Left pity evangelicals, and identitarianism is a barrier – 09/30/2023 – Power

On the night of the first round of 2022, when it was already clear that Lula (PT) had not done as well as expected, with an advantage of just 5 percentage points over Jair Bolsonaro (PL), Walter Pinheiro went online to give “a message to the whole the Brazilian left”.

“Are you going to call us, the evangelical leaders, to talk for real or are you going to continue using just the figure of Henrique Vieira as a totem?”, posted the pastor of the progressive Bethesda Church. “You won’t beat Bolsonarism without us.”

Message given, but, for specialists inside and outside the temples, there is still room for the field to fully assimilate the warning to rebuild bridges with the segment, dynamited after two Xifopag movements — the rise of the identity struggle between progressives and a more conservative conservatism. strident in temples already attached to what they call traditional family values.

The election ended like this: Lula sweated to win, with 2 million more votes than his rival, a mere pittance compared to the 124 million voters in the second round. Vieira, a pastor who excited Gregorio Duvivier and other personalities outside the evangelical faith, ended up elected federal deputy for PSOL-RJ.

After the electoral suffocation has passed, it is in a blind man’s mood that the left gropes in the face of the bitterness that has set in against it among a large part of evangelicals, once more sympathetic to its candidates.

The chronic difficulty in dealing with areas historically refractory to progressive rhetoric persists in other areas, such as public security and agribusiness.

It doesn’t help to dispel this distrust, such as Lula taking João Pedro Stedile, leader of the MST, to a meeting with the Chinese president, to the anger of ruralists, or saying that there were “some fascists” at Agrishow, the largest agricultural fair in the country.

He has also insinuated that police officers are not people, a campaign faux pas for which he later apologized. And his government makes little progress to “build a positive agenda in the area of ​​security, which is a vision, so to speak, alternative to Bolsonarism”, says Rafael Alcadipani, from FGV and the Brazilian Public Security Forum. “It seems like the left doesn’t want to deal with the problem.” The other side, by the way, is excellent at capitalizing on the widespread fear of violence.

The incompatibility of ideological geniuses never facilitated a stable union between the left and these poles. But the polarization has gotten much worse, according to Alexandre Gonçalves. Leader of labor Christians in the PDT, he circulates through all these channels. He is a pastor, federal highway police officer and from Santa Catarina, a Bolsonarist enclave. Although he recognizes that the animosity between the parties already has wrinkles, he points out that the bellicosity today is nuclear.

He uses 1989 as an example: many pastors endorsed Fernando Collor, a few, Lula —Silas Malafaia, in fact, voted for him in the second round. “But everyone lived together peacefully. From 2010 onwards, it became irreconcilable for two pastors from the same church to support one name from the left, another from the right.”

For Gonçalves, the abyss widened as Brazil began to import the agendas of the new American left. While traditional left-handed politics was structured around the concept of class struggle, the younger wing embraced clashes linked to identity, which include feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQIA+ causes.

“If you ask an evangelical if he wants to have quality healthcare and public schools, labor rights like vacations, he will say yes. This is how the left can connect with the churches”, says the pastor. “But if you start a dialogue with transversal themes, even if they are important, this ends up giving rise to a majority identitarianism. This is very good for the right.”

These are ideas raised about religious dogmas and fake news, such as that the Brazilian family (only the heteronormative version applies) and religious freedom are in danger.

Even if customized with local seasonings, the standard is global, says political scientist Guilherme Casarões, professor at FGV. “We have tensions between a traditional left, focused on the economic and class dimension, and an identitarian left, concerned with guaranteeing the rights of vulnerable groups.”

In Brazil, the PT seeks to synthesize these two lines, “even though it faces difficulties”. In the US, for example, there are cleavages in the Democratic Party between figures like Bernie Sanders, the old guard, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new generation.

“We see a difficulty for the left in general in mobilizing voters around broad agendas. The utopia of the past, represented by socialism, has been replaced by feelings such as fear, hatred and resentment, efficiently activated by the extreme right, particularly of a populist nature. .”

Casaões still sees communication obstacles. The antagonistic pole was skilled “in the early occupation of digital spaces”, he says. The left, on the other hand, struggles to “build broad narratives that appeal to the masses, beyond the groups with which it traditionally dialogues.”

“At the same time, swallowed by polarization, many began to equate conservatism with fascism, ostracizing significant portions of the population.”

Philosopher Márcia Tiburi, affiliated with the PT, summarizes this stance by launching “How to Talk to a Fascist?”, a title that labels those who vote for the ideological opponent in this way, or suggesting that the gift of speaking in tongues, central to the Pentecostal faith, is fake and popular among “people who didn’t have access to a culture”, as he told UOL.

Since returning to the Presidency, Lula has made nods to this religious aspect, such as sending an unprecedented letter to justify his absence from the March for Jesus and supporting the expansion of tax exemptions for churches in the Tax Reform. Evangelicals from different persuasions converge on one point: you can’t be too careful not to appear opportunistic, giving rise to the joke that some gestures in politics are like the World Cup, they only appear every four years, for the electoral show.

“If you want to take the evangelical world seriously, you have to start with respect and openness to listen to it,” says Methodist bishop Marisa de Freitas. “When a sector is only considered as another means of electoral support, it will never be legitimately addressed. And, realizing that it was ‘used’ based on its faith, it can take a boomerang shape, with unpredictable energy.”

There are still typical stumbles of many who, until yesterday, seemed to want to cover their noses if they crossed paths with a believer on the street. Walter Pinheiro, the pastor who warned colleagues on the left not to ignore the strength of the temples, mentions the task force of ministers that Lula created to get closer to the countryside. The strategy included dividing it into four tabs: traditional, Pentecostal, neo-Pentecostal and peripheral.

“This division already contains mistakes. Most Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals are on the periphery, so it makes no sense to separate the segments.”

It is also not worth, according to Pinheiro, ignoring progressive evangelicals (he sees himself there) and other relevant characters in the construction of evangelicals’ public narratives.

For example: “The Dunamis Movement led [em 2020] an event called The Send Brasil and managed to bring together many young people in three stadiums. It was attended by Damares Alves and Bolsonaro. Leaders of these independent charismatic communities go unnoticed in the analyses, as they do not have the aggressive caricature of Malafaia, but they greatly influence evangelicals’ opinions on politics.”

Author of “Chronicle of a Tragedy Announced: How the Far-Right Came to Power” and columnist for SheetWilson Gomes wonders whether the Lula government will be able to relax relations with the conservative electorate.

“It is very difficult to imagine that the government and the Lulista militancy would lower their guard and stop treating the businessman who creates 30 jobs and struggles to pay taxes as an ‘exploiter’, of treating the believer on the periphery as a ‘fundamentalist’, the rural sector as ‘fascist’. And similar predicates will come from there, in a feeding of enmity that doesn’t seem to have an end.”