Cultural war is a legacy of Bolsonarism even without Bolsonaro – 04/15/2023 – Politics

It is no coincidence that evangelicals continue to wreak havoc in the opinion of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), as Datafolha showed, and that the parliamentary front of this religious segment bothers the current government in Congress.

If, in the past, evangelical politicians and pastors adopted a pragmatic stance, even approaching PT administrations, now they have a new reason to close ranks with the opposition: the transformation of Brazilian politics into a cultural war.

Roughly speaking, the culture war reflects a deep divide between progressives and conservatives over notions of morality. In practice, this translates into disputes over the legalization of abortion, LGBTQIA+ rights, feminism, gender equality, the budget for culture and the content of education in schools, among other topics.

According to political scientist Guilherme Casarões, this is one of the main legacies of Bolsonarism, with likely long-term implications even if former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) leaves the leadership of the movement.

“It’s hard to speculate what will become of Bolsonaro from now on, but Bolsonarism, even if it changes its name, will have a very big impact on the way the country organizes itself politically”, says Casarões, who is a professor at the Escola de Business Administration at FGV-SP.

“This Bolsonarist way of thinking about the country and politics is very much guided by the notion of Christian nationalism. It is not militaristic patriotism, or it is not limited to that; nor is it the sectarian religious vision. It is the fusion of these two things”, he says.

This Christian nationalism, according to Casarões, translates into the idea that the answers to all of the country’s social problems lie in an agenda aligned with religious values.

“To this corresponds the fight against communism in its political and cultural manifestations, the fight against what they call gender ideology, the confrontation with what they consider society’s moral depravity”, says the political scientist, who is coordinator of the Observatório da Extreme Right.

The analysis of this tangle between politics, faith and patriotism led Casarões to propose a new concept to understand leaders like Bolsonaro: radical right-wing religious populism.

In partnership with Ricardo Barbosa Jr., from the Institute of International Relations at the University of Brasília, Casarões developed the idea in the article “Statecraft under God: radical right populism meets christian nationalism in Bolsonaro’s Brazil”. encounters Christian nationalism in Bolsonaro’s Brazil).

Published earlier this year in the scientific journal Millennium, one of the most traditional in the field of international relations, the text justifies the creation of the concept as a subcategory of radical right-wing populism, a well-known phenomenon.

Radical right-wing populists are political leaders or ideological groups that defend flags such as nationalism, racism, xenophobia and authoritarianism.

They are populist because, encouraging a permanent division in society between an elite painted as anti-national and the people, they claim the right to speak on behalf of that majority, even if they have to bypass institutions.

They are from the radical right, and not from the ultra-right (two variants of the extreme right), because they do not reject democracy right away; on the contrary, they participate in the electoral process to come to power. Once elected, however, they distort the rules of the game to install a government with an authoritarian profile, although not necessarily dictatorial.

Radical right-wing populism is often used to describe politicians such as Marine Le Pen (France), Boris Johnson (UK), Donald Trump (US) and Bolsonaro, among others.

But, for Casarões and Barbosa, it is possible to refine this set by paying more attention to the religious element. The mobilization of faith, say the two researchers, is central to providing not only a solid base of support but also material resources, campaign structures and ideological narratives.

Religious groups, moreover, help sustain government and, in return, enjoy unprecedented institutional participation and unprecedented opportunities to reorganize state-society relations on ecclesiastical terms.

Le Pen and Johnson do not enter the subset of radical right religious populists. Trump enters, as does Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Narendra Modi (India) and, of course, Bolsonaro.

“The extreme right [que inclui direita radical e ultradireita] It’s based a lot on affection. That is, it is not a rational political construction as a whole. It is fueled a lot by fear: fear of the other, fear of the different. And it converts that fear into hatred, which has a powerful political effect”, says Casarões to Sheet.

“It speaks to resentful groups in society, either because of the economic issue or because they feel excluded from the political process. This is not necessarily related to religion”, says the political scientist.

While in Europe fear orbits much more around xenophobia and the idea of ​​a clash of civilizations, in the Americas religion fulfills this role by presenting values ​​and identity even to those who do not approach specific theological demands.

“In the US, for example, it is the war of progressives and moral relativists against Christian values, for example. Here, Bolsonaro managed to place his political opponents in the position of enemies of the Brazilian Christian identity. So much so that Lula was accused of being a Satanist and of want to close churches”, says Casarões.

“From the point of view of the far-right populist leader, this is an instrumental use of religion. It is not possible to think that Trump and Bolsonaro are good Christians”, says the FGV professor.

Bolsonaro began to cultivate his religious image even before he officially became a pre-candidate. His opposition to what he called kit-gay and the baptism in the Jordan River were two steps along this trajectory, done with enough ambiguity to neither prefer nor deprecate denominations.

In the Presidency, he turned faith into a matter of State by using it as a criterion to appoint ministers of his government and the Federal Supreme Court, or by attacking human rights legislation within the cultural war.

In the article, Casarões and Barbosa further argue that Bolsonaro and other populists like him make religion the key to an international alignment, with the aim of building a new world order in which communities defend their cultures and values ​​from outside influence.

Seen from this perspective, Bolsonarism, whatever Bolsonaro’s destiny, should maintain its protagonism among the opposition forces to the Lula government.

“With the advantage that Bolsonarism is no longer a windowpane, as it is out of power. It can be less a movement of substantive counterpoint to the government’s agenda and more of action in the cultural war, which continues to take place on social networks and in the Legislature”, says Casarons.