Minoritisation, public religion and religious populism in Brazil

Abstract

This article discusses the trajectory of the Evangelical-Pentecostal emergence in Brazilian politics, based on an analytical framework provided by the categories minoritisation, public religion, and populism, approaching it in a diachronic key, from the 1980s until the 2022 elections. It argues that the evangelical emergence expresses an irruption of the political as the instituting dimension of the social, regardless of the former's religious character, and that it unfolds in different moments, not foreseen or planned, of affirmation of a minority as part of the definition of national identity (national people) and gradual inclusion into the current political pact in society, leading it to aspire to the moral and political direction of society, in a context of hegemonic crisis. This minoritisation implied the transformation of the Evangelical-Pentecostal field into a public religion, criss-crossed by broad social dynamics and conflictiveness, while enabling it to integrate a new power bloc aimed at founding a new, post-Lulista, post-democratic, Brazilian people, formed by “good citizens” from a “Christian majority”, in resonance with other conservative positions committed to confronting “the left”, as an unassimilable enemy.