639238

research-article2016

LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X16639238Latin American PerspectivesMinoritization And Pluralization

Minoritization and Pluralization

What Is the People That Pentecostal Politicization
Is Building?
by
Joanildo A. Burity
Translated by
Frutuoso Santana
The emergence of Pentecostalism on the Brazilian scene has raised new questions
about the way religion relates to the definition of a people, how religious minorities
can be politically and legally integrated into the mainstream of national identity, and
to what degree the state-religion relation is constitutive of society in a context of
increasing sociocultural, religious, and political pluralization. The argument draws on
the concept of minoritization proposed by William Connolly, against the background
of Laclaus problematic of the formation of a people as a hegemonic actor. An analysis
of Pentecostal discourse on the public and the people reveals that Pentecostalism
minoritized itself in response to perceived exclusion and this accentuated pluralization
within it. An unintended effect of this logic was the fluidity of the boundary between
sacred and profane, religious and secular. In a context of growing cultural, social, and
political pluralization, these discursive practices have the potential to lead either to the
aggiornamento of Pentecostalism or to the regressive closing of a populist right-wing
discourse.
A emergncia pentecostal na cena pblica brasileira tem colocado novas questes
quanto forma como a religio se relaciona definio de um povo, como as minorias
religiosas podem ser politica e legalmente integradas ao filo principal da identidade nacional, e em que medida a relao entre religio e estado constitutiva da sociedade, num
contexto de crescente pluralizao socio-cultural, religiosa e poltica. O argumento desenvolve-se em torno do conceito de minoritizao proposto por William Connolly, com base
na problemtica laclauniana da formao do povo como ator hegemnico. Uma anlise do
discurso pentecostal sobre o pblico e o povo revela que os pentecostais minoritizaram-se em resposta a uma percepo de excluso e que a minoritizao acentua a pluralizao no interior do pentecostalismo. Um efeito no-pretendido dessa lgica a
fluidificao da fronteira entre sagrado e profano, religioso e secular. Num contexto de
crescente pluralizao cultural, social e poltica, essas prticas discursivas tm o potencial
de aprofundarem o aggiornamento do pentecostalismo ou de seu fechamento regressivo
num discurso populista de direita.
Keywords: Pentecostalism, Brazil, Minoritization, People, Pluralization

Joanildo A. Burity is a political scientist and lead researcher and director of postgraduate studies
and professional development at the Fundao Joaquim Nabuco. Frutuoso Santana is a translator
living in New York City.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 208, Vol. 43 No. 3, May 2016, 116132
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X16639238
2016 Latin American Perspectives

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Issues regarding the nature of the popularthe inclusion of religious, ethnic,

and cultural minorities in the definition of national identity (and the people that
embody and express it) and the more specific relationship between the people/
national identity and religionare not only historically interwoven but also circumstantially transformed. They have come to the fore in Brazil in recent decades
and stimulated heated debates. The increasing pluralization of the religious field
and the emergence of a religious minority demanding recognition and rights are
socio-demographic and political indicators of that process. The argument to be
developed here highlights the place and role of Pentecostals in this process. I will
argue that the emergence of Pentecostalism on the national public scene raises
questions on the status of the popular in relation to religion, the political and
legal implications of the incorporation of a religious minority into the mainstream of national identity (contrary to its characterization as foreign and problematic), and the constitutional theme of the relationship between religion and
state (or, more broadly, religion and politics) in a context of increasing sociocultural, political, and religious pluralization (see Burity, 2006a; 2011; Sorj, 2004).1
I will go on to discuss the way a specifically Pentecostal discourse on the
public and the people is being built, with the understanding that the word
discourse here is used as a system of differences articulated as a social practice that implies inseparably word and action and that is relationally built
in a land (material and imaginary) inhabited by many others (see Glynos and
Howarth, 2007). I will try to examine from a poststructuralist and pluralist
point of view how Brazilian Pentecostalism is constituted as a people2both
part of the people and a rearticulator of a sense of a people as it learns to
shape its identity boundaries in response to relational contexts that define its
allies and its opponents.
The argument is based on a set of 55 interviews with Brazilian Pentecostal
leaders examining their attitudes on various topics. The objective of this
approach was to investigate the contours of the Pentecostal political imaginary
in the present context and the relational dimension of the constitution and
transformation of this imaginary. These interviews, conducted between 2011
and 2012 by a team of which I was a part, locate the Pentecostal and Charismatic
(including Roman Catholic) discourse in a time of some reflection on its trajectory. Forty-four pastors and 11 lay people from 20 Pentecostal and 2 non-Pentecostal denominations were interviewed in eight cities in three Brazilian
regions (the Northeast, the Southeast, and the Midwest). Seven of them were
women. Nineteen (11 of them pastors) held a political office or worked directly
in politics as congress members or senior managers or advisers in the executive
branch. I will focus on a random selection of 10 of these interviews conducted
in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, So Paulo, Braslia, and Salvador.
THE POPULAR, THE NATIONAL, AND THE STATE-RELIGION
DIVISION
Why inquire about the meaning of the public presence of Pentecostalism in
Brazil in terms of the concept of the popular? First, because in defining the
popular what pertains to the people (and the place held for religious, ethnic,

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and cultural minorities in it) and the relationship between people, national
identity, and religion are historically intertwined. These issues are articulated
in particular ways in different modern social formations, and recently they
have sparked renewed debate, if not heated controversy. Second, because the
politicization of contemporary minority actors raises questions about their
inclusion in the majority population and demands articulation to broaden or
call into question the hegemonic configuration of the people (see Deleuze
and Guattari, 2003; Laclau, 2005).
Socio-demographic change in the Brazilian religious field is not strictly
quantitative. It has expressive qualitative markers of emerging identity formations and of a rearrangement of the field that goes beyond religious differentiation. This points to a hegemonic struggle in which the very boundary between
the religious and the secular is in flux (see Burity, 2006b; 2009; Freston, 2007;
Casanova, 2001; 2010).3 My hypothesis is that with the emergence of
Pentecostalism on the national scene the issues of the popular, minorities, and
the relationship between the state and religion have assumed new dimensions.
Adversaries of this religious minority repeatedly reference its foreign and
potentially illegitimate character, but its emergence contests this claim. The
Pentecostalism that emerges as public religion has every indication of a cultural
fusion that qualifies it as indigenous. Its trajectory since the 1910s includes
sustained numerical growth and autonomous organization, a complex dialogue with popular culture in its collective ethos, various forms of subordinate
incorporation into the Brazilian political, economic, and social status quo since
the late 1960s, and unchallenged hegemony in the Evangelical field since the
mid-1980s.4
The Pentecostal component of this socio-demographic change was initially
considered a perceived threat to Catholics, historical Protestants, and various
types of secular actors (academics, politicians, social activists, lawyers, judges,
etc.). In addition to competition for believers, the threat was seen in the breakdown of strata supposedly organized and arranged harmoniously in the traditional Brazilian social structure (see Soares, 1994). The emergence of
Pentecostalism was viewed as raising problems in this configuration, weakening the bonds of community among the poor because of its sectarianism, antisyncretism, proselytism followed by conversion, and fundamentalism and its
poorly representing the national identity, essentialized in the public debate in
terms of an unresolved set of contradictory attributes: Brazil is a Catholic
nation; Brazil embodies cultural and religious syncretism; Brazil is the
country of political conciliation; Brazil has a tradition of tolerance and pluralism that should be protected (see Da Matta, 1991; Debrun, 1990; Motta, 2013;
Souza and Sinder, 2007; Valla, 2001; Zaluar, 1997).
Resistance to Pentecostalism was in part understandable. Fear and mistrust
of it and the allegation of disaggregation against it were part of the hegemonic
political dispute of the period. The discourse of threat resisted at all costs the
possibility of thinking of Pentecostals as a people (that is, as a legitimate part
of the people). The issue of the popular was posed in more than one way: To
what extent, in the definition of a people, does religious identity add to or
separate, aggregate or fragment? What is the people after two decades of
military dictatorship? How can one situate politically mobilized religious

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minorities, especially while rejecting models of integration that assign minorities the status of subaltern?
In the history of Brazilian religions, the status of popular was not readily
extended to religious minorities. As these very diverse groups were being
incorporated into the mainstream of national identity, they had to resolve the
issue of what people they represented. Were they communities of believers
separated from the people in general? Were they adherents of a religion of
the poor and marginalized vis--vis the religion sanctioned by the elites? Did
they represent actors in dispute for political control of the People-Nation? Jews,
Muslim and animist African slaves, Protestants, Candombl followers,
Umbanda believers, spiritualists, and atheists all historically experienced
strong rejection, discrimination, and persecution by the majority sectors of culture and religion and by the state itself.
Second, the inclusion of religious minorities is a classic theme of liberal,
modern Western European discourse. As Casanova (2010; 2012) has stressed,
although what Westphalia established was not the separation of church and
state but the confessional statethe national church under the authority of
secular power (cuius regio, eius religio)some concession was made to religious
pluralism. Thus the theme of religious minorities has a long liberal pedigree. It
evolved and became autonomous, overflowing in the direction of a discourse
of rights of minorities in general (political, ethnic, linguistic, regional, etc.), and
was ultimately reiterated in the twentieth century through human rights discourse. The events between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
UN conventions on sociocultural diversity testify not only to the increasing
inclusion of minorities but also to the increasing invisibility and marginalization of the rights of properly religious minorities (Banchoff, 2011; Ghanea,
2012). The political emergence of the Pentecostals in the 1980s reintroduced
both the theme of the popular and that of the integration of a religious minority.5 To become a socially and culturally legitimate religion meant to become
part of the legitimate definition of a people.
Third, we have what I have called the constitutional theme of the relationship between religion and the stateconstitutional in the sense that the
squaring of this relationship is constitutive of a form of society. The separation
between religion and the state is one of the structural elements of the form of
society that emerged with Western modernity. This relationship is also constitutive in the sense of originating: religion as a separate sphere of the state and
one largely associated with the private management of faith or spirituality is a
creation of Western modernity. Since then, there have been rules established for
regulating places and relations according to the modern logic of the nationstate (see Asad, 2003; Burity, 2007; Fitzgerald, 2007; King, 1999; Taylor, 2007).
Thus it is revealing that the constitutional issue is the one most rapidly crystallized in the debate on the coexistence of religious actors in the Brazilian public
sphere after the democratic transition. The agreement between the state and the
Vatican in 2008 promulgated by Decree No. 7107 of February 2010 (Cunha,
2009; Observatrio, n.d.) is symptomatic of a discourse that serves the Catholic
Church and its religious and secular competitors in different ways: in establishing the idea that the secular state is not antireligious or irreligious, the justification for the agreement explores the consequences of the long history of the

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constitution of post-Westphalian religious difference. On the one hand, it cannot contest the principle of religious pluralism, and therefore it cannot be presented as a return to a state religion or to the legal form of the Concordat. On
the other hand, it exploits that very principle as it reactivates the prerogatives
and historical advantages of the Catholic Church to offset the loss of believers
and political clout in recent decades. The agreement only reinforces the Catholic
dilemma between positioning itself as one religion among others and reiterating its intention to be the cultural substrate of Brazilian identity, thereby risking
the incitement of antagonism from secularists and religious opponents.
The constitutional problem is also visible when an emerging religious minority demands for itself the same treatment provided to the (legally) silent majority, which is however deemed to be improper, abusive, or unduly
particularistic. A religious minority minoritizes the religious majority, reducing it to a symmetrical plan. To wish to be treated equally means that the minority considers the majority just another minority! Not surprisingly, this attitude
arouses controversy and protest (even from other minorities) that can produce
a negative or reverse minoritization. At the same time, the minority, as simply a small number, minoritizes itself when it claims autonomous agency
representation without intermediaries. Thus it becomes a minority with its own
voice, its own demands, and a sense of action that, even when it is powerless
to impose it alone, uses a repertoire of collective action already tested in the
context of modernity: construction of a differentiated identity, self-assertion as
a legitimate being or actor, articulation of a demand for rights, and coalition
formation with other minorities (and dissident sectors of the majority).6
Under the conditions just described, the ongoing pluralizing process in postdictatorship Brazil is sociocultural and religious but has powerful political
implications. The Pentecostal minoritization constitutes the publicization of
religion. The Pentecostal minority found its place in the population only as a
public religion, and it was not readily recognized as such. This was its trump
card but also a steady source of internal tension because only as a public religion could its socio-demographic existence be translated as an identity capable
of influencing the new definition of the people that emerged with democratization. At the same time, in emerging as the publicization of a religious fraction, Pentecostalism opened itself to both internal and external contestation: it
ended up having to abandon the quietism, isolationism, and world rejection
that marked the decades in which its identity was shaped, broke with the
offer of representation from the historical Protestant churches to build a selfrepresentation, and underwent repeated negative minoritization that aimed to
delegitimize it as sectarian, intolerant, manipulative, and corrupt.
This is not a matter of glamorizing the Pentecostal minoritization. Among its
immediately perceived characteristics were its inconsistency, its corporatist
pragmatism, and its susceptibility to co-optation and corruption. A sudden
politicization on the margins of the political socialization of the elites, struggling to establish itself as legitimate in the eyes of apolitical Pentecostal generations, Pentecostal minoritization rested on two sources of interpellation
with potential intramural resonance: the encouragement of intragroup solidarity (symbolized in the brother votes for brother motto) and organization
against supposed secularist threats to religious freedom. It failed, however, to

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build the ethical and political bulwarks necessary to preserve its integrity in
relation to established power, sharing without much reservation or refinement
in the political bargaining and corruption widespread in Brazilian political culture (cf. Burdick, 1993; Burity, 2011; Freston, 1993).7
THE PENTECOSTAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE PEOPLE
Employing the interpretive key proposed above, I will now explore various
aspects of the relationship between minorities and the people in the interviews
that illustrate and reinforce it. Two constructions of the people can be identified in the interviews. On the one hand there is the people that emerged from
the pluralization and minoritization of the 1980s and 1990smobilized, plural,
and assertive about its rights, a self-conscious or politicized People. On the
other hand, there is the subaltern people, negatively minoritized and capable of
being manipulated, misinformed, and submerged in the realm of necessity
(either resorting only to the magical elements and materials of religion or unable
to recognize that it is being exploited and rise up against its situation). Neither
construction entirely covers the distinction of Pentecostals from non-Pentecostals (religious or not). The Pentecostal identity is in fact dispersed between these
two constructions, with alignments that depend on individual trajectories or
specific themes. The distinct positions within it may be grouped together in
terms of an open matrix and a closed matrix (to use a systems metaphor).
In the open matrix, which values pluralism, the hegemony that constitutes
the people is deterritorializedit does not coincide with any sociopolitical
order based on class, identity, or ideology or socio-religious order based on different religions or internal currents within each of them. Pentecostals in this
matrix neither see the people as people to be converted through politics nor
aspire to power to restrict pluralization on behalf of the Evangelical faith. They
see themselves as in solidarity with and part of the people. The open matrix
may refer either to a liberal conception of representation of interests (clearly the
predominant position) or to a radical-democratic conception of demand articulation in popular projects (still a marginal position in this group). This matrix
is aspirational and doubly minoritized in the positive sense: it brings out a
democratic discourse of Pentecostal content amid a Pentecostal majority referenced in the closed matrix and is in solidarity with societys democratic
demands.
In the closed matrix, we have the strict articulation of the Pentecostal
peoplea collective that either is separate and self-referential or aspires to the
moral and political direction of the society. The first mode is typical of classical
Pentecostalism and rooted in its sectarian and popular origins at the interface
between a religion of minorities and a religion of the poor: the Pentecostal people does not mix with the wider people, is not involved in politics, and does not
believe in the credentials of the elites (establishment or opposition) or their ability to transform reality. In this state of self-imposed isolation, the people is the
community of the faithful, and its public presence is governed by the tension
between being in the world and not belonging to the world. The second
mode is typical of neo-Pentecostalism. It emerged with political liberalization

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(in the mid-1970s) and oscillates between a clear anti-Catholic agonism struggling to occupy the position of Catholicism and an attraction to the market
model. It is competitive and disputes spaces of power with aplomb, but it also
includes defenders of the old Constantinian or Genevan models present among
sectors of classical Pentecostalism, in which there is a coupling between church
and state. Thus it has a potentially regressive and authoritarian bent.
The interviews reveal an effort both at opening Pentecostalism to a broader
definition of people and nationality and at closing it, neutralizing the challenges of pluralization. Leaders positioned differently in the Pentecostal religious publicization process propose distinct readings of the possibilities and
objectives in question. My issue here is neither the sincerity of the motives nor
the adjudication of the truth claims made by the interviewees.8 I am interested
instead in understanding how the political scenario (cultural or electoral) in
which Pentecostals and other social and political actors meet is constructed.
Moreover, I want to unveil what this scenario tells us about the self-understanding that pastors and politicians are able to articulate after 25 years of
struggle for a place in the new Brazilian order established after the dictatorship.

THE OPEN MATRIX: DETERRITORIALIZED HEGEMONY

In a narrative about emergence, it is possible to argue in favor of the priority
of opening versus closing. The opening may be deliberate or unexpected, but
it may also be a process whose direction one cannot entirely control. Therefore,
it is subject to interpretation disputes and to the relational field in which
Pentecostals are involved. The opening scenario is one of the multiplication of
agonistic relationships.
Openness is also a process that focuses on the Pentecostal movement at the
time of its very emergence on the scene. As it became minoritarian,
Pentecostalism opened itself and changed. In the open matrix this perception
arises, for example, with the observation that the Pentecostal movement crosses
denominational boundaries among Evangelicals and even between Evangelicals
and Catholics (the Charismatic movement) through events, services, music,
and media coverage. The leader of one of the largest born-again churches in
Belo Horizonte (Southeast Brazil) explained:
In fact, when we start to talk to [Catholic people who convert], there is nothing
of Catholic theology, that is, the intercession of Mary, the saints, papal infallibility. All of that changed. . . . Until the 1950s in Brazil, the Evangelical message
was an anti-Catholic message. Pastors preached against the pope, against
saints, all that. Today the message is more evangelical. I see it here at the
church. People convert and do not need to go through a catechism in order to
clear their heads of Catholic teachings.

There is also a divestment of denominational identities in the search for

unity among Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians or for media coverage
of multiple Evangelical identities, contributing to their blending. A
Charismatic Baptist minister commented on the use of the media for outreach
purposes:

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In the media, the messages were much more evangelistic. They entailed the
presentation of the Gospel and of the good news of salvation. And the media
television, radiocome into every home. Thus, even if the Presbyterian, or
Baptist, or member of the Assembly of God was never physically present in a
church that was not his, from his home he could watch a television program
that was not of his church. Little by little he or she began to realize that many
ideas were similar.

For a national Pentecostal leader based in So Paulo, this attitude pointed to

a flux that put institutional boundaries in perspective under sociocultural conditions that transcended religion:
I think it is a new urban phenomenon. In other words, it is a new feature of the
urban religious phenomenon, which is the transience between different communities. The sense of belonging is no longer local. It is not situated in the
parish or in the local church. Belonging is the concept of that religious phenomenon as a whole in the municipality. It feels evangelical and, as a result, a person feels like a membera little bit of a memberof all the churches that have
at least the label Evangelical.

This transcendence has a popular character in Laclaus sense: through it distinct denominational identities are articulated, combining various denominational structures and individual religious practices. It is also explained
theologically by some respondents in terms of the divine freedom of action
expressed in the biblical image of the Holy Spirit as a force, a wind that
blows where it wills. This circulation of the Holy Spirit across denominational boundaries has at least two effects. First, it requires some modesty about
owning the truth (We cannot say: God, you can only work here in this church.
God is entirely free) and the recognition that Evangelicals have not contributed as much as they might to Brazilian culture (We still dont have a soap
opera screenplay writer who has an Evangelical vein, in part because
Evangelicals have not prepared for it). Second, this modesty focuses on the
relations between Evangelicals and Catholics, as a minister from the Assembly
of God in So Paulo explained:
I think Jesus is too large for us to want to make Him fit within our institution.
. . . Today, I would not dare say, as I have felt in the past, that God was only in
the Evangelical church, that there could be no salvation for Catholics, or that
there could be no genuine experience with the Holy Spirit for Catholics. I think
there is one, yes.

Within this perspective of opening, what would define the Pentecostal project? I highlight below four aspects of this project that arise from the interviews:
First, the Pentecostal experience inspires other new experiences: literal opening of new churches and communities or negotiations of local partnerships.
The hegemonic vocation here is to open up spaces, expand and articulate
them, not to reproduce a blueprint and control it.
Second, the Pentecostal spread may involve the refusal to name the newly
created projects. This view appears, for example, in the idea that local churches
and congregations have expanded but their denominational bonds can continue

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to exist and be preserved (Baptists, Presbyterians, Assembly of God members).

When they expand they create community networks but not a new denominational structure. Nor do they insist on being identified by their original Brazilian
names when they are in transnational missions.
Third, some respondents argued that the excessive growth of some congregations (the megachurches) weakens the synergy among their members even
on the denominational level. Their numerical success leads to a loss of authenticity and does a disservice to the political intentions of Evangelical politicians,
since it is difficult to distinguish them ethically, and thus reduces their ability
to make a difference. In an Anabaptist framework, a pastor from So Paulo
questions the cause of the election of Evangelical politicians as an expression of
a hegemony grounded in religion:
Why must [a president] be necessarily Evangelical? Ideally, in case most of the
population is Evangelical. If this is the principle, I support and preach about it.
When I preach the Gospel, I preach expecting people to be converted; it is what
we want. But will everyone be converted? No, not true, not everyone will convert, . . . although it is our wish. I wanted the president, the cabinet, the whole
senate, to be converted. . . . But this is a very childish idea. It belongs to those
people who claim that we need a Christian president. Sometimes it is better
that he or she not be Christian.

Fourth, the project involves a rejection of the theocratic alternative, which

reinforces the separation of church and state in a pluralistic framework:
No, Brazil cannot cease to be secular [leigo]. Religion deals with society in one
field and politics acts in another field. Of course, as a social and religious being,
whether Evangelical, Catholic, spiritualist, Buddhist, or whatever, one has a
stake in the social life of the country. As a citizen, one has obligations and
duties, not to mention the right to speak, to participate, to want thingssometimes things I do not want and vice versa.

In this context the outlook is agonistic but shows a hegemonic slant. It is

argued in terms of free expression of values common to certain groups, which
brings them together. It is also argued in terms of a claim of collective participation rights.
This opening toward hegemony brings Pentecostals the challenge to insert
themselves socially and culturally without losing their identity. It also challenges them to live this tension without having to (or knowing how to) resolve
it: Live the counterculture, dont be absent, as one respondent asserted. The
process of building hegemony is also expressed in the attempt to make
Pentecostal discourse represent, in its particularity, practices and demands that
transcend it, such as the causes of family and morality. In this case, the
influence of religion is defended in a noninstitutional, deterritorialized
frame. Influence is worthwhile as a religious discourse but not as a religious
institution, and it is worthwhile because, in reality, says a pastor from So
Paulo, every evaluative and philosophical base is theological or religious:
I discern two things in religion, institution and thought. As an institution, it has
to be outside. Now, behind every idea there is a philosophy, such as theology.
No one is against something without having a philosophy or an intellectual

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training that grounds such an attitude. . . . So in this case, religion will provide
tools for reflection and support for that idea in favor or against something. Not
as an institution, but as thought. . . . There is not a human being who is not a
theologian. Even the atheist believes in something. . . . Everyone, whether or
not connected to an institution, has a religious thought.

This reasoning also appears in the form of an Anabaptist withdrawal from

the dispute in the sphere of the statea strict and literal separation, as indicated in the speech of the national leader of a Pentecostal denomination based
in Rio de Janeiro:
The Churchs first task is to let the world be the world. The Church must have
a faithful presence and be the community of the Kingdom. . . . It is not our task
to induct those who are not a part of the Kingdom, and to try to change the
world. . . . [Our] ethics is something that I believe to be the issue of the Christian
community, although I also believe that our current society politicizes everything. Thus, many people seek authenticity through the state. . . . And the state
has become a kind of secular priesthood that authenticates the existence and
rights of all. And I believe that the Church lives above and beyond this. We
need not be certified by the state.

To be sure, this attitude is not prevalent in Pentecostal circles today. However,

it highlights a discourse that, with minor variations, would apply to leftist
rhetoric in the Pentecostal world in that it points to an activism based in civil
society and admits the inevitable ambiguity of living within an established
order from which it benefits but which it does not condone: to live in this
world, to coexist with a reality that produces benefits you enjoy today, knowing
that they are the result of a systemic violence. And we live in a world that lies
under the power of the evil one.
This theme is also linked to the theme of persecution as a context in which
the church grows. The perception of misunderstanding, mistrust, and fear
recurs in both matrices and points in part to the negative minoritization to
which Pentecostals are subjected by the dominant sectors of society. Sometimes
this feeling is rationalized by the idea that the identity of the church is being
purified and authenticated by adverse conditions. Many of the respondents,
both pastors and laymen, seem at ease amid the agonistic relationships created
by pluralization and minoritization because they understand that they (a) preclude any choice of the conditions under which one should act and (b) are an
opportunity for authentic testimony to their faith.
CLOSURE: SELF-IMPOSED ISOLATION, POLITICO-CULTURAL
LEADERSHIP, AND THE THEOCRATIC TEMPTATION
When it comes to the political, the open matrix reveals an oscillation that is
inscribed in a context of deterritorialization by the global expansion of Brazilian
Pentecostalism, the transformation of its worldview promoted by the crosscultural experience of missionaries, and clashes with religious and secular
opponents that force a constant revision of Pentecostal positions. The closed
matrix does not prevent deterritorialization but is a response from those sectors

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that have been exposed to it and perceive it as pressure or threat. Closure is not
a starting point but an attempt at reterritorializationan answer. It simply considers it possible to find or replicate in a self-managed and self-controlled way,
from within Pentecostal identity and organizations, a means of crossing from
private religion into the public world of politics, culture, and social movements.
Thus it overlaps postures of the sectarian past with self-sufficiency claims to
meet the challenges of publicization. The result is a hegemonic aspiration that
some want limited to society, from below, and others want expanded to the
sphere of politics, from above, in a government of saints. Only one ultraconservative fringe feeds Genevan dreams. In other words, closure is neither simple
nor easy.
The from below faction intends to form a new generation of leaders tasked
with exerting influence in many areas of life. A minister from a Baptist church
in Belo Horizonte alludes to the Korean Evangelical experience of fostering
such a mentality starting with training for a kind of political ministry. This
training is an aspiration of his church, a means of correcting the lack of preparation of Evangelical politicians: We are not at that level yet, but we will get
there.
The language of conquest emerges with force, mingling with the theology
of the conquest of the seven mountains (family, church, education, media,
entertainment, economy, and government).9 In the words of one respondent,
the project is to create a system of thought, a Christian philosophy for each of
these areas. The actors behind it know that it is a long-term process and understand that the desired changes will come through molecular actions with
expansive potential. In this variant of the closed matrix the people can be seen
with disdain or fatalism, as a manipulated mass tamed by the state, or as
deserving of being governed in a theocratic fashion within the church environment through an Episcopalian regime of life-tenured pastors and bishops (a
growing trend among Brazilian Pentecostals).
There is some self-critical reflexivity in the comments by an Assembly of God
pastor based in So Paulo on Pentecostal behavior during the dictatorship. In
that context, self-imposed isolation and self-policing produced the well-known
effects of the closed matrix. The ban on talking politics and the focus on moralistic denunciation of bad habits had the double effect of legitimizing the
military rule and growing under its protection:
The Church grew in that time. Growth in subsequent years was more vegetative in the older churches and was coupled with the emergence of the so-called
neo-Pentecostals The former was a top-down Gospel, which appealed
more to the supernatural, the mystical; the latter is a bottom-up Gospel,
which is more materialistic and earthly.

The time labels of before and after the military regime are fundamental
for this interviewee. For him, the democratization challenged the Pentecostal
closure in two ways within the younger generations:
When I speak of this before and after, in the after I see a great social mobility process. There is a new generation that thinks, that has evolved. . . . Thus,
we are living meaningful social and cultural changes in Brazil. . . . Today, it is

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more difficult to reach this new generation than it was in the past because it is
a generation that thinks and questions. It is a cultured generation.

Thus the self-criticism is directed inward, splitting the Pentecostal people

between believers in the top-down Gospel (focused on spirituality) and
believers in the bottom-up Gospel (focused on material prosperity). At the
same time, there is criticism directed outward: Pentecostals or not, the poor
were seduced by the Messianic ethos of the Lula era. They believed that they
had found in Lula their Messiah. In the closed matrix, Pentecostals oscillate
between two visions: sometimes they need to protect themselves from the
world, and sometimes they cannot distinguish themselves from the world. In
this view, they have become a people without qualities and without identity.

CONCLUSION
The emergence of Pentecostals in Brazil has raised difficult questions for analysis. It is at once a matter of the publicization of religion and of politicization of
a certain kind of popular actor. Across all socio-demographic criteria, the vast
majority of Pentecostals and Charismatic Christians are poor. They lack a tradition of political participation and only recently have enjoyed access to higher
education. Among Brazilian religious traditions, Pentecostalism carries two
equally minoritizing forms of identity: classic sectarianism and the more recent
emphasis on prosperity. These forms have been the object of harsh criticism for
a long time. Thus, when they emerged from political quietism in the 1980s,
Brazilian Pentecostals posed, in their own way, serious questions about the
Brazilian religious, cultural, and political status quo. Their popular background
created pressures emanating from traditional political culture while giving them
the opportunity to carry out a rough dialogue with everyday cultural and
religious practices (see Soares, 1994). The immediate results of this interaction
were acceptability from below (increasing numbers of conversions) and the
beginnings of a demand for self-representation and political recognition.
In this article I have sought to trace the thread that links the emergence of the
Pentecostal religious minority to the issue of inclusion and recognition. I have
only touched upon some of the elements of the research on which it is grounded.
I have argued that the Pentecostals minoritized themselves (demanded an
independent voice and challenged the prevailing hegemony) in response to a
perceived exclusion (negative minoritization, whether prior to the emergence
or in reaction to it) or in the face of increasing social and cultural pluralization.
Attempts to articulate their own discourse about themselves and what
they want could only come to fruition through permanent interaction with
other actors. Therefore, minoritization accentuated pluralization within
Pentecostalism by pulling it from self-referentiality. The open and closed matrices I have identified in my interpretation of the interviews result from the doubly agonistic nature of this minoritization: self-assertion and a response to the
challenge posed by opponents.
An unintended effect of this logic is the fluidity of the boundary between
sacred and profane, religious and secular. We see how, in a context of growing

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cultural, social, and political pluralization, these discursive practices have the
potential to lead either to the aggiornamento of Pentecostalism or to the regressive closing of a populist right-wing discourse. The rhetoric of conquest, which
aims to create a Christian society, inspires concern. At the same time, far
beyond their Brazilian expression, the permeability of Pentecostals to local
realities already shows signs of a minoritizing pluralistic and popular-democratic alternative. Nor should the open and closed matrices be considered a
final result: everything is very recent in the publicization of the Pentecostal
religion, and a careful examination of the interviews reveals that not even its
leaders are sure exactly what they want or how to accomplish it. They need to
develop their philosophy, train people, and identify methodologies for achieving their objectives.
The texture of Pentecostal discourse places it in the intersection between
social and legal-political unrest in Brazil today. However, it is also juxtaposed
with the countrys cultural dynamics, in which the challenges of hegemonic
construction take place amid irreducible pluralism and the impossibility of
containing the flux between the various positions at stake. Opening and closing
alternate but also overlap. It is at the heart of this context that the claims of
Pentecostalism to make itself the people and conquer the Brazilian population have created multiple throws of the dice in the long history of religions
modern regulation, including those that point to the emergence of new religious subjects as politicized minorities.
NOTES
1. This definition of pluralization, inspired by Connolly (2005), attempts to account for the
multidimensionality of the phenomenon, which requires focus on (a) the degree of public recognition of the functional distinction between religion and the state, the ethnic and cultural diversity
of the population, and the emergence of identity politics in the public sphere; (b) the religious
composition and internal diversity of the societys religious traditions; and (c) the pluralizing
impact of contemporary global flows, which confront particularistic practices but also empower
some of them by connecting them with similar practices elsewhere. Thus, the number of religions
in existence and their demographics are important but not sufficient for assessing the impact of
pluralization on religious dynamics. In this context, pluralization makes room for both the opening to plurality and a closing to its requirements, hence its contested character (see Connolly, 1995:
xixxiv; 2005: 6063).
2. I employ this term here with the meaning used by Ernesto Laclau (2005: 91161; 2006a;
2006b).
3. In the Brazilian context, the term Evangelical applies to Protestants in general (see
Bebbington, 1989; Noll, 2004; Smith, 1998). Several of the churches derived from the nineteenthcentury missionary movement had already adopted the term officially (e.g., the Lutherans and
initially the Congregationalists), but it was the wave of Pentecostal growth of the 1980s that consolidated public use of the term either as a self-designation or as an assignment by others.
Pentecostals insistence on publicly identifying themselves as Evangelical and disputes with
their opponents over the attributes of the term express its contested and ambiguous character. If
I speak of a hegemonic process it is because this is not just a semantic dispute but a struggle for
control of enunciation in the Protestant field and for the public recognition of Evangelicals as
an actor within and outside of religious boundaries (see Giumbelli, 2002; Mafra, 2001; Mariano
and Oro, 2011; Motta, 2013; Oro, 2011).
4. The 1980s marked a turning point in Brazilian religious demographics, with most non-Catholic groups growing significantly. Religious pluralism was markedly Christian (88 percent of more
than 190 million inhabitants in 2010), but in addition to the internal diversity (Catholics, Orthodox,

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historical and Pentecostal Evangelicals, micro-denominations, and independent churches) there

has been an increase in people with no religion (from 0.8 percent in 1970 to 7.3 percent in 2000,
reaching 8 percent in 2010) and spiritualists (from 1.1 percent in 1991 to 2 percent in 2010). Moreover,
pluralism is expressed in terms of a complex web of ethical, sociopolitical, ritual, and doctrinal
positions across all religious groups. The most significant fact in the past four decades has been the
growth of the Evangelicals, especially Pentecostals. While the proportion of Catholics has declined
from 91.8 percent in 1970 to 64.6 percent in 2010, that of Evangelicals has increased from 5.2 percent
to 22.2 percent. The Pentecostal contingent among Evangelicals represented 67.8 percent in 2000,
declining to 60 percent in 2010 (see Pew Research Center, 2013; IBGE, 2010).
5. Pentecostalism should be understood as a minority both in an empirical and in a political
sense. Empirically, it is a fraction of the Christian field (15.2 percent in the 2010 census) whose
internal fragmentation implies that the term Pentecostal hardly refers to a cohesive and stable
identity. There are constant fluctuations and even doctrinal, organizational, and political divisions
within the denomination. Pentecostals, for example, are sometimes split between Pentecostal
and Charismatic (Evangelicals or Catholics) and sometimes between classical and neo-Pentecostal
(wealth and health gospel) (see Anderson, 2004: 115; Burity, 2013; Martin, 2002: 127). Politically,
Pentecostalism is a minority in a positive sense, because of its autonomous public emergence and
questioning of majority dimensions of culture and politics, and in a negative sense, because of its
rejection as an unassimilable actor, an actor that cannot be integrated by the political elites, the
secular media, or its religious opponents.
6. The terminology used here derives from Deleuze and Guattari (2003). Connolly (2010; 2011)
refines these terms.
7. In this sense, not everything in Pentecostalism is a minority in the political sense: there are
segments that are well integrated into the political system, reproducing traditional political practices and resisting mingling with other minorities. The closed matrix discussed below is indicative
of this logic of the majority within a minoritizing movement.
8. I am aware that not all of the motivations that animate the Pentecostal minoritization are
vested with republican virtue. There are institutional or individual interests in economic gain
and political projection, bargains for privileged access to public goods, and the intention to control
positions for resisting or attacking opponents and antagonists. Concrete expressions of politicization or charges of the illegitimacy of such motivations have been the target of harsh protest by
various opponents of Brazilian Pentecostalism. In this context, the internal struggles for a true
or authentic formulation of the relationship between Pentecostalism and society (or politics)
should be seen as part of relational process that aims to capture the proper political dynamic to
claim an autonomous voice (minoritization) and to engage in reflection on a lived experience of
more than two decades. As we shall see, they both open and close to the pluralization and to the
challenge of their expressions and motivations. Such processes and experiences involve, in addition, religious and secular actors. To capture this dynamic, approaches focused on religious economy or skeptical about the multiple linkages between interest policy, strategy, and religious faith
seem insufficient or insufficiently reflective about their normative assumptions.
9. Several traditions intersect here: the image of the seven mountains refers to Loren
Cunningham (Youth With a Mission) and Bill Bright (Student and Professional Crusade for Christ),
in the 1970s (see http://www.reclaim7mountains.com); discourses on the conquest abound in
several versions of the theology of domination, which stems from the American Christian right (see
Berlet and Lyons, 2000; Connolly, 2008) but is loosely appropriated by Brazilian Pentecostals.

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