Oligarch Dominance Through Religion: The Prosperity Gospel & Evangelical Christianity in Brazil

Religion is much underrated as a tool of foreign domination within international relations scholarship. During the colonial era, Christianity (in both its Catholic and Protestant forms) was foisted upon colonized populations through the destruction of previous churches, outright violence and coercion, and brainwashing within institutions of learning. Through this, the colonizers strove to destroy as much of the indigenous cultures as they could as this would greatly facilitate their domination of the colonized; especially with a Christ and a God visually constructed as white Europeans.

The areas of the world where this religious colonization was successfully resisted contain many of the nations that currently form the resistance to the Western neocolonization: China, India, Iran. Christianity in Russia had been imposed by its own rulers and took on its own forms in the Russian Orthodox Church which is independent of Western colonizing influences.

In recent decades there has been a new spurt of Western religious colonization stemming from the United States, in the form of an Evangelical Christianity that teaches a love of Western Capitalism through a Prosperity Gospel together with a veneration of the state of Israel. Its has become extremely influential in Brazil and stands in stark contrast to the Liberation Theology that promised a church that would be active in supporting the people against the oligarchs in this world; one that the Catholic Church hierarchy stamped out within its midst.

As Delana Coraza notes, the once fringe Evangelical/Pentecostal movement has grown into a decisive force within Brazil.

According to Brazil’s official census bureau (IBGE), 9 percent of the population attended Pentecostal churches in 1990. By 2000, the figure had risen to 15.4 percent, while in 2010 it was 22.2 percent … the Datafolha polling institute stated in early 2020 that Evangelicals now make up 31 percent of the population … the typical Evangelical is female, Black, and has a low income, meaning that Evangelicals are today more clearly profiled in terms of gender, race, and class.

IBGE demographer and retired professor José Eustáquio Diniz suggested in a study that Evangelicals will comprise half of the Brazilian population by 2030 … 17 new Evangelical churches opened up every day in Brazil in 2019.

What are the reasons for such a rapid rise, centred on the poorest and most vulnerable members of Brazilian society? One of the major reasons is the neoliberal destruction of other social support systems for working people, such as unions and formal workplaces. The evangelical churches enter into this emptied social space and offer a new communal organization for devastated individuals and communities.

One is the advance of neoliberalism in the 1990s, with devastating consequences for the poorest of the working class. Lacking jobs and the psychosocial support needed to deal with the poverty and violence that devastated peripheral areas as a result of the restructuring of the world of work, many people found objective and subjective responses to their pain and anguish in these small churches … Among these brothers and sisters in faith, there are numerous accounts of lives rebuilt within the church according to a daily discipline of belief. Their trajectories and environment are endowed with new meaning, both from a territorial and personal perspective. A new aesthetic of the periphery can be observed: psalms and other Biblical verses appear on the walls of homes and local shops. The small church often becomes the centre of a neighbourhood, that is to say an open arena, a place to be heard, where you can feel safe, welcome, and achieve a sense of belonging in areas otherwise marked by loss and deprivation.

These churches become the basis of a new social reality in the capitalist sacrifice zones of Brazil. The other alternative, the Liberation Theology that promised a Social Gospel, was snuffed out by the Catholic Church and its allies; including the Latin American and US security services.

In the 1970s, Brazil was also distinguished by the spread of Liberation Theology in the peripheries. Liberation Theology is a religious movement that sprang up in Latin America among several popular organizations, made up of people of faith, in response to encroaching industrialization. In Brazil, industrialization led to the rural peasant masses being proletarianized, deepening the continent’s structural economic inequalities. Liberation Theology inaugurated the theological break with tradition that as we saw was later taken up by Pentecostals, in which it becomes possible to find happiness in this life. Liberation theologians intended, of course, that such happiness should be built collectively on the foundation of social justice.

At the same time, successive US governments, in league not only with the Protestant Right but also with conservative Catholicism as personified by pope John Paul II, were active in Latin America in sometimes bloody actions against Liberation Theology. Conservative churches throughout Latin America, many of them fundamentalist, received funding from US groups keen to see them consolidated in the region.

One of the Catholic reactionaries was the future disgraced pope Ratzinger, who showed the same wanton disregard for those sexually exploited by Catholic priests as those financially and economically exploited by the capitalist ruling class; as Elle Hardy notes.

a young German theologian named Joseph Ratzinger – the future Pope Benedict XVI – had been politically liberal, but he began developing an increasingly conservative outlook that divorced faith from secular politics. In promising to forefront the poor, and go beyond charity to seek broad and lasting solutions to their poverty, liberationists believed that they were bringing the Church back to the teachings of Jesus. Ratzinger, and many of his European colleagues, saw things very differently. (Hardy)

Ratzinger lead the charge against Liberation Theology within the Catholic Church, while looking the other way from, and even facilitating the continued, Catholic priest sexual violations of boys and girls.

Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, might have been known as ‘God’s Rottweiler’, but when it came to teachings that questioned established hierarchies and beliefs, he was Pope John Paul II’s sottocapo. Together, the two fervent anti-communists executed a well-planned hit on a movement that orthodox clergy saw as Marxism in holy cloth.

Ratzinger warned that deviating from Papal authority risked ‘provoking, besides spiritual disaster, new miseries and new types of slavery.’ He believed that liberation theology subverted the meaning of truth and violence. A doctrine ‘incompatible with the Christian version of humanity’, it had, he said, an ‘ideological core borrowed from Marxism.’ To his mind, Marxists believe only in class and class struggle, and see society as inherently violent. That leaves no room for Christian ethics, such as good and evil. Unshackled from morality, Marxists are then compelled to participate in the struggle and to reverse the nature of domination by establishing their own.

Without a socialist alternative, the populations of the sacrifice zones turn to the right; in this case the Pentecostal churches. The differences between the traditionally dominant Catholic Church and the Pentecostal greatly favour the latter in such sacrifice zones.

The liturgy of born-again Christianity is one of bodies that express themselves spontaneously through words and music, and it unfolds beyond the institutional sphere of the church. Pentecostal Evangelicals cannily absorbed the popular religiosity of religious festivals and their cathartic moments so necessary for abused, stigmatized, and oppressed bodies. Pentecostal services are available on an almost daily basis, alongside meetings for Bible study and for specific age groups. (Corazo)

Pentecostalism gained traction among poor migrants from the countryside who moved to the outskirts of large cities looking for work, like the Macedos. That was followed by a reverse migration of sorts, as new converts took the religion back home to the impoverished rural communities where Base Communities had flourished. Early research on Pentecostal converts suggested that they were the poorest of the poor. (Hardy)

The Pentecostal churches promise liberation from want in this lifetime, but rather than a liberation based in a social gospel and communitarianism it offers an individualistic and very pro-capitalist view of personal liberation through the Prosperity Gospel. Within such a worldview those that have gained wealth have been blessed by the Lord, very much reversing the logic of Christ’s teachings.

The churches developed in the daily grind of working-class peripheral neighbourhoods, and their followers encountered in them the promise of prosperity in this life. Unlike other Christian traditions, in which salvation only takes place in the Kingdom of God, Evangelical churches came to offer the possibility of rewards on earth. This new perspective is an important factor for understanding the phenomenon, a theological tenet that provided meaning for impoverished workers with little expectation of leading a dignified life.

This theological break from tradition, termed “prosperity theology” (a term used more by academics than churchgoers themselves), can be understood as a choice to be in the world and to garner individual earthly achievements, with concrete practical consequences for the believer. The greater the faith, sacrifices, and discipline, the more blessings will be received, measured in terms of health, work, and wordly goods. Prosperity then ceases to be a mere possibility and becomes a consequence of the believer’s commitment to a divine task, the latter very clearly set forth by the Pentecostal leadership. The consequences, meanwhile, have moved beyond day-to-day existence of impoverished workers and into the arena of institutional politics. (Corazo)

Pentecostalism had really got going in the post-WW2 United States in response to the policies of the New Deal and the loosening of conservative social mores.

Pentecostalism really got going in North America after the Second World War, coinciding with the US elevation to global superpower. This brought forward a flood of optimism; yet, for many leaders of both faith and industry, it was a time for vigilance. Business leaders were scarred by the economic safety net implemented by Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. Christian leaders were terrified of the godless ‘reds’ sweeping Europe. In fearing the slippery slope towards communism, these interests found common cause. While they were busy merging the languages of business and Bible, the Pentecostals, often looked down on by their evangelical counterparts, were stoking new revivalist fires across the country. Out of the spirit of this patriotic postwar nation arose a new vision of Christianity.

Prosperity theology, often known as the gospel of health and wealth, emerged with the help of syndicated radio and cassette-tape technology. Kate Bowler, the author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (2013), says: ‘Inverting the well-worn American mantra that things must be seen to be believed, their gospel rewards those who believe in order to see.’ (Hardy)

The Pentecostal churches have become heavily involved in Brazilian politics, with many representatives in the legislature and with the prior president, Bolsonaro, as one of their allies.

As with the US evangelical churches, they push a socially conservative and highly neoliberal agenda; with the latter against the interests of the membership but being pushed by the church leadership.

Thanks to American influence, anti-state discourses — heavily linked to the Christian Right in the US, where any extension of state influence is seen as a communist agenda — helped shape Evangelical positions in the Brazilian congress. While communism or what they call communism — again due to US influence — is “demonized” by institutional Evangelicals, Israel is considered the Promised Land chosen by God and the foreign ally of choice, which explains the prominence of Israeli flags in the March for Jesus.

It is worth underscoring that the anti-state agenda derives from the Evangelical leadership. Rank-and-file Evangelicals follow in ideological lockstep, repeating the information they are continually bombarded with, such as the idea that “the state is corrupt”, which is reinforced by widespread public opinion. The doctrine of the minimal state is not easily absorbed by working-class born-again Christians. Black and impoverished, the Evangelical base depends on the state, even if it is wary of the public service machinery. (Corazo)

Macedo, the leading Pentecostal religious entrepreneur became extremely rich and owns one of the leading Brazilian television networks.

As Macedo’s following grew, he used funds from his flock to buy a television network, Record, in 1989. Today, he is a self-made billionaire who has received everything he owns from believers – including his only son, Moysés, given to Macedo in the street as a baby by its birth mother. To this day, prosperity gospel’s trickle-up economics continue. Smaller churches practise what they preach and become satellites for established megachurches by ‘sowing’ a percentage of their church income in order to receive the blessings of those who are materially more successful, therefore spiritually more devout. (Hardy)

The Pentecostal churches are also driving an increasing level of religious intolerance, a “holy war” to force out other faiths.

They are a growing social institution through which the Brazilian vassal oligarchy and the US oligarchy can block any socialist agenda, delivering an increasing number of the population into a false consciousness that directs them to act against their own interests and for the interests of the oligarchs. Domination through the manipulation of the hegemonic societal discourse, heavily instigated and facilitated by outside forces. With half of Brazilian society possibly so captured by 2030.