Last week, the president (PT) and made an alert: God is seeing. “From time to time I learn that some pastor said something, he said that Lula closed churches, that Lula do not know about the accounts. My belief is that God is everywhere and see who is lying and who is telling the truth.”
It is well known that Lula is in bad sheets with the segment. The sourness of evangelicals with him is a constant in this third term. Just rescue, which gave him 62% disapproval among believers. The general index is 48%.
The government has understood that it needs to reconstruct dynamic bridges with the churches – always remember that many have campaigned for Lula and Dilma Rousseff (PT) in the past, until they bolted in recent years. The question is: how?
The president received at the Alvorada Palace, with arms given with the first lady, the sociologist Janja, the “believer chat.” The program is presented by Pastor Marco Davi, author of “The Black Religion in Brazil – that blacks make option for Pentecostalism”, and Eulália Lemos. It is a class linked to the progressive front of evangelicals by the rule of law. Part of a microcosm.
Lula preached to the few converts that openly reject Jair Bolsonaro (PL) and all he represents. The interviewers were not there to put the petista against the wall. The mission was different: giving it space and ensuring that the message came entirely to the audience I needed to hear. And okay – it wasn’t sabbath mode, but militancy, doing her work in the political grove.
Not by chance Eulália, by evoking two election high voltage public policies, raises for the first lady to cut: “The Bible says, Janja, that the generous will be blessed because she shares her bread with the poor. We want to know about sustainable community kitchens and the gas of the people.”
Lula was also given the opportunity to repress a speech that became a letter in the sleeve to justify why it is difficult to see him in temples. “My relationship with the church is this, it is the true relationship. There is no lie, there is no electoral use of the churches, has no electoral use of religion. I would never allow myself to use religion, you know as politics.”
It is true that there is a certain fatigue, among the faithful, with the politicization of the Cults on the Bolsonarist right. The insistence on transforming pulpit into a stage gives signs of wear, even if most there sympathizes with the conservative agenda. Bolsonaro’s frenzy was once larger in megaevents like a.
It does not mean that the left know how to capitalize on it. The impression still persists in the average evangelical that the progressive intellectual elite has rancid with him and his brothers of faith. Minister Marina Silva (Environment) synthesized this discomfort when, in an interview with TPM magazine years ago, she said she had heard from friends something in line: “Did you find you as smart, how can it be from the Assembly of God?”
As if the evangelical were synonymous with civilizational delay: either it is an unfit poor to exercise autonomy over what he believes, or a greedy pastor by tithes, without true faith. This reading ignores life trajectories and complex community practices, reducing faithful to two shallow stereotypes: the naive and the explorer. It should irritate.
Lula has long shown that this dynamic draws. After his defeat to Fernando Collor, in 1989, he diagnosed that PT did little to extir fake news that it would close evangelical churches to win (yes, it already existed, but at the time they would do so to be a plate of Catholics, and did not want to give the believer people to grow).
The petista evaluated at the time that he should have waved more to the religious. “Certain things we discussed from the head of politicized people.” Missing the people.
In the recent “apocalypse in the tropics,” he exposed his thesis “that what led socialism to failure was the denial of religion.” Lula is on.
Cuts to 2025, and the petista does not seem to be able to hit the tone to dialogue with evangelicals. It is not a value judgment about your speech against the political use of churches, whether you have merit or not. Only the realization that it has no effect, and its approval numbers remain down in this Christian block.
The limitation is symbolic: it speaks the language of politics, but not the faith that organizes the lives of millions of Brazilians. And their opponents occupied this space with more consistency.
Lula is painted as someone who has never had organic relationship with the field. His party DNA comes from unions, intellectuals and progressive Catholicism, via liberation theology. It embodies secular values that opponents fall as antagonistic to religious morality, from abortion to sexual diversity.
There is a narrative construction, calcified in the imagination of many churches, of which it is an enemy of Christians.
In the pragmatic part, solid channels are missing with national carat evangelical leaders, something he had in previous terms. The polarization imploded them. Nor is it successful to go straight to the evangelical base. When it waves it, it does so via intermediaries isolated and without much range in the middle. Not from a continuous strategy.
This base, which is above all black, poor and feminine, shares central concerns of Lulism – as work, income and hunger fighting. But it is not enough. The left does not make a mistake by bringing material issues, but sounds incomplete if religious values discard. This is when you don’t mocked them.
To use a progressive jargon, it still lacks evangelical literacy to talk to the Brazilian peripheries. Then the straight talk does not become a believer chat. The opposition thanks you.
