RELIGION AND NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY IN BRAZILIAN SOCIETY TODAY

The following reflections will guide an ethnography that will be conducted in a Neo-Pentecostal evangelical church in the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) programmed for a period of one year from August 2021. The question to be answered is the following: which is the role played by Neo-Pentecostalism in the formation of neoliberal subjectivity in today’s Brazilian society? \nIn recent years, Brazil has seen profound political transformations with the controversial impeachment of left-wing president Dilma Roussef, succeeded by her right-wing vice-president, Michel Temer, until the \nelection of a far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. The sudden turn to the right of the country was marked by the deepening of the neoliberal policies that have guided the country since the 1990s (attenuated during \nthe period when the country was governed by the Partido dos Trabalhadores, to which President Dilma belonged) that accentuated the already profound economic and social inequalities that have historically \nmarked Brazilian society. In Brazil, the neoliberal transformations of recent years have been accompanied by an exacerbation of public discussion based on a moral agenda in which themes related to the family, \nsexual orientation and the right to life acquire a fundamentalist bias that threatens individual rights and advances societies that occurred in Brazil since the country’s redemocratization in the late 1980s. \nBrazilian neoliberalism accompanied by its moral agenda is undoubtedly driven “from the top” by the convergence of national and international economic and political interests that guide the country’s direction However, this proposal aims to show how the recent directions through which the country has been led are also built from “below”, based on the daily practices of the communities. For this, this proposal makes use of the analysis of a point in which neoliberalism and moralism converge in the current Brazilian society: Protestant religious phenomenon called Neo-Pentecostalism. \nNeo-Pentecostalism is the name given to Pentecostalism (a strand of traditional historical Protestantism that emerged in the United States in the early twentieth century) in Brazil from the end of the 1970s, when a new theology was adopted, Prosperity Theology, which, instead of valuing asceticism according to classical Pentecostalism, starts to admit and also encourage happiness, health and material prosperity in this world In other words, instead of rejecting the world, Neo-Pentecostals begin to value it (Mariano 1999). According to the neo-Pentecostals, material prosperity is a unique and exclusively individual decision: it is enough an unshakable faith in God, to demand your rights in a loud voice and in the name of Jesus \nand to be obedient and faithful to Him in the payment of offerings and tithes. The adoption of Prosperity Theology was a revolution. Until then, Pentecostalism was insignificant in Brazilian society as a whole Since \nthen, it started a significant expansion, being today the fastest growing religion in Brazil, especially among the poorest segments of the population (Mariano 2013) and has been gaining increasing public visibility, religious, media and political power. \nThis proposal starts from the hypothesis that the Pentecostal advance must be related to the advance of neoliberalism in Brazilian society. Neoliberalism is understood not only as a set of economic policies \naccompanied by an ideology that would result in the dismantling of social policies and the precariousness of work and existence (Harvey 2007). But mainly as a rationality according to which capitalism is the only possible horizon within a society whose members are subjectified from the mechanisms of competition and individualism, typical of the business world (Foucault 2008, Dardot and Laval 2014). Neopentecostal success is, therefore, due to the convergence of his theology do it yourself with neoliberal rationality. \nHowever, the liberal economic practices admitted and encouraged by Neo-Pentecostalism are unparalleled in the moral field. According to Shibley (1998), Pentecostalism and fundamentalism are related and were \nborn as a reaction to Protestant theological liberalism. From the beginning, they clung to the dogma of the inerrancy of the holy scriptures, to the literal and unhistorical interpretation of the Bible, to the belief in premillennialism, to theological and political conservatism, to the rejection of the social gospel, secularization and secularism. Even today, despite certain flexibilities, it is possible to say that Brazilian Pentecostalism still follows a good part of the classic Pentecostal tradition, focused on the family, in the defence of male authority, in the containment of sexuality, autonomy and women’s rights, in radical opposition to feminist demands, abortion, homosexuality, sex education in schools (Mariano 2019). \nIt is believed, therefore, that neoliberalism and moralism are not just impositions made “from above” on society as a whole They are also everyday government exercises that aim to direct the conduct of individuals for specific purposes, governmentality according to Michel Foucault (2008). In our specific case, a religion whose theology justifies, feeds and builds neoliberalism from “below”.

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