BRAZIL: Religious war breaks out
Religion has taken centre stage in Brazil’s presidential election. Candidates are accusing each other of being possessed by the devil, of practicing religious intolerance, and even wanting to shut down churches.
How did it get to this and what is really at stake? It all started on 24 July when the Partido Liberal (PL) confirmed President Jair Bolsonaro’s bid for re-election. It was then that Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, started appearing ever more frequently alongside her husband on the campaign trail, often becoming the main attraction of the event. Half sermon, half breakfast talk show, Michelle’s appearances include soul-searching prayers, messianic prophecies, as well as anecdotes about family life designed to give the former army captain a friendlier, less combative face.
The reappearance of Michelle, who had mostly kept out of the limelight, in recent months, is no coincidence. Her husband is trailing in opinion polls and has a hard time reaching out to voters beyond his hardcore supporters. Her role is twofold: to tap into a female electorate that has been critical of Bolsonaro’s misogynist past, and to win back evangelical Christians, who were essential in his election victory in 2018.
According to the latest Datafolha poll, 34% of evangelical women do not know which candidate to vote for, which is roughly twice the share of undecided voters in the electorate at large.
Lula demonised
The problems began when Michelle stepped up the rhetoric, essentially likening former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) to the devil, when she said that the presidential palace, the Palácio do Planalto, had been dedicated to the work of demons before Bolsonaro took office.
“You can call me crazy, you can call me a fanatic, I’ll keep praising our Lord, I’ll keep praying,” Michelle told the congregation of the charismatic evangelical Igreja Batista da Lagoinha church in Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, on 7 August. “Because for many years, for a long time, that place was consecrated to demons and today it’s consecrated to the Lord Jesus,” she added.
Two days later Michelle posted a video on her Instagram profile showing Lula in an Umbanda ceremony, a typical Brazilian religion with elements of Catholicism, Spiritism (Espiritismo), and African-derived faiths. Underneath the video, which linked Umbanda to forces of darkness, she added her own comment: “That is permitted but I can’t talk about God.”
At the same time Bolsonaristas started sharing pictures in social media chat groups of Janja, Lula’s wife, standing in front of miniature replicas of Orixás, deities of Umbanda and Candomblé, another religion combing elements of Catholicism and African faiths, representing a force of nature.
Janja has not publicly declared any religious faith. However, in May she was married to Lula in a Catholic ceremony by Bishop Emeritus of Blumenau, Angelico Sandalwood Bernardino, who has known the former metalworker since the 1970s. Lula declares himself a Catholic and his left-wing Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) has historic ties to leftist Catholics.?
“I have learned that God is synonymous with love, compassion, and above all, peace and respect,” Janja wrote on social media on 9 August. “It doesn’t matter what religion and what creed. My life and that of my husband have always been and always will be guided by these principles,” she wrote.
That did not do much to ease the growing tension. The Bolsonaro camp started spreading rumors that Lula would persecute evangelicals and even close their churches, something that did not happen during 14 years of PT rule.
Marco Ant?nio Feliciano, pastor of the Assembly of God church in S?o Paulo and a federal legislator for Bolsonaro’s PL, essentially admitted to spreading the fake news in an interview with?Rádio?CBN?on 15 August. “We talked about the risk of persecution, which can culminate in the closure of churches. I have to warn my flock that there is a wolf prowling us, who wants to swallow our sheep through deception and subtlety,” he told CBN. “The overwhelming majority of churches are announcing to their faithful: let us be careful.”
PT forced to respond
The PT had no choice but to clarify in a statement that no such plans exist and that it was Lula who granted churches more independence and legal autonomy with the 2003 Law of Religion. “This is not a religious dispute, that needs to be clear. It’s a political dispute. But obviously in this flood (of information) we have to separate the lies and the fake news,” Gleisi Hoffmann, president of the PT, told local media.
The episode hit a raw nerve with the PT, which fell victim to several successful Bolsonaro campaigns in 2018 that twisted facts to generate scare campaigns, including one that alleged Fernando Haddad, its presidential candidate then, promoted youth homosexuality in schools. The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE), the top electoral authority, considered Bolsonaro’s accusations unfounded and ordered the withdrawal of publications containing it.
Alarm bells went off in the PT headquarters, as Lula advisers studying the latest opinion polls feared that the attacks over religion could damage the Lula campaign. Bolsonaro’s support among evangelicals jumped from 44% in mid-July to 62% in early August, according to an opinion poll conducted by Poder360.?
Regardless of the fistfight in the name of religion, Lula may not have taken the rise of the evangelical Church, with its respective lobby in congress, seriously enough, some observers argue. The percentage of Brazilians who consider themselves Catholic has fallen from 75% in 1995 to currently around 50%, while the share of evangelicals jumped from 14% to nearly a third over the same period, according to Datafolha opinion surveys.
“Lula hasn’t courted them the way he should. He needs to speak to the evangelicals, have at his side someone who speaks in a language evangelicals understand,” said Pastor Paulo Marcelo Schallenberger, who was approached by the Lula camp earlier in the year precisely to build a bridge to the religious denominations that have surged in recent years. “He thinks that this audience will come naturally, but he lacks a gesture,” Schallenberger said.
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So, on the day the campaign officially began on 16 August and the new head of the TSE, Alexandre de Moraes, called for a clean and fair election, Lula fired back at Bolsonaro, accusing him of genocide during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic for neglecting to adopt science-based health policies. Over 700,000 Brazilians died. Only a week earlier the TSE had banned PT videos in which Lula used the term ‘genocide’ against Bolsonaro.
“You (Bolsonaro) were a denialist, you didn’t believe in science, you didn't believe in medicine, you believed in your lie,” Lula told metalworkers in S?o Bernardo do Campo, the birthplace of his political career in the state of S?o Paulo. “If there’s anyone who is possessed by the devil, it’s this Bolsonaro,” he said.
Evangelicals versus Communism. There are a host of evangelical churches across Brazil, many of them of Pentecostal denomination. In their early days, protestant missionaries in Latin America were promoted by Washington to act as a counterbalance to left-leaning Catholics aligned with Liberation theology that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, precisely one of the original pillars of the PT.
So, in an odd twist of history Bolsonaro today is rallying evangelicals to join in his fight to eliminate Communism. While millions seem to have heard his call, there is a downside to campaigns targeted at a specific segment of the electorate.?And that is that they risk antagonizing another group. And that is exactly what appears to be happening. At the same time that Bolsonaro’s support among evangelicals rose 17%, it fell 11% among Catholic voters, according to a Poder360 poll.
Perhaps that explains why Lula’s lead over Bolsonaro has remained relatively stable at 12 percentage points in this week’s electoral surveys by Ipec and Genial/Quaest. This suggests that Lula might have made the wiser choice by not choosing sides in this battle.