Fundamentalist evangelicals and politics: an analysis of the Brazilian situation (2018-2019)

Abstract

This article acknowledges that fundamentalism has never been such a popular topic in Brazil as it is today; and that the wide use of the concept is rarely associated with the spectrum of Protestantism defined by the literal hermeneutics of the Scriptures, as in the onset of the fundamentalist movement. Roughly, in contemporary Brazil the adjective fundamentalist qualifies one that is a conservative or reactionary evangelical, usually Pentecostal, and with some presence in the media and politics. Thus, actions of fundamentalist evangelicals in the Brazilian public and political space must be understood by the Religious Studies (in dialogue with Theology), since democracy is at stake when particular religious interests are transformed into matters of State and governmental actions. Therefore, this article aims at assessing how the qualification “fundamentalist” associated with the name “evangelical” contributes to understand Jair Bolsonaro’s election to the Presidency of the Republic in 2018, with a focus on his promise of changing the Brazilian embassy in Israel of Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The conclusions on the relationship of the so-called Christian Zionism (as a fundamentalist feature of evangelical sectors) with the election of Bolsonaro result from bibliographical and documentary research, whose empirical data of were obtained from the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.