LA ALIANZA ENTRE LA ULTRADERECHA Y EL MOVIMIENTO EVANGÉLICO EN BRASIL
Portents
06 September 2025
PARA LA REVISTA nlr sidecar, original en este ENLACE
Within the broader story of the rise of evangelicalism in Latin America, Brazil represents an especially dramatic case of political success for the Christian right. Not only are evangelicals a rapidly growing slice of the Brazilian electorate – they now account for around 30 per cent of the population, compared to only 5 per cent in 1960 – they also form an increasingly visible part of the political coalition behind Bolsonaro: some 70 per cent of evangelicals are estimated to have voted for him, more than any other demographic group. Evangelical interests are also directly represented in the legislature, with around a hundred deputies in the Brazilian congress (they are often referred to as the bancada da Bíblia – the ‘Bible caucus’). The political influence of evangelicals is still broader: the Frente Parlamentar Evangélica (Parliamentary Evangelical Front), founded in 2003 and including politicians from various parties, today comprises almost two-fifths of congressional deputies and 30 out of 81 senators.
Evangelicalism’s growing political clout in Brazil is the subject of Petra Costa’s documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics. Born in Belo Horizonte in 1983, Costa went to drama school in São Paulo before training in anthropology at Barnard and then social psychology at LSE. Her first film, a short titled Undertow Eyes, came out in 2009, followed by a first feature-length documentary, Elena, in 2012. Apocalypse follows on from her 2019 film Edge of Democracy, which gave a close-quarters account of Rousseff’s impeachment and the rise of Bolsonaro, often through strikingly candid interviews with the leading protagonists. The two films have a similar visual style and method: both rely on first-hand testimony from key players, and both make extensive use of lingering shots accompanied by an eerie soundtrack of sostenuto notes or chords on the edge of dissonance. Like the earlier documentary, Apocalypse in the Tropics is also in the essay-film genre, more exploratory than explanatory. While it’s clearly intended to evoke an atmosphere rather than to load viewers with information, this does mean that much of the context that would help us make sense of what we’re seeing is bracketed out. And though Costa’s restrained style allows viewers room for thought, it also creates a sense of distance from the topic, leaving the film hovering uncertainly over many of the crucial questions it raises.
In Latin America, the term ‘evangelical’ has several overlapping meanings, which correspond to successive waves of Protestantism’s spread in a predominantly Catholic region. In its most general sense, the word can refer to Protestants of any kind. Some denominations – Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists – arrived with migrants from Europe, their presence small from colonial times to the late nineteenth century. The word can also refer more specifically to Pentecostal missionary groups, mainly North American and European, which started to arrive in Latin America in the early twentieth century. (One of Brazil’s largest and most influential churches, the Assemblies of God, was founded in Belém by Swedes and Italians in 1911.) But the term ‘evangelical’ is also commonly applied to the much greater number of charismatic churches – both Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal – that have proliferated in Latin America in recent decades. As well as putting more emphasis on personal salvation, these churches allow a much greater role for miracles and divine gifts, such as speaking in tongues, than the older Protestant denominations. Many of them formed out of schisms from foreign parent organizations, but dozens more have sprung up autonomously.
Among other things, this means that evangelicalism is less a singular new faith than a proliferation of sects. Many of the larger ones have multiple branches vertically subordinated to a central leadership, while countless others are tiny, autocephalous self-starters. Evangelical groups also operate at a variety of scales, from lavish mega-churches to meetings in garages under bare light bulbs. While outfits such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, headquartered in a giant replica of the Temple of Solomon in São Paulo, certainly draw large numbers of worshippers – the Temple seats 10,000 when full – it’s likely that the bulk of evangelical believers are distributed across a bewildering number of smaller churches.
According to data compiled by the UK-based Brazilian researcher Victor Araújo, the growth in the number of officially registered evangelical churches – defined in the broadest sense – has been especially explosive since the 1990s. In 1970, the country had just over a thousand; by 1990 that number had reached 17,000 – an impressive rate of growth, but one that pales beside the subsequent expansion. By the turn of the century, the number of evangelical churches in Brazil had doubled to over 30,000, and by 2019 it had tripled again to more than 100,000. According to Araújo, around half of this total could be classed as Pentecostals, with the rest split between neo-Pentecostals on the one hand, and assorted Protestant denominations on the other; some estimates put the proportion of Pentecostals even higher, and they are unquestionably the dominant strain of evangelicalism in Brazil.
Geographically, evangelical churches are found across the country, but with especially high concentrations in the coastal states of Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo, which have 80 evangelical churches per 100,000 inhabitants, according to Araújo’s calculations. São Paulo and states in the southern interior such as Minas Gerais, Matto Grosso do Sul and Rondônia have between 30 and 50 per 100,000; their distribution is thinnest in the Northeast – Ceará, Piauí, Rio Grande do Norte – with less than 20 per 100,000. Ironically, the PT may have helped boost these numbers nationwide: Araújo argues that a programme to bring electricity to underserved areas, launched under the first Lula government, was the major factor behind the spread of so many churches in the 2000s and 2010s – a premise that in itself points to their modest, low-tech nature. Within the larger cities, churches often put down strong roots in the favelas by offering basic public goods and amenities that are all too lacking.
While evangelical churches swung behind Bolsonaro after 2016, their politics haven’t always been reactionary. Across Latin America, for much of the twentieth century the older Protestant denominations were often somewhat progressive, actively pushing for secularization and freedom of worship but also embracing the ‘Social Gospel’. Pentecostals, by contrast, tended to be quietist, shunning political engagements altogether in a world tainted by sin. With the Cold War, rifts opened up within Latin American Protestantism just as in Catholicism, with some churches and clerics tilting left in favour of Liberation Theology while others leaned right, propelled above all by anti-communism. Adding to the rightward momentum was the fact that conservative US churches also stepped up their activities in Latin America starting in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them touting the ‘Prosperity Gospel’. (Apocalypse in the Tropics includes archive footage of Billy Graham sermonizing to a packed Maracanã stadium in 1974.)
Brazil’s evangelicals only moved into politics in an enduring way with the end of the military dictatorship. According to political scientist Taylor Boas, the drafting of a new constitution in 1987–88 raised concerns that the Catholic Church would try to re-establish its institutional status to the detriment of Protestants; Pentecostals in particular mobilized to get delegates elected to the constituent assembly to guard against this perceived threat, creating the first iteration of the bancada da Bíblia. The threat did not materialize, but evangelicals retained a significant political presence thereafter, working effectively to block attempts to legalize abortion in the 1990s and 2000s, for example. Yet as Boas argues in Evangelicals and Electoral Politics in Latin America, they were often pragmatic in their political alignments. Many of the evangelical churches endorsed Lula in 2002 once his victory seemed likely and even backed Rousseff in 2010. (Evangelicals could also be just as crooked as the rest of the political class: Boas describes evangelical deputies trading their votes for TV licences in the 1980s, and notes that several of them were ensnared in the corruption scandals that proved so fatal for the PT in the 2010s, including Lava Jato.)
While evangelicals have consistently been conservative when it comes to questions of sexuality – sex education, reproductive health, LGBTQ rights – a step change in their rightward shift seems to have come in 2011, with mobilizations against an initiative by the Rousseff government to counter homophobia in schools. Overseen by the then education minister Fernando Haddad, it was labelled the ‘gay kit’ by right-wing critics, who whipped up sufficient outrage for the initiative to be dropped. Pentecostal churches were central to this effort, as was Bolsonaro – an early sign of their future conjunction. Thereafter, Boas argues, the increasing polarization of Brazilian politics between pro- and anti-PT positions presented churches with a straightforward choice. Few of them hesitated: while there were and still are progressive churches, the broad mass of evangelical leaders aligned with Bolsonaro, and in the process accelerated a rightward trend among evangelical voters.
This longer history remains largely offstage during Apocalypse in the Tropics, which grapples more with the immediate symptoms of evangelicalism’s rise. Rather than providing a linear narrative, it explores its subject through a series of discrete chapters. Some have resonant liturgical titles – ‘Genesis’, ‘Revelation’ – while others invoke broader concepts (‘Dominion’) or focus on specific individuals (‘The Kingmaker’). The subject of this last chapter, Silas Malafaia, is in many ways the film’s protagonist, figuring as the éminence grise of Bolsonaro’s alliance with evangelicals. Now in his late 60s, Malafaia has been a prominent televangelist since the 1990s, and since 2010 has been head of the Assembly of God Victory in Christ, a branch of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God church founded in Rio in the late 1950s. Though he endorsed Lula in 2002, he broke with the PT in 2010 and has since moved ever further to the right.
Through Costa’s lens we see Malafaia veer unsettlingly between vitriol and cold calculation. His sermons reach a crescendo of rage as he denounces the PT as propagators of homosexuality. But we also see him telling Costa that Bolsonaro made a mistake promising to put an evangelical on the Supreme Court, since this wasn’t essential to furthering their agenda. Bolsonaro’s nominee, the pastor André Mendonça, was approved in the end; we see Michelle Bolsonaro tearfully praising the Lord when the vote count comes in – a tantalizing glimpse of another key player, since it was her longstanding worship at Malafaia’s church that paved the way for her husband’s alliance with the pastor. (Bolsonaro himself is supposedly Catholic, baptism in the Jordan notwithstanding.) The scenes where we see Malafaia and Bolsonaro together are especially revealing: Bolsonaro appears diffident, deferential to the pastor. At one point Costa pauses and rewinds some footage of a 2022 rally to show Bolsonaro clearly looking to Malafaia for approval of what he’s about to say, suggesting that the words to come were not his own.
It’s Malafaia, too, who most clearly articulates one of the film’s key concepts. He explains to Costa that the evangelical churches previously only told their flocks about Heaven, rather than telling them how to be citizens of this world. He then lays out a version of Dominion Theology – the notion, emerging in the 1980s among right-wing US evangelicals, that the faithful should seek control over the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society (religion, the family, education, media, government, arts and entertainment, and business) in order to inaugurate a Christian polity in anticipation of the Second Coming.
Costa paints this concept as central to the evangelical vision as a whole, but if that’s the case it means some substantial doctrinal differences have collapsed. ‘Premillennial’ believers, mainly Pentecostalists, generally hold that Christ will come and inaugurate a thousand years of peace before the end times – rendering secular projects largely irrelevant, hence the historic tendency of such churches to political quietism. By contrast, ‘postmillennials’, mainly neo-Pentecostals, believe the thousand-year peace must precede Christ’s return – hence their greater involvement in politics. Malafaia’s embrace of Dominion Theology suggests that many Pentecostals have decided that political activism is not only a necessary evil, as it was in the 1980s constitutional debates, but a positive good. In any event, it’s true that evangelicals across denominations have become more politically active, and there is certainly a shared vision behind the program they are seeking to implement. While the rollback of sex education, women’s access to reproductive healthcare and LGBTQ rights is part of a reactionary backlash, it’s nominally intended not to turn the clock back to a patriarchal idyll, but forward, towards the Apocalypse.
At one point in the film, we see dozens of people kneeling in the street, fervently praying aloud. Many have their hands raised, and nearly all of them are around six feet apart from each other and facing in different directions. This eerie scene is from 2020, amid the catastrophic surge of Covid in Brazil, which had the second-highest death toll worldwide in absolute terms (700,000 by the end of 2022). We see white-shrouded bodies being buried in hastily marked out cemeteries and hear recordings of the tearful pleas of medical staff in Manaus for oxygen supplies. In the midst of this, we see Bolsonaro responding to a journalist’s question about the spiralling casualty figures: ‘What is it you want me to do? We’re all going to die… the state can’t look after everyone.’
His handling of the pandemic certainly had an impact on his support. A survey conducted after Lula’s narrow second-round victory in October 2022 found that while 44 per cent of voters thought Bolsonaro’s overall performance in power had been ‘bad’ or ‘terrible’, the figure rose to 58 per cent when it came to how he dealt with Covid. But among evangelicals it seems not to have made much of a dent: as we have seen, he won 70 per cent of their votes in that election. We hear Malafaia’s voice saying that the pandemic is one of God’s ways of judging the world, and a sign of Jesus’s imminent return. Did evangelicals agree? Costa doesn’t explore this point in detail, and even though she does include some interviews with ordinary believers about their reasons for voting for Bolsonaro – gender politics loom large – the film as a whole has relatively little to say about how and why they come to believe the things they believe.
At one point, Costa asks Lula why evangelicalism is so popular. He responds by recounting an anecdote he used in his days as a union organizer. If a worker lost his job, the union would tell him he must organize and prepare for a long struggle, while the Catholic Church would say it was his lot to suffer. The evangelicals, by contrast, would give him a simple answer that at least offered him a chance: it’s the devil’s fault and embracing Jesus is the solution. While the stark clarity of its explanations and its emphasis on the power of individual agency may well account for some of evangelicalism’s appeal, there is much more to be said here. Among other things, charismatic evangelicalism has shown itself to be more adept than other brands of Christianity at offering a sense of meaning and cohesion to people whose lives have been rendered increasingly precarious in neoliberal times; perhaps the Prosperity Gospel is the fitting compensatory fantasy for the atomized subjects of the market. It has also built an impressive physical infrastructure, putting deep roots in communities and bringing it close to broad masses of the population. Then there is the question of its specifically theological appeal. Does the emphasis many churches place on the presence of the divine in everyday life draw adherents who, contrary to the predicates of modernization theory, still feel the world to be enchanted? Put another way: who wouldn’t want a little more of the miraculous in their lives?
By the end of Apocalypse in the Tropics, the focus is less on evangelicals themselves than their role in the paroxysm that followed Bolsonaro’s defeat. The film climaxes with the storming of the Brazilian congress and supreme court building in Brasília by Bolsonaro’s supporters on 8 January 2023. There is some extraordinary footage here, much of it filmed on phones by participants themselves. We are placed in the midst of a swarm of yellow-clad figures waving Brazilian flags as they gather in the Praça dos Três Poderes and then jubilantly surge up the white concrete ramps of the congress building. In the light of the rest of the documentary, the frequency with which participants refer to God and Jesus is suggestive, though it’s not clear how many of them are evangelicals (as opposed to, say, right-wing Catholics, of whom there is also no shortage). We watch them gleefully trash the halls of power, turning Oscar Niemeyer’s utopia of sleek modernist forms into a morning-after pigsty.
Costa’s camera lingers over the destruction, hovering above broken marble tables, toppled statues and busts, vandalized art, as her voice-over takes us back to the etymological roots of the word ‘apocalypse’ – revelation as discovery, not an end but an unveiling. The rhetorical move seems to be intended to offer hope: that this violent moment of apparent triumph for the right might be instructive for the rest of the population, making the hidden seen and therefore knowable. But given the film’s title and ominous overall tone, viewers might also be left wondering whether Costa’s apocalypse is instead a moment of revelation for the right: less a hollow failure of a riot than a flexing of political muscles, demonstrating the possibilities of a menacing power to come.
Yet the portents are perhaps not as bleak as we might assume. Despite the size and apparent solidity of the right-wing evangelical bloc, it was not enough to get Bolsonaro re-elected in 2022, and the latter’s arrest and trial have opened up rifts in his entourage that may translate into larger political fractures. Some on the right are already advocating a switch to São Paulo governor Tarcísio de Freitas – a far-right evangelical – while others furiously insist on loyalty to Bolsonaro. For all the air of otherworldly inevitability that surrounds the evangelicals’ rise in Apocalypse in the Tropics, it remains to be seen whether it has permanently reconfigured Brazil’s electoral landscape, or whether evangelicals will switch sides once more if and when the wider balance of political forces changes. For better or worse, the ultimate consequences of evangelicalism’s ascent will unfold not in the unyielding domain of theology, but in the profane and inconstant realm of politics.
Read on: André Singer, ‘Lulismo 3.0: A Mid-Term Diagnosis’, NLR 150.
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