Evangelicals split on supporting or resisting the dictatorship – 01/21/2023 – Politics

In 1969, two faithful denounced members of their own church to the military dictatorship. Informants from the DOPS (Department of Political and Social Order), one of the regime’s most violent bodies, the pastor and the bishop accused young Methodists of “subverting and indoctrinating the left”.

Anivaldo Padilha was one of those denounced. A student of social sciences at USP, he ended up arrested months later and welcomed into the interrogation room with a punch in the stomach. “Then they began to apply the ‘telephone’ to me, which consists of hitting the victim’s ears with both hands at the same time.”

The worst was yet to come. In the torture sessions that followed, she got to know the “dragon chair”, coated with metal sheets connected to a voltage regulator. “I was placed naked, with hands and feet tied. They demanded that I give all the information I had. With each refusal, the torturer turned the crank to increase the intensity of the shocks. To make the effects stronger, they placed a damp towel under my buttocks .”

Back in his cell, he was introduced to another form of torture: starvation. Dinner, often the only meal of the day, consisted of leftovers from the barracks brought in cauldrons. Rice, beans and chopped tomato. With swollen hands, which could barely hold the spoon, he had trouble swallowing his food.

The following year, the Methodist youth leader, who was also active in the AP (Popular Action) against the dictatorship, went into exile. He was unable to attend the birth, in that same 1971, of Alexandre Padilha, the son of the newly sworn-in Minister of Institutional Relations in the Lula government.

The testimony was given to Brasil: Nunca Mais, an ecumenical project conceived by a Catholic (Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns), a Presbyterian (Reverend Jaime Wright) and a Jew (Rabbi Henry Sobel). The octogenarian Anivaldo is also one of the four authors of “The Evangelical Churches in the Military Dictatorship – From Abuses of Power to Christian Resistance”.

Organized by Coletivo Memória e Utopia, the book recovers the evangelical engagement against and in favor of the military period at a time when most churches are rooted in Bolsonarism, openly sympathetic to those years.

The work recalls seven evangelical victims of the dictatorship. Their history passed through the Commission for Political Deaths and Disappearances, extinguished by Jair Bolsonaro (PL) at the end of his government’s lights and recomposed by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).

Heleny Telles Ferreira Guariba, member of the Central Methodist Church of São Paulo, disappeared at the age of 30. Inês Etienne Romeu, believed to be the only survivor of the Casa da Morte, a torture center in Petrópolis (RJ) where she received electric shocks in her vagina for three days, testified that she believed that one of her captive colleagues was Heleny.

Another emblematic case is that of Presbyterian Paulo Stuart Wright, the son of American missionaries elected state deputy for Santa Catarina and impeached in the first year of the dictatorship for “lack of parliamentary decorum”—he did not wear a jacket and tie.

An AP militant, he disappeared in 1973. Two years later, Pastor Jaime Wright, his brother, participated in the cult in memory of Vladimir Herzog, also murdered by the State.

Co-author of the book, Magali Cunha points out three distinct postures of evangelical leaders in the face of the authoritarian resurgence of those times. “The most prevalent was silence and indifference, which ends up becoming support. They omitted themselves in the face of persecution”, she says.

There was also a progressive minority among the faithful and others who, even without ideological alignment with the left, “on ethical principles stood against the dictatorship”. Some were denounced to the oppressive government by the pastors themselves, like the father of Minister Alexandre Padilha.

Finally, an evangelical portion contained or explicitly supported the coup plotters.

Even before the coup, the segment was already agitating against what it saw as a leftist threat. The Baptist pastor Enéas Tognini narrated having heard in 1963, from an officer of the Army’s secret service, that the evangelicals were the hope for “saving Brazil from the clutches of communism”, a “spiritual force of the devil”.

Adherence is clear with a reading of church newspapers.

In March 1964, at the door of the coup, O Estandarte Evangélico, from the Assembly of God in Pará, published: “We can compare [o comunismo] to a horrible monster that subjugates 900 million people in its iron curtain. All this is the fulfillment of the Scriptures. The end of time has come.”

The following month, with the generals seizing power, the president of the church sent a congratulatory message to the Military Junta.

In June 1964, Brasil Presbiteriano expressed its confidence in the military government, deserving of “the support of Christians”. “We believe that Presbyterians, whatever their party, owe to themselves, to Christ and to the Nation a positive attitude of participation in the tasks that await the country.”

Magali Cunha recalls that, with the hardening of the regime, churches promoted purges of too progressive members for the liking of the leadership.

For the researcher at Iser (Institute for Religious Studies), the moment is opportune for evangelicals to draw lessons from the past. Memories, she says, “have to be revived so that we realize that supporting undemocratic regimes is an issue incompatible with the memory of what Protestantism means in the world.”