The Brazilian Conservative Wave, the Bolsonaro Administration, and Religious Actors

Despite the obvious connection between conservative Christian leaders and Bolsonaro, from his electoral campaign to the formation of his administration, religious agency in Brazilian politics goes beyond a mere conservative register. This article seeks to trace various dimensions of the trajectory made by evangelicals in Brazilian politics as a tipping factor in the emergence of a new protagonism of religious actors in politics. It discusses how the emergence of evangelicals as public actors has included different ideological and practical expressions, as well as internal disputes and ventures some remarks on whither current trends point to as Bolsonaro’s government makes room for the evangelical right but sparks reactions and rearticulations from various forms of evangelical progressives.

largely unnoticed, which is why by the mid-1980s, when Pentecostals first displayed their force of political coordination through the elections of over 20 members of parliament (32 including traditional Protestants) to the National Constituent Assembly, there was such a surprise among political commentators, academics, and social activists.
The second aspect, which I think also sheds light on this emergence/public impact focus refers to the 'democratisation process'. Particularly in Brazil, in the early 1980s, a struggle for democracy took place which in many ways was quite limited and protracted, but, on the other hand, created space for new agendas, new social actors, new political projects, which had not hitherto been easily organised or acknowledged in the Brazilian political context. Once set off, this process continued and picked up momentum in the late-1990s, through an 'expansive democratisation'. What has been occurring over the last few years in Brazil indicates that this process of expansive democratisation has all but come to a halt, resulting in what some have called a de-democratisation or a post-democracy scenario. Some kind of democratisation, then, did take place which caught analysts and activists a bit unawares, in the sense that religious actors which had behaved in a certain way started to move in very different directions, raising concerns and, sometimes, encouraging conspiratorial ideas about what they intended to achieve.
A basic conceptual framework: pluralisation, minoritisation, and conservative reaction 3 I would like, before going into details of this emergence, to draw attention to three concepts that I consider helpful in understanding the process, as far as religious politics is concerned. I am going to be very economical here. Space is limited. The first concept is 'pluralisation', by which I understand the increasing differentiation and complexity of the social composition and relational dynamics of Brazilian society, coupled with multiple forms of cultural identification and collective organisation, which led to a very different picture of Brazilian society as compared to the 1950s and 1960s, when the military took power.
______________________________________________________________________________________________ Secondly, 'minoritisation'. Evangelical politics is a case of minoritisation, that is, not so much the mere existence and visibility of a numerical minority, but a process through which, in the contemporary world, we have witnessed a proliferation of minority groups or actors, which have challenged definitions of national identity, as well as the narrow spaces for participation and political representation that such cultural, ethnic, linguistic, sexual, religious minorities have experienced in many parts of the world. Minoritisation is, first, a process of selfassertion. It is a process of self-organisation to claim different things from a majority society used to being quite relaxed about demands coming from such minorities.
Minoritisation is also a demand for majority identities to be brought 'lower' to the level of minorities, and therefore being treated as or becoming politically one more minority, among others. This can be expressed through a claim on democratic rights or through acts of defiance, contestation, and confrontation of the majoritarian order.
Thirdly, more recently, I think we can speak of a 'conservative reaction' against the (limited) advances that these entangled (but harbouring distinct logics) processes of expansive democratisation, pluralisation and minoritisation have achieved. After being challenged to the point in which it would appear that those advances could threaten the age-old political and cultural established order, a group of key conservative actors, transnationally connected, set out to undo this very deliberately.   powerful interests. This is usually far from idealised pictures of straightforward advancements. Wavering and regression, therefore, have not been novelties in the hard-won history of creating democracy in Brazil.
Not everything that can be said about evangelical minoritisation relates to the rise of the extreme right. The latter is very much a recent development, both because that minority had never been so powerful before and its recent prominence benefited from a juncture of institutional turmoil and uncertainty, domestically and internationally. On the one hand, Pentecostals The main idea behind this process was to carve out a space of recognition and participation in Brazilian mainstream cultural and political life for a religious minority. Pentecostals sought to protect religious freedom from an alleged Catholic Church attempt to become re-established and avert a putative communist threat.
But they also claimed social and economic rights. They resorted very much to the same kinds of citizenship codes of expression and mobilisation that were being used by so many other social minorities and political groupings, then, who fought the military regime and engaged in democratic construction.
Basically, this participation expected to find a 'place' for Pentecostals in the national people (BURITY, 2021(BURITY, , 2016b. Minoritisation had to do with a claim to be part of the people through self-assertion and autonomous representation. Pentecostals had long been seen as members of a foreign sect, maybe representing anti-national interests. On the right, they threatened the Catholic underpinnings of Brazilian culture through their staunch conversionism and opposition to   confrontational, civil-society based engagement with the state. At best, some of their (grassroots) leaders and (middle-class, intellectual) advisors were drawn into executive or consultative policy-making structures of progressive administrations.
The friction and the challenges that the conservative wave created in Brazil, especially after the general elections of 2014, slowly led to a more public profile of these progressive and radical evangelical groups and movements. As a result, they have tried hard to contest this widespread idea of 'the evangelicals' very often used by right-wing leaders within the evangelical political establishment to convey the idea that there is a (near) homogeneous collective out there the latter fully represent. Ecumenical and radical evangelicals have tried to empower, from a religious perspective, the agenda and demands of social movements, and they have joined with other religions, other religious minorities, particularly the Afro-Brazilian religions, that have become highly discriminated against, to create more space for a non-conservative religious voice in this process.
They also resonate the agenda of minority, environmentalist and global justice politics through their connections with local, transnational and global partners.
In the 1980s progressive religious activists had some space in the

Concluding remarks
The startling thing about evangelicals in politics over the past few years is that we are dealing with popular religion, not elite expressions of religion.
Although there are wealthy, intellectualised movers in the process that was  showing that you are under God's grace and that God is in control and will not let the worst happen.
However, the picture would not be complete if I stopped at that, because there is a growing environmental awareness among evangelical social activists and Christian ecumenical NGOs. Several of the latter were formed in the early-1990s, but some date back to the mid-1960s and early-1970s. From my own research on ecumenical social activism in Brazil and Argentina, I would err much in saying that all of them are very keen to promote or develop environmental policies as part of their social projects, as part of their charitable support for poor, indigenous and traditional communities, and some of them make a lot of this environmental concern. Among them, the largest Christian NGOs that operate in Brazil.
So, the story is unfinished and as unpredictable as ever, despite appearances to the contrary...

Revised by Eoin Portela Submitted on April 06, 2021
Accepted on May 27, 2021