Abstract This essay posits Brazil as one critical locus for gestating the New Right. Often conceived of as a conservative reaction to the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the New Right actually developed transnationally, with determinative participation from Brazilian activists. In this article, I focus on a revelatory subset of those activists, who demonstrate collaboration that (1) linked elite reactionaries in Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere; (2) facilitated the rise of conservative Christianity as populist groundswell; and (3) transformed these two countries into power centers of a Right that adheres to the now-familiar Brazilian moniker “Bible, Bullets, and Beef.”

A direita política evangélica no Brasil tornou-se presuntiva, mas foram prefiguradas durante os processos simultâneos de redemocratização nacional e de politização evangélica na década de 1970 . Nesta encruzilhada, os líderes de várias denominações religiosas adotaram a linguagem de uma crise moral aguda, lançando as bases para uma direita evangélica. A própria crise moral tornou-se "nosso terreno", o ponto de inserção dos evangélicos de direita na esfera política, e uma das várias questões-chave que dividem evangélicos reacionários e seus correligionários progressistas. Até o momento da Constituinte, a posição dos Batistas e Assembleianos, como vozes dos conservadores que apoiaram amplamente o regime militar e se opuseram às iniciativas de justiça social do ecumenismo de esquerda e ao comunismo, tinha sido estabelecida após anos de pronunciamentos que ligavam essas questões à crise moral. Este artigo inicia um exame desses anos, dos contornos determinantes da transição gradual das coisas etéreas para as coisas políticas - e o significado destes contornos para facilitar a ascensão da direita evangélica.

Right-wing evangelical politics in Brazil have become presumptive, but they were prefigured during the simultaneous processes of national redemocratization and evangelical politicization in the 1970s. At this crossroads, leaders of several denominations adopted the language of acute moral crisis, laying the groundwork for an evangelical Right. Moral crisis itself became "nosso terreno" - the point of insertion for right-wing evangelicals in the political sphere, and one of several key issues that would divide reactionary evangelicals from their progressive co-religionists. By the time of the constituinte, Baptists' and Assembleianos' position as vocal conservatives who largely supported the military regime and opposed ecumenicalism, leftist social justice initiatives, and communism had been established by years of pronouncements linking these issues to moral crisis. This paper begins an examination of those years, of the determinative contours of the gradual transition from things ethereal to things political-and the significance of these contours in facilitating the rise of the evangelical Right.