Sujeitos da política, ou por que os evangélicos não são quem dizem ser

 

A note on Pentecostalism, minoritisation and populism

Evangelical emergence has been overwhelmingly Pentecostal. Pentecostals account for between 49% (Bolivia) and 80% (Brazil) of all Protestants in the region (Bell, Sahgal, and Cooperman 2014, 62).¹ But “Pentecostalism” does not name any single or unified identity. And being a majority within a minority does not translate as a mere demographic feature, as historic Protestant churches (present in Latin America since the 1810s, roughly) had long stood for what it meant to be a Protestant and led the way throughout as the public voice of Protestantism. So, Pentecostalism had to face, from the beginning of such surge, the existing institutional and cultural hegemony of historic churches and to find its own place within and beyond it. Which immediately reveals the constructed – not merely expressive – character of Pentecostal emergence vis-à-vis other religious and secular actors.

Considering the interconnections between pluralisation and democratisation, and despite their historical marginality amidst massively Catholic masses, evangelicals were increasingly dragged out of their (self)isolation due to the acceleration of the process of political opening and a persistent economic crisis that hit hard popular sectors (in the 1980s and 1990s), which opened new perspectives for collective organisation, conquest of rights and expansion of participation spaces (at the end of authoritarianisms). Also relevant has been the intensification of global/local dynamics since the 1990s, in cultural, economic and political terms (Freston 1993, 149–221; Burity 2017; Mallimaci 2015; Parker 2016; Carbonelli and Jones 2015; Barrera Rivera and Pérez 2013; Pierucci 1989; Pérez Guadalupe and Grundberger 2019).

“Evangelicals” thus names a discursive formation within the contemporary conservative Protestant field, mostly Pentecostal, built over nearly four decades, with different levels of success. Whereas the number of evangelicals varies widely in Latin America, from 9% of the population in Mexico to 41% in Guatemala and Honduras, Brazil standing halfway, with 26% (Bell, Sahgal, and Cooperman 2014), this discourse intends to speak for all Protestants (while ironically excluding non-conservatives), through the “mediation” of a highly professionalised activist sector, both lay and clergy, a conservative evangelical elite.

In the argument that follows I will portray the evangelical emergence as the construction of a new political subjectivity (Howarth 2006; Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008), that is, as the construction of a new people, or, alternately, as the re-hegemonisation of the people. The main thrust of this process turned around an electoral strategy to render evangelicals as a legitimate part of the national people (Burity 2016; Wynarczyk, Tadvald, and Meirelles 2016; Freston 2017). It resorted to anti-Catholic rhetoric and the appropriation of the lexicon of citizenship rights to articulate that demand. The relative success of the strategy and the effects of a broader conservative turn internationally made it possible for the evangelical politico-pastoral elite, especially in the last five to six years (writing in April 2020), to cast “evangelicals” as a fully-fledged political subject, now aiming at reforming the nation-people into an evangelical people.

My hypothesis is that this construction of Pentecostal identity as the general identity of Brazilian Protestants – “los evangélicos”, “the evangelical people” – is the agonistic effect of the early activation of a new political subjectivity, a new postdictatorship religious people in various Latin American countries. The spread of discourses of spiritual warfare, health and wealth, uneasy relations to the left, intolerant dogmatism, irrepressible proselytising is indicative of that agonistic profile in the domain of Pentecostal religious practices (Machado 2015; Machado 2018; Mariz 1999). The diagnostic of a crisis of traditional values disaggregating society, the perceived threat of Catholic dominion or Afro-Brazilian religions cultural advances, the clash against corruption and atheistic communism, and the demand for recognition of evangelicals, qua religious agents, as a political force in its own right are key elements in this new political discourse. The constitution of evangelicals as a collective identity, as a political subjectivity, as an active minority can thus be seen as the construction of a people within the national people.

Minority politics cannot, from this perspective, be understood as a process of affirmation of an unchanging set of views, practices and demands. It surely reflects histories of subalternisation, but it is also shaped by wider and more complex contexts of contemporary pluralisation and politicisation of identities.

The concept of minoritisation can be understood in two ways. First, minoritisation concerns multiple recent processes of self-assertion by groups of individuals, communities, in the light of shared identity features or demands for recognition, justice and reparation of historical wrongs. Such self-assertion is usually done not only by naming the minority’s right to exist, but by denouncing the minoritarian character of the majority, that is, its politically constructed character. This obviously establishes dyn
amics of political contestation or agonism, due to the very emergence of minorities, since they do not limit themselves to asking for space to exist, but challenge the make-up of the majority order as “non-representative” (W. E. Connolly 2008; 2011; Burity 2015b).

Minoritisation also corresponds to the resentful response that assertive minorities often receive. In recent years, whether because many did not wish or perhaps were not ready to see, there was surprise at the appearance of reactive, conservative positions – sometimes quite aggressive. But those are resentful responses to assertive minoritisation. Such negative minoritisation, as I would call it, is characterised by the deliberate production of invisibility, discrimination or violence towards emerging minority groups, alleging their illegitimacy or the “exaggeration” that their demands and ways of life represent, and striving to reinforce subalternisation. This is akin to conventional ways of portraying minorities as targets of discrimination and exclusion. But the relational, agonistic dimension is highlighted by Connolly and others. Thus, contemporary processes of minoritisation are a field of dispute between emergent actors and their repression or neutralisation.

Religious minorities, like many others, are usually organised in multiple formats and dimensions. They can be voiced and mobilised virtually or institutionally (through denominational bodies, councils of churches, leaders’ caucuses, federations or networks). They also appear as loosely structured groups and occasional forms of grassroots mobilisation as well as providing critical mass to institutionalised channels. Church-based religious minorities tend to assume institutional and hierarchical forms, which lend them authority and narrow the possibilities for expressions of dissent.

As a counterpart, progressive, ecumenical religious organisations and groups can take on both institutional and rhyzomatic forms. They are often made up of small teams working in religious collectives (denominational departments, charities, social pastoral services, local and translocal networks). There are also “loose” activists in social movements or secular civil society organisations. But they are not negligible. And they are not exactly unknown and invisible. In fact, in the past fifteen years or so, in the experiences of progressive Latin American governments, such progressive religious minorities began to be increasingly seen, heard, but still little considered in the research agenda on civil society, social movements or collective action networks.

Pentecostal and ecumenical minoritisations were certainly not the only ones to emerge within organised religions. The process was not specific to religion, engaging women, black and indigenous people, sexual minorities, etc.

Pentecostal (evangelical) minoritisation arises out of a deep process of social, cultural and political transformation that has changed the face of Latin American societies. It helped broaden the perspective of several relevant political and social actors toward “religion” as a field beyond Catholicism, opening up spaces for minority religions (Christian variants and non-Christian ones). The current reactionary configuration, particularly since the mid-2010s, which also goes beyond evangelicals, gathering conservatives from Catholicism and other religions, is the outcome of manifold disputes for fixing the meaning of a new order.

There have been other alignments and discursive constructions, beyond and sometimes in opposition to the Pentecostal construction of “the evangelicals”, as mentioned above. It proved necessary for conservative evangelicals to defeat moderate (“progressive”) segments of the evangelical field, both historical and Pentecostal ones, developing into a parliamentary and pastoral elite which, today, is also represented in the executive branch at national and sub-national levels in most South American countries, in different proportions. Furthermore, evangelical politicisation was soon split between sharing public spaces and legal frameworks crafted to recognise and accommodate subaltern voices revealed by pluralisation, or seeking to reshape those spaces as agonistic disputes no longer seemed to keep adversaries at bay, slowly pushing the evangelical elite towards an antagonistic path (José Luiz Pérez Guadalupe 2019, 46–49, 172–78; M. das D. C. Machado 2012; R. de Almeida 2017; Burity 2018).

In sum, the meaning of minoritisation, when seen as a self-assertive demand, but relationally constructed vis-à-vis a majority order seen as exclusionary and unjust, is never predetermined. Those who faced the evangelical-pentecostal public emergence through a mere reiteration of old liberal and secularist denunciations of the undue confusion of religion and politics could not realise the extent to which the evangelical elite had strived to overcome resistances by ordinary Pentecostals and older generation pastors to the minoritisation project. They also overlooked the reluctance, disgust or rejection by secular politicians, social activists and progressive intellectuals to the “rough” and “retrograde” Pentecostal identity and public performance. Finally, it also escaped liberals and leftists the changes that the relational and agonistic character of politicisation inevitably produces to the identity, forms of action and “original” aims of actors involved. A major development, in this case, has been the increasing transformation of Latin American Pentecostalism into a public religion.

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———. 2017. ‘Authority and the In-Common in Processes of Minoritisation: Brazilian Pentecostalism’. International Journal of Latin American Religions 1 (2): 200–221.

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1 These numbers include belonging to a Pentecostal denomination or church, and identifying as Pentecostal/Charismatic (even within traditional Protestant churches) and should not be taken at face value. Census numbers are generally lower, falling typically between 60 and 65%.