Study: Bolsonarist evangelicals silenced after attacks – 03/22/2023 – Politics

The many evangelical leaders who did not spare their vocal cords to help Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in the electoral campaign preferred to remain silent in the face of coup attacks on the headquarters of the three Powers on January 8th.

The option to remain silent prevailed on the social networks of evangelical agents who were Bolsonaro’s engaged campaigners, shows a report by Casa Galileia, which monitors virtual profiles of this Christian segment.

For this survey, the entity monitored publications on the 8th, 9th and 10th of January – a total of 448 posts on Instagram and 529 on Facebook.

Explicit engagement in anti-democratic acts stemmed from a microscopic radical fringe within the evangelical whole, according to the report. Case of the YouTube channel of a pastor called Valdirene Moreira, without major relationships in between. Another example is Pastor Geovane Dias, who promoted a collection through the Povo da Fé channel to finance the trip of pastors to Brasília, for real-time coverage of the day.

According to the report, there was “almost absolute silencing of profiles of the evangelical extreme right during the invasions”, and it took a while for mentions of the episode to pop up on the internet.

This ended up contributing to “other voices being heard”. A minority in the field, progressive evangelicals were responsible for almost 60% of publications on Instagram on the 8th, a rate that dropped to 30% two days later.

The case of the former Presbyterian pastor Antonio Carlos Costa, founder of the NGO Rio de Paz, who talks about “crazy scammers”, and Pastor Caio Fábio, who said at the time: “Among the terrorists there are pastors and many believers, evangelicals are the worst threat to democracy in Brazil and the USA”.

Another wing, which Casa Galileia defines as center, includes the position of the theologian and pastor Guilherme de Carvalho, who was already part of the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights in the Bolsonaro government —left the portfolio commanded by Damares Alves (Republicans ) with reviews.

On January 9th, Carvalho shared a letter of repudiation issued by the Evangelical Alliance. The next day, he published an open letter entitled “I underestimated the Bolsonarist threat”. In it, he reiterates his “longstanding critique” of progressivism and the evangelical left.

But he says that, short-sighted, deaf and defensive, he has reason to regret it. Example: as a theologian, “and not a mere government employee”, he conveyed “the impression, upon accepting the invitation to the post, that Bolsonarism would somehow be a good option for Christians”.

The believer influencer Zé Bruno also reacted, calling the scenes in Brasília the “Tupiniquim version of the Capitol”, the depredation against the American Legislature carried out by radicals in the wake of the defeat of Donald Trump, two years earlier.

As for what the report recognizes as the extreme evangelical right — the case of pastors who echoed the Bolsonarist narrative of questioning the election results — there was no record of open approval for anti-democratic acts. “It can be said that most of the positions were characterized as a selective repudiation, which condemns violence, depredation and vandalism, but does not give up an argument that justifies the plausibility of these extreme attitudes.”

Exceptions happened. The now senator Damares Alves was one of them. His repudiation of the attacks was objective, “without building a context that would give room for double interpretations or justifications”, says the text.

Damares posted on the occasion: “Freedom of demonstration is one of the pillars of democracy, but invading and plundering public or private property will never be the solution. Our disagreement with the left is in the field of ideas and against ideologies.”