Evangelicals lived their own ‘June journey’ in 2013 – 06/19/2023 – Politics

Also for evangelical churches, 2013 was a year with a flavor of trailer. While demolishing demonstrations turned Brazil upside down, the segment lived its own particular journey. A series of episodes thickened the conservative soup that, five years later, would spill over into the alliance between the Catholic Jair Bolsonaro and the vast majority of pastors of national expression.

When he took that stage, Bolsonaro was still a peripheral actor in politics, a PP deputy famous for lines that accommodated him at the head of parliamentary extremism. He sees the suggestion of doing “the work that the military regime did not do” and killing “about 30,000”, starting with then-president FHC.

It was June 5, two weeks before the most massive protests that took to the streets of the country. Tens of thousands of faithful gathered on a Wednesday afternoon, in front of Congress, in an act orchestrated by a key figure for the link between Bolsonarism and evangelicals.

“Look what a joke”, says pastor Silas Malafaia, seeing similarities between ten years ago and the current scene. “I organized that in favor of freedom of expression and the traditional family, against abortion.”

If now evangelical leaders are rebelling against the Fake News PL, which they see as a threat to the freedom of a pastor, say, declaring that a homoaffective marriage is a passport to hell, it was another bill that kept them awake a decade ago.

With a very similar motto, by the way: PL 122, which criminalized homophobia. “If a gay couple kissed in the churchyard, the pastor or priest who spoke ill could face three to five years in prison”, Malafaia revives the criticism.

On the same platform, in addition to Bolsonaro and him, other key players for the political plot that would take the temples.

There were Senator Magno Malta and the big star of the moment, Deputy Marco Feliciano, under artillery from movements on the left after assuming the presidency of the Human Rights Commission of the Chamber. Deeper down, the future Bolsonarist minister and later senator Damares Alves, at the time a parliamentary advisor.

The crowd held up signs that anticipated the culture wars pitting progressives against conservatives. In one of them: “New fashion in Brazil: MMA, Pampered Authoritarian Minorities. If you speak ill of them, they’ll beat you up. Where’s democracy?”. Another, in the hands of a man dressed as a clown, said: “To try to silence the church is a joke”. Also in the crosshairs were “gay activists”.

Days later, the country entered into social upheaval with protests that began on the left, because of the revolt with tickets R$ 0.20 more expensive, and spilled over into a diffuse malaise that, for specialists, paved the Bolsonarist rise.

Bishop Sonia Hernandes, who runs the Renascer em Cristo church alongside the apostle Estevam Hernandes, spoke with the Sheet in that month. Followed everything online. “On my Instagram, I saw a lot of evangelicals posting [fotos]. It had a sign: ‘Pray for Brazil’.”

The free pass that she claimed to defend was religious, to “see Brazil more full of God”. The March for Jesus, conceived by her husband in 1993, would take place at the end of June. Feliciano went, and Magno Malta performed with his pagode gospel band, Tempero do Mundo.

The senator then complained that political colleagues were snubbing the biggest Brazilian evangelical event. “Any other kind of march they’ll go. It’s like the guy who’s embarrassed to walk in the mall hand in hand with you.”

He and other Christian leaders would appear embraced in the future with Bolsonaro, who became the first president to go through the March.

Dilma Rousseff sent her minister Gilberto Carvalho in the 2013 edition. The emissary was booed when he said he was speaking on behalf of the president, a spoiler of an ill will in the churches that would haunt PTism in the following years.

Estevam Hernandes associated the crowded route with the popular protests on the day. “I think a lot of people were motivated by the demonstrations to be marching too.”

The apostle takes stock of the decade and says that, since then, “the church has acquired greater political awareness”. For him, the turbulence of that year bounced back to Bolsonaro’s election in 2018. “There was a clamor for change, and there was this expectation for a conservative name.”

In the same March, Feliciano already raised this flag. “I represent a family segment of society.”

Deputy in the first term, he gained prominence when he was chosen, three months earlier, chairman of the commission in the Chamber that watched over human rights. Reports at the time highlighted the profile of the “controversial pastor” of the Social Christian Party, his caption at the time.

He was branded racist and homophobic for phrases such as “Africans descended from an ancestor cursed by Noah” and “AIDS is a gay disease”. And he only ended up in the post due to a party arrangement accepted by the ruling party itself, he recognizes. “Since it was the eve of an election year, the PT started looking at the most important commissions in the House. As the PSC was the last in line, it received an inexpressive commission, which only gained relevance from then on.”

He took office amidst the outcry of entities linked to human rights. The chapter raised the political decibels in the evangelical leadership, which felt attacked by the table. The act on the Esplanada planned by Malafaia also became a disgrace to him, in the media spotlight, says Feliciano.

The newly formed Anajure (National Association of Evangelical Jurists) was sought out to provide legal advice, but the dialogue did not prosper. Its then-president, Uziel Santana, even released a note accusing the “evangelical political movement” of putting “society and the press against evangelicals by fomenting a crazy ‘holy war'”.

“I was the subject of Jornal Nacional for months in a row. I was on the cover of IstoÉ magazine, interviewed by Veja and the extinct Playboy. [Muitos] TV shows,” says Feliciano. “They shook my life. Protests with gay kisses inside churches. The church stood up, and on that day we showed our strength.”

Congressional peers saw it as radioactive and isolated it, he says. Rare stayed by his side. One of them shouted “go to the zoo” at protesters against Feliciano. “Bolsonaro told me: I am your soldier here, you are not alone.”

For anthropologist Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira, a professor at UnB who researches religion, 2013 was “a very central and strategic year when we think about how some guidelines began to circulate in a more capillary way in the segment”.

There, the idea that the PT persecuted churches was already spreading, embryonic for fake news that would destroy the relationship between the left and evangelicals —from the “drink bottle” to the intention to close temples.

“We understand that we need to have representatives in the houses [legislativas]this is much more important than having an evangelical president”, says Malafaia, who in 2014 placed the first member of his church, Sóstenes Cavalcante, in the Chamber.

The Evangelical Parliamentary Front had been made official in 2003, the beginning of the first Lula government. But his allergy on the left took hold in earnest over the next decade. “They tried to turn me into an example, they ended up turning me into a model. Today we have the most conservative bench in history.”