God above all: evangelicals and conservatism in the Brazilian crisis

• Grant number: 19/13130-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Effective date (Start): January 13, 2022
• Effective date (End): October 12, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Ronaldo Romulo Machado de Almeida
• Grantee: Ronaldo Romulo Machado de Almeida
• Host Investigator: James Holston
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Research place: University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), United States

Abstract

The project aims to understand the articulation between evangelicals and conservatism in the Brazilian crisis, which was triggered by the street protests of June 2013, polarized in the 2014 elections, deepened with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, and whose most recent deployment was the election of a politician with the right-wing rhetoric in 2018. A significant part of this religious segment composes the broader social process that has been termed in the national and international public debate as a conservative wave. Not all conservatives are evangelical and not all evangelicals are conservative, but in what moments, among whom, where and how did conservatism and evangelism get together in the contemporary Brazilian crisis? My more general hypothesis is that the wave is a tangle of actors, discourses, projects, interests, alliances in different planes of political interaction traversed by at least four central social force lines: economically liberal, morally regulating, politically authoritarian and socially intolerant. I think of the wave as being "broken" because it is the result of unequal, asymmetrical social processes with different temporalities, but which in the current conjuncture have been politically organized around common enemies: human rights, the protective state, secular morality, diversity of behaviors, among others. (AU)