After Lula said, at a PT event, that “90% of people receive benefits from the government” and that the party needed to speak to this public without waiting for the pastors’ approval, the speech circulated on the internet as evidence of a project to co-opt faith, a threat to religious identity disguised as an electoral speech.
An evangelical friend tried to separate things and said that, no matter how bad the speech was, there were no spiritual consequences, only political ones. The did not accept the distinction. Basically, what was at stake was not Lula’s declaration nor Christian theology; it was her place as an evangelical in a dispute over belonging.
Those who engage intensely politically don’t become sadder, they become more unstable. In the study “The Emotional Cost of Political Engagement,” in which 1,788 observations were made over eight weeks, Alexander Walker and his colleagues at Brown University measured how much each participant’s emotional state fluctuated from day to day and found that this volatility, not average mood, is what predicts anxiety.
The accounted for 9% of the variation in daily fluctuations; affective polarization, by another 5%. The implication is more uncomfortable than it seems: if the problem was accumulated sadness, you would treat it by reducing exposure. If the problem is emotional dysregulation, what is being affected is the ability to process anything, not just politics.
But why do people engage despite this cost? Human groups build cohesion through differentiation, and political differentiation establishes clear and swift moral boundaries. What the mechanism doesn’t explain is the scale. Why are political disputes now taking over the space of conversations about family, faith and community?
It is known that traditional sources of belonging have been weakening for decades: in the United States, participation in civic associations fell by half from the 1970s to the 2000s; In Brazil, religious attendance among young people aged 18 to 29 fell by 14 percentage points from 2012 to 2022 alone.
When the structures that organized identity and community begin to fail, politics occupies this space with an efficiency that no other sphere of contemporary life can replicate. After all, it is available at any time, is emotionally intense and does not require presence. The problem is that the only currency she has to offer belonging is the common enemy.
Consequently, belonging through conflict comes at the cost of the fact that the enemy needs to remain an enemy, because, without him, the bond would lose its reason for existing. My friend wasn’t trying to defend the “left” when she said that Lula’s speech would have no spiritual consequences. But for the group, she was reducing the threat, and reducing the threat is exactly what a loyal member doesn’t do. In practice, they treated her distinction as a betrayal, not a theological discussion.
It is important to remember that movements that lasted and transformed structures were not built like that. The civil rights movements in the 20th century had named enemies and confronted them, but their base was made up of communities, associations, unions and churches, and a concrete idea of the world they wanted to build. Indignation against injustice, but not hatred, was fuel. But when hatred becomes a foundation, the movement lasts as long as the enemy lasts and the resolution of common problems takes a backseat.
Affective instability is a symptom of a lack of real belonging, and politics is the available painkiller. It works enough to keep being sought after, but not enough to meet the need for meaning and deep relationships.
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