Mendonça in the STF had an evangelical lobby and a jubilant Michelle – 12/24/2023 – Power

“Isn’t it time we had an evangelical minister on the Federal Supreme Court?” The demand came from before, but now Jair Bolsonaro (PL) signaled his willingness to appoint a representative of the religious bloc that supported him so much in the country’s highest court. “Are there any, among the 11 ministers of the Supreme Court, evangelical? Avowed Christian? Don’t let the press tell me that I want to mix justice with religion.”

More than two years later, in July 2021, Bolsonaro used his presidential prerogative to nominate his then attorney general of the Union and former Minister of Justice, André Mendonça, to the vacancy opened by Marco Aurélio Mello, not by chance a Presbyterian pastor.

In the meantime, paraphrasing his minister Damares Alves, also a pastor, the then president would defend a “terribly evangelical” for the court.

The first public mention of the desire to nominate someone from the segment was made in May 2019, at the National Convention of the Assemblies of God. A renowned evangelical leader compared that day to signing a contract. If Bolsonaro went back, the fines in churches would be high.

The top leaders of the Madureira Ministry, the strongest branch of the Assembly of God along with the Belém Ministry, were with Mendonça when, months later, he was finally questioned by senators for the position. A political struggle led the powerful president of the House’s CCJ (Constitution and Justice Commission), Davi Alcolumbre (União Brasil-AP), to spend months postponing the scrutiny to which every nominee submits to enter the STF.

On the day in question, December 1st, spent eating coffee and cheese bread, Mendonça faced eight hours of interrogation at the CCJ. The hypothesis of his belief interfering with the job was a central point there. “As I have said about myself: in life, the Bible, and in the Supreme Court, the Constitution”, he committed.

He met with peers of faith in the office of then senator Luiz do Carmo (MDB-GO), brother of a bishop from Madureira, to await the result. There were Manoel and Samuel Ferreira, father and son, primate bishop and de facto leader of this assembly wing, which in the current legislature has 23 deputies and six senators in Congress. Another present: Pastor Samuel Câmara, from the first Assembly of God in Brazil, the so-called Mother Church.

The space gradually filled up. Damares took the first lady, who starred in the viral scene of the occasion. As soon as Mendonça’s triumph was announced, Michelle Bolsonaro cried out “glory to God”, “hallelujah” and the “God of promises”, hugged her husband’s former minister, jumped up and down for joy and spoke in tongues, which Pentecostals they see it as a gift guided by the Holy Spirit.

Bishop Samuel, according to those present, even suggested that the images not leave there. The recording still flooded social media and became the target of mockery, which raised accusations of religious intolerance against a demonstration dear to millions of believers.

The score was not comfortable for Mendonça, but it worked: senators gave him 47 votes in favor, six more than the minimum required to be approved. The feeling among evangelical actors in the process was that the majority of Bolsonaro government ministers were not making an effort for the cause.

“The loyalty of the church leadership and the union led the Senate to approve minister André, who today has made the nation proud”, says deputy Cezinha de Madureira (PSD-SP). A member of the church that carries his political nickname, he presided over the evangelical group in 2021.

Mendonça is not the first Supreme Court minister to court the assembly clan. In 2017, in a service that brought together the two São Paulo toucans with the largest plumage at the time, governor Geraldo Alckmin and mayor João Doria, Bishop Samuel said that he spoke “directly on the phone” with Alexandre de Moraes, “always a very respectful person of evangelicals.”

Moraes was quick to justify his absence: he would have loved to go, but on the scheduled date, March 22, he took office at the STF. He received votes of “blessed” from the audience of pastors.

That afternoon, beside Samuel was his father, Manoel, a well-known face in Brasília. Elected deputy in 2006, he endorsed Lula’s re-election and later found it useful to side with Dilma Rousseff, the PT successor. Eduardo Cunha, the believer who cried out to God to have “mercy on this nation” when voting for the impeachment that, as president of the Chamber, he opened against Dilma, attended a temple in Madureira.

Bolsonaro would also find favor with the Ferreira family, which did not stop Manoel from posing smiling with Lula after they shared a dish of chicken and okra in 2021.

It was in a church in Madureira that Mendonça, a Presbyterian, preached three months before being questioned and two months after being appointed to the chair.

Bolsonaro was fulfilling a promise made to allied pastors to appoint an evangelical to the court which, until then, had only had a minister of that faith. Antônio Martins Villas Boas arrived at the court in 1957 with the commitment to “put the unmistakable note of my eternal Lord” in his work.

Mendonça did not speak at his own inauguration. What he did was amend on the same day what would be the beginning of a tour of gratitude to the evangelical leaders who worked for his landing in the Supreme Court.

He left the ceremony for one of the churches he would visit in the following days, in Brasilia’s Catedral Baleia, the national headquarters for Madureira, carved in the shape of an aquatic mammal.

A week earlier, having just been approved by the Senate, he traveled to Rio to play the round of thanks. He had lunch with Bishop Abner Ferreira, also from Madureira, and went with him to the headquarters of the Rio de Janeiro Executive, where he was welcomed by Governor Cláudio Castro (PL). Deputy Sóstenes Cavalcante (PL-RJ), an ally of pastor Silas Malafaia, also went.

Mendonça vented to Castro about the “ordeal” with “elements of drama” that he went through until Alcolumbre scheduled his hearing. But he persevered. “Imagine if Christ gave up the cross? He wouldn’t have Christianity.”

The day ended at the Assembly of God Vitória em Cristo, the church in Malafaia. To the audience of faithful, the owner of the house honored his “friend, brother, pastor André Mendonça”. The Presbyterian preached about the “great victory that God has prepared for us.”