Lula may have a truce, but it frustrates evangelical progressivism – 01/17/2023 – Politics
[ad_1]
Petistas know that Lula narrowly won this election, and that the electoral suffocation can in part be credited to the revulsion that the PT evokes in so many evangelical churches, after years of heavy Bolsonarist campaign in them.
From now on, everything will be different, could be heard backstage on the left. After all, this Christian block should still grow a lot in the coming years. The kind of thing that can make all the difference in a polarized Brazil to the point of consecrating a winner by such a slim margin as the one that separated Lula from Jair Bolsonaro (PL).
But what we saw, once Lula’s return to the Presidency was guaranteed, upset both the evangelical leadership on the right and the progressive minority who made the “L” for Lula with one hand while holding the Bible with the other.
The Lula government has not yet shown signs that it intends to prioritize the segment that it neglected for years, which helped to push it into the lap of Bolsonarism.
Symbolic example: leaders who were part of transition groups of the new government proposed not to remove the term “family” that Bolsonaro added to the Ministry of Human Rights when he entrusted it to Pastor Damares Alves.
“When we talk about family we are not talking about moral burden, whatever family model it may be,” says Baptist Nilza Valeria Zacarias, coordinator of the Evangelical Front for the Rule of Law. The movement gained a seat on the Social Participation Council set up by the Lula team.
She argues that deleting “family” from the Esplanada could send a bad message to a group already reticent to the PT. In the working groups in the areas of women and human rights, it was clear to the evangelicals present that the proposal was indigestible.
The word ended up sandwiched in the Ministry of Development and Social Assistance, Family and Fight against Hunger, which did not please. Nobody refers to the folder by its full name.
“Sooner or later, it could spill over into the evangelical segment that this is a government that doesn’t care about the family, which is not true”, regrets Zacarias. “We are in the war of narratives.”
And he is losing battles, say supporters of Lula. The idea of creating a Secretariat for Religious Affairs, floated before the inauguration, has so far gone off the radar. Bad signage. “We even advanced in the transition. The government took over, and everything went backwards”, she says.
On the Bolsonarist side, the tantrum was already established, and the beginning of Lula 3 did not help. They angered the use of the neutral pronoun (“todes”) at official events and the cleaning of the Planalto Palace with rock salt. The gesture is associated with Afro-Brazilian religions, the target of religious intolerance by a section of this Christian group. The inauguration of Anielle Franco (Racial Equality) and Sonia Guajajara (Indigenous Peoples), with drums and a salute to Xangô, the orixá of Justice, also did not go unnoticed.
But nods were made on both sides. The Madureira Assembly of God, one of the main ministries of what is the largest evangelical church in Brazil, is seen as a guaranteed support for Lula. Not everyone, however, opened their arms to the new president.
The president of the evangelical group, Sóstenes Cavalcante (PL-RJ), says that he was sought after the second round by senator Eliziane Gama (Cidadania-MA), an ally of Lula. For Sóstenes, her real intention was to find out if Silas Malafaia, her pastor and an anti-PT bazooka, agreed to a truce. The deputy says he rejected any proximity.
After so long painting the PT as the Dark Party, and Lula as the devil in person and with a beard, pastors found themselves facing a dilemma. Never before has a president been as inbred with evangelical leadership as Bolsonaro. But he lost the election. “Ball forward”, as Bishop Edir Macedo preached, wasn’t it even 72 hours after Lulista’s triumph?
Reversing would not be unheard of. Macedo himself first demonized Lula and then supported him, depending on the political wind. Parliamentarians from the Bolsonarist shock battalion, such as elected senator Magno Malta (PL-ES) and deputy Marco Feliciano (PL-SP), just the other day were just smiles for PT Dilma Rousseff.
The last decade, however, has consolidated identity struggles, inflamed conservative sentiments and catapulted Bolsonaro, a low-clergy congressman hitherto isolated in extremism, to the Presidency. Practically all pastors with strong national influence embarked on Bolsonarism.
But not everyone wants to park on it. The question was to understand the least traumatic way to detach oneself from the former president without seeming opportunistic, after such a symbiotic relationship between the parties.
The scenes of explicit vandalism in Brasilia can now offer an honorable way out for pastors who don’t want to be tied to radical agendas. Not that they were more palatable to democracy before, but within many churches there is a perception that there is no room, for now, for the Bolsonarist stridency once embraced with so much enthusiasm.
The apostles Estevam Hernandes (Renascer em Cristo) and César Augusto (Fonte da Vida) campaigned for Bolsonaro and, after Lula’s victory, softened the criticism. Augusto even sent a representative to vice-president Geraldo Alckmin’s inauguration as Minister of Industry.
The two criticized the riot in the capital — disapproved, incidentally, by 94% of evangelicals, according to a Datafolha poll.
From the Universal Church came serial blows on the left, such as the refusal to accept that a Christian could recognize himself in this field. Bishop Eduardo Bravo, a spokesman for the church, repudiated the extremism of the 8th.
Not that resistance to Lula has disappeared from the map. Most still resent Lula having won, even though they understand that continuing to clash with him is not to anyone’s advantage.
And there are firm and strong pastors in the opposition, who even relativized the destruction in Brasilia. See Silas Malafaia, Josué Valandro Jr. (leader of Michelle Bolsonaro’s church) and some leaders of the Presbyterian Church of Brazil — Reverend Ludgero Bonilha even reproduced a post on a social network about the “good Brazilian people” and their right to no longer recognize the legitimacy of the State.
[ad_2]
Source link
