Lehmann, in an article in The Nation.
“QAnon’s theories that there is a secret channel of satanic elites controlling the world resonates with evangelicals,” Andrew Chesnut, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a phone interview.
In Brazil, something similar happens. “We have detected many coincidences between Bolsonarismo and QAnon in conspiracy narratives such as the Awakening (a massive awakening that, when occurring in the near future, allows for the collective discovery of the truth),” said Leticia Cesarino, from the University of Santa Catarina. .
It is not surprising, then, that Michelle Bolsonaro and her close ally, Pastor Damares Alves, now a senator from Brasilia, have spread conspiracy theories about alleged pedophile networks linked to Lula’s Workers’ Party.
Nor is it coincidental that, in the respective assaults on the Capitol in January 2021 and the headquarters of the Three Powers in Brasilia, in January of this year, the slogan was: seize power, in the face of the imminent “storm of cosmic judgement”. warns Lehman.
