Evangelicals Can Put a Right-Wing Candidate in Brazil’s Presidency
By Julio
Severo
Major
news outlets in the United States are addressing prominently one subject
this week about Brazil: The evangelical influence in the incoming presidential election.
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| In this Sept. 2, 2018 photo, evangelicals raise their hands in prayer as they listen to a song during a service at the Assembly of God Victory in Christ Church in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (AP Photo/Leo Correa) |
As the Fox News and the Associated Press report
noted,
“Brazil,
a deeply religious country slightly larger than the continental U.S., is home
to the world’s largest number of Catholics — some 123 million, according to the
latest census in 2010. But evangelicals are growing and now number 42 million,
or about 20 percent of the total population.”
How in this world could an evangelical minority
have more political impact than Catholics in the largest Catholic nation in the
world? The first explanation, at least for evangelicals, is outside of this
world. It is spiritual.
Yet, there is also another explanation,
which the reports do not give. The Catholic Church has been plagued for decades
by the Liberation Theology. In fact, the most important Catholic organization in
Brazil, the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (NCBB), was founded some
50 years ago by Helder
Camara, a notorious adherent of this Marxist theology. He was known as “Red
Cardinal.”
Catholics could, by their sheer and overwhelming
majority, make a decisive impact in the elections in Brazil, but Marxism has
had an upper hand among their leaders and people. Liberation Theology has crippled
conservative activism in the Brazilian Catholic Church. For example, the Worker’s
Party, the socialist party that ruled Brazil for 13 years ruining the Brazilian
economy, was brought up by powerful NCBB leaders.
The
Fox News and the Associated report said,
“Evangelicals already have a large
influence in national politics. The so-called ‘evangelical bloc’ in Congress is
made up of 87 representatives and three senators, about 15 percent of all
federal lawmakers. Their votes were instrumental in the 2016 impeachment and
ouster of President Dilma Rousseff.”
The evangelical minority has been
victorious because they are united in their conservative stances against
abortion and the homosexual agenda. The overwhelming Catholic majority has not
such conservative union.
An
important document from the Workers’ Party drawn up in 2015 outlining
strategies to destroy the opposition stated explicitly: “Since the election of [an
evangelical politician from evangelical bloc], we are suffering a right-wing
offensive.” This far-left-wing document quoted the evangelical politician no
less than 9 times, placing him as the greatest danger for all the left in
Brazil. No other name appears as prominently as his name. The name of Jair
Bolsonaro appears once.
Even though the evangelical politician
could be a better candidate, schemes from the Workers’ Party overthrew him.
Yet, although a Catholic, Bolsonaro has
received the support from the most prominent evangelical leader in Brazil. The
Fox News and the Associated report said,
Silas
Malafaia, one of the most influential pastors in Brazil, makes no apologies for
trying to influence the votes of parishioners from his more than 50 churches.
During
a recent interview with The Associated Press, he said proudly he had helped
elect 25 representatives and five senators. His own brother is a state
representative for Rio de Janeiro.
“I
help candidates get elected by lending them my image and words,” said Malafaia,
who from the pulpit and on social media argues that left-leaning candidates
promote "moral garbage" with liberal stances on gay marriage and
abortion.
Malafaia
has been outspoken in his support for Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right congressman
and former army captain who has promised to crack down on crime and root out
corruption in politics.
“In
Brazil, we need a macho like him,” Malafaia said, adding that Bolsonaro will “defend
all the values and principals of the Christian family.”
Last
weekend, Malafaia visited Bolsonaro in the hospital, where the candidate was
recovering after being stabbed during a campaign event Sept. 6.
“God
is an expert in turning chaos into a blessing,” Malafaia said in a video that
he posted on YouTube from Bolsonaro’s hospital room.
Not always Bolsonaro was so right-wing as
he is today.
In 2002, in the first election of socialist
Lula, the idol of the Workers’ Party, Bolsonaro called Lula honest and said
that he would vote for him.
In 1999, when Bolsonaro was asked what he
thought of Hugo Chavez being supported by communists, he said: “He is not
anticommunist and I am not too. In fact, there is nothing closer to communism
than the military.”
In 2002, Bolsonaro supported Aldo Rebelo,
head of the Communist Party of Brazil, as Defense secretary.
The only evangelical candidate in this Brazilian
presidential election is Marina Silva. She was a Catholic actively involved in
Liberation Theology, but her conversion did not deliver her from this Catholic
theology. She has never changed, politically.
Bolsonaro seems to have changed politically,
and this is the reason Silas Malafaia is rallying Brazilian evangelicals to
support him, not Marina, in the hope that he will “defend all the values and
principals of the Christian family.”
Malafaia
and other evangelical leaders are concerned about pro-life and pro-family
issues. Marina has not such concerns.
All the U.S. headlines about the political
impact of evangelicals in Brazil have highlighted Malafaia but this is not the
first time that the U.S. spotlights are on him. He was exclusively interviewed
by the New York Times in 2011 in a suggestive headline titled “Evangelical
Leader Rises in Brazil’s Culture Wars.”
Perhaps the only problem for Bolsonaro is extreme
radicalism in some of his non-evangelical followers. His running mate, General
Mourão, said there is “a certain radicalism in ideas, even ignorance” among
Bolsonaro’s supporters.
He
was talking in support of Janaína Paschoal, a prominent member of Bolsonaro’s
party. She voiced concern about extremists among Bolsonaro’s followers, saying,
“You do not win an election with a one-sided mindset. And you do not govern a
nation with a one-sided mindset.” She had already identified such extremists
when she said, “Olavetes are as collective imbeciles as Workers’ Party
adherents, Marxists… Wake up!”
Olavete is an adherent of Brazilian
astrologer Olavo de Carvalho, who has lived as an immigrant in the U.S. for
15 years. He said
recently: “Evangelical churches have done more harm to Brazil than the entire
left.” In spite of so long time in the U.S., he has never been noticed or
quoted by FoxNews or other U.S. major news outlet. Evidently, the public in the
largest Protestant nation in the world would be surprised if they learned that he
is known in Brazil for his many attacks on evangelicals and for his strident
advocacy of the Inquisition’s revisionism, which tortured and murdered Jews and
Protestants.
Such advocacy
has created a wave of radical pro-Inquisition right-wingers in Brazil. The
worry of Mourão and Paschoal seems to be directed to such extremists.
It remains to be seen if the powerful impact
of evangelicals in a possible election of Bolsonaro will eventually defuse the influence
of extremists.
Portuguese version of this article: Evangélicos
poderão colocar um candidato de direita na presidência do Brasil
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