The Kingdom and the outpost of evangelical power in Latin America

The story of a family in charge of an evangelical church, immersed in a dark web of power that intertwines the murkiest politics, Justice, the business community and the intelligence services, made El Reino the series that was the rage of the moment. But beyond its outstanding cinematic virtues, the thriller managed to debate a key phenomenon: the accelerated incursion of the Evangelical Churches in Latin American Politics.

In recent decades there has been a demographic transformation in the religiosity of the continent, marked by the debacle of the Catholic Church and the vertiginous rise of the evangelical population, which went from 3% to more than 20% in 60 years. Although the evangelical world encompasses a diversity of currents and denominations, the neo-Pentecostals are the protagonists of this boom and of the commitment to take over the institutional framework.

His main success was the penetration in the popular neighborhoods and the capacity to contain vulnerable people, channeling despair and despair. The same in the jails. They challenge with the oratory of charismatic leaders generating an emotional bond and an enviable sense of belonging. They complement their territorial deployment with those mega-churches in sumptuous buildings in urban centers, radio and television stations, schools, musical bands, clothing and more. A whole cultural industry that enhances its massiveness.

From that massiveness and that magnetism of its pastors and telepreachers, its leaders perceived the effectiveness of the “evangelical vote” and began to get into legislative or local positions, almost always from spaces of right and far right. Faced with the growing discredit of the traditional parties, they appear as the renewed face of the conservative forces to combat the expansion of rights like legal abortion or equal marriage.

The boundaries between religion and politics have always been blurred. But the ambition of this ecclesiastical branch to dominate power structures, such as supports of the neoliberal creed and the front line of the anti-rights troop, shows a strong revival of religion as a political tool.

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Evangelicals split from the Catholic Church with the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Pentecostal current emerged in the United States, which expanded in Latin America in the 1970s to counterbalance the advance of Liberation Theology. In 1982 he became president of Guatemala -through a coup- the military and evangelical pastor José Efraín Ríos Montt, years later convicted of genocide.

Another antecedent bears the stamp of another turned dictator, the Peruvian-Japanese Alberto Fujimori, who won the 1990 presidential elections thanks to the support of some evangelical churches. Then he put Carlos García, a pastor of the Baptist Church, as vice president, and some 50 evangelical faithful were candidates for Congress for his party. Thirty years later, the Union of Evangelical Christian Churches played hard for his daughter Keiko’s third – and frustrated – attempt to become president.

But without a doubt it was Brazil the nucleus of expansion of the evangelical churches in South America, spreading pastors throughout the region. It is also the country with the greatest political involvement, especially from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and its powerful multimedia Grupo Record.

A power that was structured around the “bench of the Bible”, with dozens of legislators, and that managed to place the Pastor Marcelo Crivella as Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, dismissed and imprisoned in 2020 for corruption. The greatest milestone of the evangelical power was its role in the triumph of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, who was baptized in the Jordan River by an evangelical pastor. Last week, Bolsonaro proposed a pastor to the Supreme Court to fulfill his promise to put in a “terribly evangelical” judge.

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The ecclesiastical factor was also a protagonist in the coup in Bolivia in 2019. “The Bible re-enters the Palace,” the de facto president Jeanine Áñez shouted smiling, lifting a giant copy while taking office surrounded by the military. The day before, businessman Luis Fernando Camacho, the main promoter of the coup, posed kneeling in the same Government House, also with a Bible in hand: “The Pachamama will never return to the Palace. Bolivia belongs to Christ ”. The coup plot had had the support of the Church and evangelical leaders.

Central America is another epicenter of the evangelical incursion in the political arena. Guatemala had as president between 2016 and 2020 the evangelical theologian Jimmy Morales, in Costa Rica the evangelical preacher Fabricio Alvarado arrived at the ballot in 2018 and in El Salvador Nayib Bukele governs, another exponent of that church who came to militarize the Congress shouting prayers and preaching .

In Colombia, evangelical pastors – allies of former President Álvaro Uribe – showed their weight at the polls when they pushed for the NO in the plebiscite to ratify the Peace Agreement between the government and the FARC in 2016.

Although some progressive leaders such as Lula or Andrés Manuel López Obrador have also made alliances with evangelical sectors, the hegemony of the reactionary orientation is clear, with the case of support for Donald Trump as the maximum expression.

The crusade is comprehensive and aims at the dispute of meanings. “The explosive growth of the neo-Pentecostal current in Latin America constitutes a highly effective conservative emergency at the level of micropolitics, that is, in the struggle for the constitution of contemporary subjectivities”, analyzes a complete report from the Tricontinental Institute.

Argentina: the future has arrived

The Kingdom is a fiction. “But a fiction that contains elements taken from realities”, explains its director Marcelo Piñeyro. Realities that in Argentina still do not show a superlative dimension. For now. The strongest bet was the street mobilization against the legalization of abortion, in addition to a failed attempt to position the Salta deputy Alfredo Olmedo in 2018.

The Christian Alliance of Evangelical Churches (ACIERA), which came out with the top caps against the series, knew how to weave good ties with several leaders of Together for Change; In 2019, the macrismo nominated six evangelicals for Congress and the former military officer Juan José Gómez Centurión had as his running mate Cynthia Hotton, an evangelical leader. For this year’s legislative elections, dozens of evangelical candidates are presented, both in JXC and in new spaces such as the Frente + Valores or the Celeste Party. As in other latitudes, the leap to the politics of evangelical power comes from the right.

Gerardo Szalkowicz is editor of NODAL. Author of the book “América Latina. Traces and challenges of the progressive cycle ”. He hosts the radio program “Al sur del Río Bravo”.

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