Democracy and the Christian Right in Brazil: Family, Sexualities and Religious Freedom

Abstract

Based on data publicly available on various online platforms and in academic literature, this article analyzes the prominent role that the Christian Right has taken in the government of Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019–2022), including the pandemic period) to strengthen its political–religious project. To this end, we present the ideological mechanisms that align neoconservative Catholics and Evangelicals with both the government’s neoliberal premises and Bolsonaro’s moral communities. We focus on the rhetorical updating of religious freedom to intensify the nationalist narrative of a Christian Brazil, highlighting the judicial expertise that the Christian Right has accumulated in its reactive activism against the pro-rights agenda of LGBTQI+ communities and the advancement of the Pro-Life, Pro-Family agenda. We discuss the anti-gender crusade and “gender ideology” as political instruments of the Evangelical leadership in the process of juridifying public policies related to sexuality, gender, and family, and as a defense of the Christian nation, which it also leads. However, we identify a reconfiguration of the balance in the correlation of forces within Brazilian Christianity.

Keywords

• Christian Right
• Bolsonaro
• pandemic
• gender ideology
• family