Evangelical Black Activism in Brazil – Political Liminality and Situational Configuration

Abstract

Evangelical black activism exists in Brazil since the 1970s. Its current public reemergence, however, is still under-explored in the social sciences. Moreover, part of the specialized literature has recently characterized this activism as incomplete – since its actors are considered to be ‘rejecting African inheritances’ – and advocates that black and evangelical identities are incompatible. Differing from this perspective, this article shows how evangelicals participate in the public problematization of racism; it proposes to address this issue with a non-essentialist approach in three arguments: 01. evangelical black activism has reemerged publicly; 02. actors configure their religious and racial identities according to the problematic situations and public arenas in which they engage, which requires scholars to adopt a situated and relational approach to this form of activism; 03. the ways in which they reemerge and configure their identities are conditioned by the politically liminal situation of evangelical black actors and, consequently, by their need to acquire the status of a legitimate social movement and legitimate evangelicals. This article presents partial results of a research effort conducted between 2019 and 2021, in which qualitative research methods and techniques were used, such as direct and participant observation (in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco), semi-directed interviews, document analysis, and social media monitoring.

Keywords

• black movement
• evangelical black movement
• evangelical political activism
• public problem