Jair Bolsonaro, now Brazil’s former president, lost re-election in October. But he didn’t lose it by himself. Besides the more than 58 million voters who plumped for the far-right leader, Mr. Bolsonaro was also backed by a series of powerful groups in Brazil — perhaps none more so than evangelical Christian figureheads.
Mr. Bolsonaro’s banners of God, Fatherland, and Family were backed to the hilt by influential evangelical leaders, and they were likely able to convince a large percentage of their flock to back the president.
At the head of Mr. Bolsonaro’s evangelical army were pastors Silas Malafaia, Claudio Duarte, André Valadão, Rene Terra Nova, Estevam Hernandes, Samuel Ferreira, and José Wellington Junior — all of whom preached that the candidate for re-election was God’s answer to the Brazilian nation.
This behavior, due to the level of influence that these evangelical leaders exert over a mass of believers, established a rhetoric devoid of reality, but which was fundamental in establishing an almost messianic idea: that the Brazilian democratic process would not be a mere constitutionally established suffrage, but a “spiritual battle” between good and evil.
Other characters from the Brazilian Pentecostal movement joined this discourse, such as Waldomiro Santiago, Edir Macedo, and other pseudo apostles and bishops who actually constituted a large number of electoral canvassers with a potential “electoral corral” on behalf of their faith.
And one cannot ignore the role played by First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro, who declares herself an evangelical Christian and who allied herself with some female evangelical leaders who chanted the lyrics: “Oh Bolsonaro, you are not going to lose / I can already see the Workers’ Party crying”.
There is yet another group that occupied the pulpits of evangelical churches, proposing a true rehearsal for what would be the battle of the “Brazilian Armageddon.” These leaders were not ashamed to use the Christian faith and become allies of mass misinformation spreaders — forgetting that, in the Gospel of John, the Devil is the father of lies.
The basis that supported this discourse established itself among Brazil’s evangelicals in four pillars: gender ideology, abortion, the legalization of drugs, and family, all the while partnered with the discourse that the left represents evil, and that, as pastor André Valadão has declared, if you hold left-wing views, “you...
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