It would be possible to say that, in terms of evangelicals, it was not a very applied student. The Perseu Abramo Foundation, the party’s arm of study, then decided to teach the religious group that, according to Census 2022, represents 27% of the population – 6.6% in 1980, the year of founding the acronym.
The course “Faith and Democracy for Brazilian Evangelical Militancy” began last week with 775 enrolled and a speech that synthesizes the spirit of the whole thing: “The Bible is the book of the working class.”
The one who told her was the theologian Angelica Tostes, one of the guests for the first of eight planned virtual meetings. “How many of us, going to our work, taking the subway, taking the bus, we see brothers and sisters of faith with the Bible, whether on mobile, [na versão] physical”.
You can’t turn your face to a field that is mainly “black, poor, made with women from the periphery,” argues Tostes, who is Pentecostal. That cliché about building bridges is true, and this engineering doesn’t happen overnight.
“We need to think that dialogue is not a noodle. ‘Three minutes, I dowed with the evangelicals’. No.”
Dialogue “is not an ambulance” that you only drive “to help in times of despair,” she continues. “Dialogue is construction.”
Daughter of former Catholics converted to evangelicalism, Tostes manages to understand why this religion has sonted its base so much in Brazil.
“We see that [as igrejas evangélicas] These are spaces that welcome these people and give not only answers of a concrete but also existential dimension. And then it is necessary that our companions and companions who do not have religious experience also observe it. Religion, not only evangelical or Christian, gives meaning in life. “
A test that the opponents, he says, gabitarita. “This sense was somehow captured by the far right and the right, because with this weakening of the unions, the CEBs, of liberation theology itself, which somehow also intellectualized, a space has been empty. But in politics there are no empty spaces.”
CEBs are the base ecclesial communities, linked to the Catholic Church and that the sociologist, columnist of Sheetdefines as “the main organizational form of leftist Catholicism” in his book “PT, a story”. Liberation Theology is a current that arises in the 1960s in Latin America and interprets the Christian faith from the struggle against social injustice.
The president of the foundation that organized the program, Paulo Okamotto, told the class in “certain urgency” to “make this reflection”. In the 2024 electoral period, the PT launched to guide candidates and militants in dealing with evangelicals.
A ball raised by the material: you can’t put any “under the nickname of fundamentalist”, which would “show prejudice and could be interpreted as religious persecution, giving them into fundamentalism.”
Okamotto states at the virtual meeting: “We have been working for over a year, in a group here in Perseu Abramo, to make us increasingly be aware of our militants, managers, affiliated, about the importance of religion in the lives of the Brazilian people.”
An institutional video displayed for the group – and that the Foundation prefers not to make public – rehearsed a language in tune with a expensive value to Christianity in general.
The content says: “Every family in this country deserves to have decent housing, food, work and income. The family is where we find fraternity and solidarity in times of difficulty. The true Christian, he is the first to defend the family.”
The point is to understand which family mold is talking about. This term, according to Tostes, “is being co -opted in an instrumental way, as if we on the left do not defend the family,” he says. “But we defend families, the various ways of being a family.”
Thus speeches, which show models that escape the “traditional Brazilian family”, with father, mother and children, cover many things. From homes with solo mother to homosexual couples who adopt children.
The pastor, coordinator of the Front of Evangelicals by the rule of law and progressive reference in the middle, sought to bring the petista program of the Christian matrix.
“Kingdom principles,” he says, demand “a government that works for the future of the worker.” It’s in the Bible. “We see, for example, there in acts [livro do Novo Testamento]that the Church created a social security for the widow. And, as the apostle Paul said, those who have reaped too much have not left, so that those who have reaped less do not miss. Christian logic is a justice that works from equality. “
He also says that the Scriptures defend land reform. It appears in the Old Testament: the Jubilee would be this special year, every half century, when enslaved are freed, debts, forgiven, and there is social justice in the distribution of land – that, by the way, would not belong to men, but to God.
Ramos here sees a confluence point with “Marxist utopia, which is the end of the classes and when the means of production belong to the worker.” This “cooperative logic you find in Scripture is impressive,” he is enthusiastic.
Evangelical dean among petist parliamentarians, Deputy Benedita da Silva gives a brief witness recorded – was on a flight at class time. May your colleagues, like her, be “ready to declare to all and to all that we do not embarrass the gospel of Christ.”
The names cast for the course are all part of a progressive minority between evangelical leadership, with shy projection near pastors such as Silas Malafaia and Claudio Duarte, or influencers like Deive Leonardo and Thiago Brunet, all evangelicals who flanked Jair Bolsonaro in the election.
Among the guests to lecture is the pastor, who had where he teaches after an article about Judas who annoyed conservatives.
Also speaks to the class Pastor Sergio Dusilek. Pressured by peers, he in 2022, in the middle of the electoral dairy, after saying that “the evangelical church has to ask for forgiveness to the president.”
