colonial times

In his seminal work Casa Grande and Senzala (Global Editora, 2013), a landmark work in sociology, originally published in 1933, by the anthropologist, sociologist, and essayist from Pernambuco, Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), offers a rich reading of the formation of Brazilian society, based on his experience in the Apipucos neighborhood of Recife. His personal and intellectual trajectory is intimately linked to the city and the neighborhood where he lived.

Regarding this monumental work, the poet João Cabral de Melo Neto wrote:

“No one has written in Portuguese in the Brazilian dialect: that relaxed way of speaking found in hammocks, on porches, in a mixed-race soul, measuring its siesta prose, or the prose of someone stretching.”Museum of everything. José Olympio, 1975).

And Carlos Drummond de Andrade concluded:

“Old portraits; recipes for okra stews and other stews; the Ruas Direitas cakes; past splendors; the dark line of milk curdling into sweetness; prayers by the light of the oil lamp; sex in the dark bed; the big house; the slave quarters; even the most vivid regrets, everything resurfaces and speaks to me, great Gilberto, in your books.”Pocket guitar restrung. José Olympio, 1955).

Freyre describes the plantation house as a microcosm of patriarchal colonial power: fortress, school, bank, chapel, and cemetery. The plantation owner, in addition to owning the land, owned people: slaves, relatives, children, wife, lovers, priests, and politicians. He was the master of life and death. This dominion was established by incorporating these elements, not excluding them. The pattern expressed in the plantation house is capable of housing everyone from slaves to the patriarch's children and their respective families (SOUZA, Jessé). The Late EliteLeya, 2017).

"Syphilis was the quintessential disease of the plantation houses and slave quarters. The plantation owner's son contracted it almost playfully among Black and mulatto women, losing his virginity prematurely at the age of twelve or thirteen."Casa Grande and Senzala, P. 109).

One of the relevant aspects of the topic we are exploring in our reflections – religion – is highlighted by Gilberto Freyre in his classic work, when he presents the imposition of the Catholic Christian faith during the colonial period, not only as an element of spiritual belief, but also as a tool for social and cultural control. The colonizers adopted Catholicism as the only religion permitted by the metropolis in the colony, imposing it on European foreigners, indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans.

"Brazil was formed with its colonizers unconcerned about the unity or purity of the race. Throughout the 16th century, the colony was wide open to foreigners, with the only thing that mattered to the colonial authorities was that they were of the Catholic faith or religion. To be admitted as a colonist in Brazil in the 16th century, the main requirement was to profess the Catholic religion: only Christians could acquire land grants. The Portuguese forget race and consider as their equal anyone who shares the same religion as their own."Casa Grande and Senzala, P. 91).

The white Portuguese rulers used religion to legitimize their authority, shaping the morality and customs of colonial society. The Catholic faith was not merely spiritual. The domestic chapel symbolized the power of the plantation owner over the morals and faith of those living under his rule. The King of Portugal reigned in Brazil without needing to govern, as the families of the plantation house reproduced the moral and religious order of the metropolis.

The presence of the domestic chapel, therefore, was not merely decorative: it symbolized the centrality of the Catholic faith in the social and moral life of the inhabitants of the property. The plantation owner, in addition to being the owner of land and people, assumed the role of guardian of the faith, reproducing the religious order of the metropolis. The Catholic faith was imposed as a sign of civilization, while Afro-Brazilian and indigenous religious practices were repressed. Religious syncretism was subjected to extreme vigilance.

"In Brazil, the plantation owners triumphed over the Catholic Church in the impulses the latter initially manifested to own the land. With the Jesuits defeated, the sugar plantation owners dominated the colony almost alone. The true owners of Brazil. More so than the viceroys and bishops."Casa Grande and Senzala, P. 38).

Heirs to such a religious, patriarchal, and rural heritage, Brazil is currently experiencing a kind of transformation: a shift in the faith market, previously entirely controlled by the Catholic tradition, now with a large share of this religious market in the hands of conservative neo-Pentecostal Protestant leaders, trained in theologies of dominion and prosperity, occupying central spaces in national politics.

The alliance between Bolsonaro's fascism and such conservative religious sectors is a clear sign of this metamorphosis. Once the domestic chapel; now, countless churches and temples congregating people in neo-Pentecostal and charismatic services; before, the imposition of the Catholic faith, today, the obedient affirmation of the pastor's directives and the so-called values ​​of tradition; in the past, the suppression of African and indigenous religions; in the present, religious intolerance against terreiros (Afro-Brazilian religious centers) and non-Christian cults.

Politically, the Christian bloc, with its Protestant tradition, has strengthened vigorously over the last 20 years, with its presence in the National Congress directing the agenda on customs, moral education, and security, while causing setbacks in civil rights.

Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 not only through the manipulation of digital network algorithms (notably WhatsApp at that time), but also with strong support from the military, rural landowners, and conservative pastors and clergy, through a strategy that presented him to his faithful followers as someone "chosen by God" to combat the evil embodied in the political left.

The Bolsonaro-fascist narrative continually fuels the idea of ​​spiritual warfare, in which the "Bolsonaro myth" is seen as a divine mission to fight against communism, abortion, and gender ideology, advocating scientific denialism (resistance to vaccination, the use of condoms, legal abortion, etc.), setbacks in civil rights agendas (women's rights, indigenous rights, LGBTQIA+ rights), and setbacks in the field of human education (censorship of debates and the production of content on sexuality, economic distribution, and human rights).

This conservative religious influence assimilated by Bolsonarism is connected to a transnational network, such as Trumpist American evangelism, represented by Family Research Council and by Franklin Graham. These institutions financially support conservative Brazilian churches, aiming to fuel the culture war.

Finally, it is understood that the transition from the chapel of the 16th-century rural plantation house to the current neo-Pentecostal Protestant temples and the evangelical caucus in Congress seems to be less a rupture and more an adaptation to the new times of a globalized neoliberal capitalist material base. It is clear, then, that religion, far from being neutral, remains one of the pillars of domination since colonial times.