First Lady da Silva responded this Monday (8) to criticism made by the pastor of the meetings she held with evangelical women and stated that the religious leader is “insignificant”. Janja gave the statements during the 4th National Meeting of Evangelicals of .
“I don’t call him either [Malafaia] of shepherd. He had the nerve to go on social media and say that I was talking to insignificant women. He is insignificant because every woman is important to me. It doesn’t matter if I had a meeting with two, three, 200, a thousand. What matters is that I talked, what matters is that I listened,” he said.
She also defended the PT militancy that it is necessary to “return to the church” and demanded action from progressive pastors, for example, to reinforce campaigns to combat domestic violence and feminicide. According to the first lady, this “narrative dispute” has to happen in all spaces.
“We cannot fail to consider that, if we do not use [as igrejas] that way they use it. We do need to talk about the things we believe in so as not to leave them talking to themselves. This is very important. Pastors from the progressive camp have to speak out”, declared Janja.
“I know this is a difficult year. It is a year in which we are going into an electoral dispute, but we have to go with a calm heart. We have to occupy the spaces that are rightfully ours due to our faith. It is not a political dispute that we are doing. It is a dispute of principle, of ethics, of morals”, he added.
Janja’s statements were made in response to an interview by Malafaia with the Metrópoles website last year. At the time, the pastor said that he “laughed” at the first lady’s meetings because they would be organized with “people who don’t have any expression in the evangelical world.”
“Everything arranged with people who don’t have any sign of expression in the evangelical world, no woman of expression in the evangelical world. I know who’s who in the evangelical world. There isn’t one, one of hundreds of women of expression in the evangelical world”, he declared.
The speeches by the leader of the Assembly of God Vitória em Cristo were made after a Janja meeting with women from the Front of Evangelicals for the Rule of Law held at the Coletivação Church, in Ceilândia, administrative region of Brasília.
The Coletivação was founded by pastor Otávio Damichel, who has also criticized Silas Malafaia.
When reporting how the meetings with evangelical women began, the president’s wife (PT) stated that the initial objective was to understand what obstacles they see in relation to the progressive field. Janja said that, after a few meetings, she understood that the difficulties faced by women from different political positions are the same.
“I’m not even going to talk about the left field, because it’s very difficult to say that. ‘Ah, the left.’ If we continue like this, we might end up skating like a car stuck in the mud. It is the progressive camp, which believes in the values that are in the gospel, which are in the Bible. I wanted to hear from them, understand what the difficulty was in getting closer to each other effectively. And I realized that it’s not difficult. There is no such separation,” he said.
Janja has intensified attempts to dialogue with women in this Christian segment since last year. She has already held similar meetings in Salvador and Caruaru (PE) and also participated in a service at the Baptist Church in the Harlem neighborhood, in New York.
In recent years, the evangelical segment has been one of the pillars of Bolsonarism, being one of those that Lula has the most difficulty attracting. Women were a decisive group in the 2022 elections and should also play a relevant role in the October election.
