Alana Souza’s Project Summary

The Holy-Land in Brazil:
Jewish Elements and the Relation between Pentecostalism and Politics

INTRODUCTION

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) is an important institution in contemporary Brazilian society and politics. The church owns the second largest TV channel in the country, broadcasting soap operas watched by a broad public. The sight of uniformed UCKG members and pastors handing out flyers and newspapers is a common scene in big cities. In recent years, with the help of their members, the Church elected pastors and bishops as congressional representatives, senators, and the mayor of one of Brazil’s biggest cities. Their representatives have been part of various ministries in previous federal governments, and the Church support of the winning candidate in the last presidential election was much debated. Understanding the UCKG’s production of public semiotics and the constitution of their members’ subjectivity and personhood in this process is the major goal of my dissertation project. However, the article developed here aims to address a specific point in this larger process: an analysis of the use of Jewish material elements by the UCKG, and how this strategy connects with the project of a Christian nation, where Brazil becomes the Holy-Land itself.

In July 2014, the UCKG opened the Temple of Solomon in São Paulo, an enlarged replica of the famous biblical temple, including rocks and trees brought from Israel, an Ark of the Covenant, menorahs, and assistants dressed as Levites. During the opening ceremony, Edir Macedo, UCKG’s founder, wore tallit and a kippah. The inauguration of the Temple of Solomon was attended by the mayor of the city of São Paulo, the governor of the State, the president, and ministers of the Supreme Court. Later, the Temple also received a visit from the Consul of Israel in Brazil and the General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. Both visits were reported by Church communication channels, highlighting two points: how these dignitaries were impressed by the construction, stating that they felt as if in Jerusalem itself; and how the pastors and bishops who met them affirmed their support for Israel.

Matan Shapiro (2017) argues that Pentecostal biblical literalism is redefining the political imagination of Brazilian society. One of his major examples is the exorcism performed by Congressman Daciolo in the National Congress[i]. In a similar way, I regard the Temple of Solomon and how it is presented by the UCKG as metonymy, and not just as metaphor, including the importance of bringing the soil of Israel to the construction site. If the soil adds sanctity, the UCKG’s Temple of Solomon itself may be understood as sacred – an attribution I noted in conversations with my interlocutors during fieldwork. This means that a small part of Brazil becomes part of the Holy Land itself. As Shapiro (2017) would say, Jewish elements and symbols are transformed in a metonymy of the holy power. In this sense, the UCKG claims its sovereignty and sanctity through, in Macedo’s worlds, a “plan of power” given by God Himself to transform Brazilian society and politics, turning it into His chosen nation (Macedo & Oliveira, 2008)[ii]. At the same time, the church is founding itself metonymically, but also literally, on the holy soil.

If the Temple of Solomon, as the UCKG headquarters, is from one perspective the metonymy of its holy power, from another it is also a metaphor of the UCKG members’ subjectivity. Using the words of one of the pastors heard during fieldwork: “You need to be a Christian who can changes things, and not be adapted to them, like the Temple of Solomon. Brás was an ugly place and now it has the most beautiful church in the world.” The Temple is the center of a Jewish materiality at the UCKG; but around it we also find other Judaic elements present in the services and daily life of the members of the Church, in their houses and bodies – like stars of David, Menorahs, kippahs, and oil from the Holy Land. These are material signs that are important in the formation of a UCKG Christian discipline or ethics (Fassin, 2012; Lambek, 2015). According to Webb Keane (2008), signs have material properties and circulate as semiotic forms, which are public entities. Using Keane’s work, we can say the uses of Jewish materiality by the Universal Church constitute public semiotics that appear in the Brazilian religious, political and social realm. In all of them, the UCKG incorporates the speech and legitimacy of holy power.

Figure 1: Street traders and passersby in Brás. Author’s photo, 2020.

Examining the relationship of the Church within Brazilian society and politics through the construction of the Temple gives us the possibility to discuss the idea of the sovereignty of a Christian nation, the political charisma developed by that institution, and the rise of populism in Brazil. In addition, it resonates with an important question when we discuss sovereignty: “what is to act politically?” (Agamben, 2005). To illustrate that discussion, this article is associated with photos not only of the Temple of Solomon itself, but also of the neighborhood where it is located: in Brás in the city of São Paulo. The importance of the visual project is to illustrate the process of sacralisation of this urban space to the point of having soil of the “holy land” and the understanding of being part of it. Moreover, Brás is presented here as a smaller scale Brazilian holy land and its visual representation is a materialization of the pastor’s words quoted above. The different layers of sovereignty, sanctity and religious and political authority in the construction of this space, and the presence of the Temple of Solomon there, is what the visual project addresses in dialogue with the article.

Figure 2: Front entry of the Temple of Solomon. Author’s photo, 2020.

CONTEXTUALIZING
UCKG and its insertion in Brazilian Politics

Until the Republic, formed in 1889, Brazil’s official religion was Catholicism. However, even after the separation of church and state, Catholicism continued to be seen as a Brazilian cultural institution, melded together with elements of Amerindian and African beliefs. This context led Brazil to be understood as the most Catholic country in the world in the 1990s. Patricia Birman and Marcia Leite argue that this mixture was for a long time understood as a certain “cordiality”, a form of religious tolerance that enabled syncretism without conflict (Birman & Leite, 2000).

Defying this context, the growth of Pentecostalism in Brazil reveals a group of churches that do not intend to follow this logic. The first Pentecostal church that arrived in Brazil was the Assembly of God, in 1911. However, Pentecostalism only drew the attention of the wider society and researchers later, with the growth of its number of adherents. Stoll (1990) noted that between 1960 and 1985, Evangelicals had multiplied by a factor of 3.6 in Brazil. According to data collected by the 2010 census, 22.2% of the Brazilian population declares itself “evangelical”. Among the evangelicals, 60% claim to be Pentecostal. Together with the Assembly of God and the Christian Congregation, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) constitutes 74% of Pentecostals. This group corresponds to 2/3 of evangelicals in the national territory and 10.4% of the Brazilian population. These numbers make clear the magnitude of the expansion of Pentecostalism in Brazil.

The UCKG was founded in 1977 by Edir Macedo Bezera in Rio de Janeiro, in a small space of what previously had been a funeral home. The UCKG stood out for its rapid growth – in 10 years, it already had more than five hundred temples throughout the country and had acquired the Record television network – for its use of media aimed at proselytizing, but also for incorporating and/or demonizing popular religions. The UCKG also stood out because of the sheer number of documentaries on the Church produced by different television channels, because of the numerous lawsuits waged by former members and pastors against the church, and because its founder, Edir Macedo had been arrested in the early 1990s. This made it impossible for anyone in Brazil to ignore UCKG’s existence. However, such actions and events also legitimized a discourse of persecution and the struggle of good against evil amongst UCKG members. The last major event that brought the UCKG back into the news was the 2014 inauguration of the Temple of Solomon – a perfect replica of the biblical temple on a 1.5 scale – in the city of São Paulo, attended by the mayor, the governor and the president (Tavolaro, 2007; Freston, 1995; Mariano, 1999).

The acquisition of Record TV made the Church and its founder major media actors in the Brazilian context. A few years after the purchase, the channel had the third largest audience in the country. In August 1996, Campos identified that 60 hours per week of Record network programming was devoted to religious shows (Reis, 2006). Despite this, for many years the broadcasts of religious content were restricted to late night programming. However, in recent years, the Record network has begun broadcasting soap operas that tell of biblical stories during the most important timeslot for Brazilian TV. Since 2005, hour-long soap operas air at 8:30PM with such biblical theme; the first series was titled “The Ten Commandments” and the current series is “The Rich Man and Lazarus”.

In 1986, only nine years after its foundation, the UCKG elected its first congressman[iii]. By the next elections, in 1990, the Church had already elected three congressmen. In 2000, they elected their first Senator, Marcelo Crivella. Crivella is a former UCKG bishop[iv], well known as a leader as well as a singer, and he is also the nephew of Edir Macedo. In 2016, he was elected the mayor of one of Brazil’s biggest cities, Rio de Janeiro. Another important step in UCKG’s insertion into institutional politics was the foundation of PRB (Brazilian Republican Party)[v]. This party was founded in 2005 by leaders connected with UCKG, including Marcelo Crivella, as well as other evangelical churches, and also the vice-president of the country at the time, José de Alencar. In the following elections, the candidates to the Congress connected with the Universal Church would launch their campaigns affiliated with this party, as would all their congressmen elected at the present moment. Currently, there are seventeen representatives in Congress who are connected with UCKG, and thirty- four representatives from PRB in general. Different authors (Burity & Machado, 2014; Mariz & Machado, 2044; Oro, 2003) explain such growth with reference to the fact UCKG’s candidates – most of the times pastors who already have some profile in the media – are supported by the Church and are brought by them into their services and TV and radio programs. Another is the fact that the Church keeps track of the number of members who can vote in each region, and it takes these numbers into consideration in their decision to launch candidates.

Nevertheless, it is also important to understand how this process is translated through the practice of the representatives elected. Two decades ago Birman and Lehman (1999), pointed out that the only constant pattern in UCKG’s actions in institutional politics was to oppose and even demonize the politics of the Labour Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT), and its presidential candidate, Lula, now former president. Although that was true when these authors did their analysis, things have since changed. The partnership between PT and UCKG started during the elections campaign, when the UCKG openly supported PT.

Authors like Oro (2002) had showed how this connection became possible in the first place. There was an intersection between the speeches on both sides about the importance of ethical behaviour in politics. The Labour Party had a coalition with a party called PL – where, at the time, UCKG’s congressmen where affiliated – which led to a pragmatic perception of such alliance. Until the elections of former president Lula, PT had been at the parliamentary opposition to the government for many years, and amongst their major concerns was a “more ethical” way to do politics. That was also amongst the concerns expressed by the UCKG’s political leaders. Framing the world as a battle between good and evil, and politics and the Brazilian National Congress as spaces where the evil dominates, was why, according to their logic, “men of God” needed to be brought to politics. As Oro (2002) had pointed out, this also meant that voting for UCKG’s members was itself a religious act; a contribution to the good, helping to win the spiritual battle happening in politics. In Edir Macedo’s own words:

Christians should not only discuss, but also especially participate to contribute at the development of good national politics, and, above all, with a project of nation idealized by God to His people. (Macedo & Oliveira, 2008, p.10)

After former president Lula’s first election, politicians connected with the UCKG and, afterwards, the PRB were deeply connected with PT’s government, including nominations as ministers. Marcello Crivella left his seat as a senator to be a minister in the government of the second president elected by PT, Dilma Rousseff’[vi]. He left this position two years after to be a candidate in Rio de Janeiro’s municipal election, when he became the city’s mayor. The partnership between UCKG and PT lasted until a few weeks prior to Dilma Roussef’s impeachment process.

The justification of politicians connected to UCKG for leaving PT’s government, and the justification of the Church itself to no longer support this political party was the same used they to join in the first place: the need of “new actors” who would have more “ethics and moral values” in their work[vii] (Oro, 2002). As Roger Sansi (2007) pointed out years earlier, the Universal Church attributes to itself the mission of building the country as a nation in its own image. This point is of great importance to this article. To understand what it is to act politically in the context of this Church and its participation in the current moment of the country, together with the idea of Brazil as a Christian chosen nation, gives us the opportunity to appreciate the role of sanctity and soil as support to sovereignty.

Figure 3: Catholic Church in front of Temple of Solomon seen through its columns. Author’s photo, 2020.

Jewish Materiality

From the beginning, it is important to highlight the big picture in terms of where UCKG’s Jewish materiality appears, in what has be called “Philo-Semitism”. The relationship between Christianity and Judaism has long been studied by different disciplines and for different purposes (Ariel, 2013; Shapiro, 2015). In recent years, a series of events has occurred in Brazil that shows the importance of looking more closely at this phenomenon. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have used Judaic elements in their ceremonies and their faithful have taken various symbols into their daily lives. The conversion of Pentecostal groups or individuals to Judaism, whether or not they are accepted and recognized by the traditional Judaic community (Toppel, 2011), has attracted attention, as has the importance given in the last presidential race to candidates’ positions on moving the Brazilian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Among these developments, is UCKG’s adoption of a series of elements of Judaism, especially the inauguration of the Temple of Solomon – a replica of the Temple as described in the Bible but built to higher proportions.

Philo-Semitism is most often defined as “support or admiration for Jewish people by non- Jews” (Fradking, 2017; Griessman, 1976; Smith, 2013). Christian Zionism is the support for the state of Israel, specifically by evangelical Christians (Shapiro, 2015). Nevertheless, the borders between these two are rarely clear. In the same way, although it is not the only important factor, millennialism is also an important category to engage in this discussion – that is, the belief that humanity is approaching the second coming of Christ and the development of prophecies related to it (Griessman, 1976; Shapiro, 2015; Whalen, 1996). However, it is also important to highlight that there are different theological approaches to this matter. In UCKG, the following were the words of one of the pastors I heard during fieldwork, Pastor Mauricio: “One of the biggest tricks of the devil is to make you believe that we are talking nonsense. That Jesus is not coming or that you can ask for forgiveness at the last minute. But He is coming, and you are not going to have time to realize this is happening.” This section focuses on this social reality and brings together previous studies that engage with it, aiming to contextualize the data gathered in both theoretical and ethnographical contexts.

The greater part of previous research has focused on so-called Philo-Semitism and its development in the U.S, while writers often also point to its early development in Europe, especially in England. In this sense, one of the most prominent figures is the Scottish Reverend John Dury (1596-1680). Dury understood that the political and the spiritual needed to be used together in order to spread Reformation ideals and opposition to the Catholic Church and monarchies, specifically in the years of the 1640s and 1650s. In Dury’s Philo-Semitic writings, Jews appear as victims of the Catholic Church, along with American Indians, whom he believed to be one of Israel’s lost tribes. Jeremy Fradkin (2017) argues that John Dury’s Philo-Semitism was, in fact, one of the characteristics of his militant and colonialist project (Fradkin, 2017).

Eugene Griessman (1976) shows how colonizers in the U.S. rapidly developed their own version of Philo-Semitism. He describes how early colonists in New England gave Jewish names to children, towns and churches, taught Hebrew in their schools, observed Sunday in the same way that Jews observed their Sabbaths, and even compared their leader to Joshua or Moses. They also called the king of England a “pharaoh”, and themselves “Israelites” in search of the Holy Land. Robert Whalen (1996) argues that enduring Philo-Semitism only emerged during the Jacksonian period, connected to a pessimistic millennialist view. This form of millennialism did not believe that democracy’s victory was a sign of Jesus’ return, focusing only on the signs of human deviation and of God’s anger. According to Whale (1996), it is in this period that American evangelical culture established a deep connection with Philo-Semitism.

Furthermore, in the last decades, research dedicated to what has been called Christian Zionism has been preeminent, especially because of its revival after the establishment of the modern state of Israel. Faydra Shapiro (2015) shows that in the study of these groups, despite the importance of understanding the eschatology of Christian groups and their use of what is called millennialism and dispensationalism[viii], researchers tend not to find resonance between these concepts and how interlocutors justify their actions. Sean Durbin (2013b) also argues that American fascination with Israel is more than eschatological or Biblical, but in fact involves a “multi-layered symbolic politics”. We can see this role, according to the author, through the group’s use of biblical references and its secular notion of the “hero of democracy”. Supporting these authors’ arguments, a Pew survey from 2003 pointed out that among people who sympathize with Israel, only 54% quoted their religious beliefs as the most important factor influencing their views (Shapiro, 2015). Furthermore, this interest of Christians in Jewishness is connected with an eschatology that sees the return of these people to their homeland and their conversion to Christianity as signs that portend Christ’s return. In this sense, American evangelicals saw the establishment of the modern state of Israel as a prophecy enacted. In Durbin’s (2013b) words, modern Israel is a “fetishized signifier of stability” in Christian Zionist eschatology. However, their perception of Israel and its Biblical meaning also connects these Christians to a particular time. It is through the relationship of Israel with the rest of the Middle East, that they can understand the progress of God’s plans and figure themselves in this narrative.

Marta Topel (2011) was one of the first researchers in Brazil to call attention to what was happening in a large number of Evangelical churches – what I am calling here the development of Brazilian Jewish-Christian materiality. Topel (2011) believes there is a pentecostalization of Jewish elements that become “charms” through the interpretation of specific parts of the Bible. To understand this process of incorporation of Jewish materiality by neopentecostal churches in Brazil, this author follows the established idea of Brazil as a syncretic country. According to Topel, there are as many religions as there are religious people in Brazil, since the institutions are unable to impose their specific rules. She understands that this theory needs to integrate two more explanations for the case of pentecostalization: the process of religious globalization, where borders are undone, and the dispensationalist belief that it is possible to find in these churches.

Manuela Carpenedo (2017, 2018) studied a messianic group in the south of Brazil that is very critical of neopentecostal churches and their use of Jewish elements. They claim Jewish descent through the historical figure of “New Christians” and believe in Jesus Christ as the messiah. Most of them were part of Evangelical groups before recognizing themselves as Jewish. While they distinguish themselves from the Evangelical churches to which they once belonged, these groups also repudiate the incorporation of Jewish elements in these churches. According to them, neopentecostal churches’ use of Jewish elements reveals a misunderstanding of God’s commandments and of the monotheistic Abrahamic faith.

Carpenedo (2017) points out how the adoption of Jewish elements by the Evangelicals is connected to a desire to reproduce the lives of the first Christians and the Jewish life of Jesus, emphasizing their Jewish roots and origins. However, the author explains that a high degree of dissatisfaction with Evangelical doctrine, practices and social and institutional organization accounted for her interlocutors leaving their previous churches. The members of the group that Carpenedo studied criticized the prosperity gospel teachings, supernatural elements and charismatic displays that they found in their previous Evangelical churches. On the other hand, this group also often criticized the following of Jewish laws as blind rabbinic legalism.

Matan Shapiro (2017) is another author who offers a case study of Philo-Semitism in Brazilian communities. He researched evangelical Christian groups who travel to Israel. According to him, during these travels there is an appropriation of both Jewish material culture and the Holy Land, inspiring an ontological change in Brazilian religious space. He argues that the travelers understand the Holy Land as literally embedded in God’s eternal bliss and expect to see and experience miracles while they are there. Shapiro (2017) also analyzes prayers and ritual actions of UCKG’s pastors in the Holy Land. Through videos, the faithful have access to the pastors’ activities and are able to see them blessing objects. These objects then return to Brazil, to act as both a spiritual connection to the Holy Land and a source of blessing. Shapiro understands a double process of sanctification is occurring – through presence in the Holy space and through the enhancement of the supernatural power of God. During this process cosmic vitality is transferred from a Biblical- Jewish past to the contemporary Brazilian-Evangelical reality. (Shapiro, 2017)

Although there are only a few studies on the relationship between neopentecostal churches and Jewish materiality in Brazil, these already reveal that there is a large variety of uses and understandings of Jewish objects and symbols in these churches. While Topel (2011) argues that this phenomenon is part of the syncretism of Brazilian society, I believe it is important not to automatically apply this concept as an answer every time we see contact between religions in Brazil. As Carpenedo (2017) stresses, this movement of intersection between Jewish practices and Christianity is happening in different ways throughout the world. In this sense it is important in this article to understand both the specificities of Jewish materiality at UCKG, but also how what is happening in this church is part of a larger phenomenon.

TEMPLE OF SOLOMON: BUILDING AND INAUGURATING

The year is 2010, and thousands of people are reunited in the space where the Temple of Solomon will be built. It is the “fundamental stone launching event”. And that is exactly what happens: a stone upon which is engraved the sentence “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Matthew 16:18) is launched into a hole that is later filled with concrete. This passage of Matthew’s Gospel is one of the most discussed in the Bible to argue the legitimacy and pertinence of different Christian groups. Some believe the passage was addressed by Jesus particularly to the apostle Peter; and others are convinced that it is extended to anyone who professes the same faith, meaning belief in Jesus as son of God. The choice of these words as the base of the Temple of Solomon appears here as more than just an agreement with the latter idea: it is also a legitimation of the Universal Church as inheriting God’s covenant as His people.

The setting of all this is in a neighborhood of Brás, in the mega city of São Paulo. Brás is an old industrial neighborhood, with different layers of immigration, but one that has also seen the building of mega-churches in the past decades. Here, in the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century, was a moment of Italian immigration. It is in this context and place that one of the first churches of Brazilian Pentecostalism appeared. The Christian Congregation, was founded by Italians in Brás in 1910, and at the beginning was restricted to this community; but nowadays, it is the denomination with the largest number of members in the country. Churches such as God is Love and Assembly of God have also had their mega temples in this neighborhood for many years. There was already a mega temple of UCKG there before. Nevertheless, the Temple of Solomon was built at a much larger scale than all of them, and nowadays is one of the biggest churches in the whole country[ix].

Figure 4: One of the old industries of Brás, behind the Temple of Solomon. The trees on the left are part of the visiting complex that includes a replica of the Tabernacle. Author’s photo, 2020.

The Universal Church’s Temple of Solomon was built based on the biblical construction that God would have demanded of King Solomon, as is shown at 1 Chronicles. That said, the dimensions are larger than the past two constructions that inspired this building. The Temple of Solomon in São Paulo is 56 meters tall, 156 meters long, and 104 meters wide. Besides the direct biblical reference to a place constructed in Israel (which today retains the last wall of its second construction[x]), UCKG’s temple also has other references to Israel itself. The first that I would like to highlight is the literal use of Israeli soil. Forty thousand square-meters of rocks were shipped to Brazil from Israel, to be used to cover the outside walls of the temple, giving this building the same characteristic color as Jerusalem stone tile, broadly associated with Israeli constructions and streets.

Beside the Temple itself, the gated area where it was constructed includes other elements with biblical and Israeli references. A replica of the Jewish tabernacle “according to Moses’s time” – as described on their website – can be visited in accompaniment with a guide pastor who is called a Levite[xi] and who wears clothes understood as typical to this kind of sacerdotal position. This visit also includes a trip to the “Biblical Garden” of olive trees in reference to Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, and a replica of the golden Dome of the Rock. While this last one is actually the top of a building originally constructed as an Islamic mosque, in the UCKG’s version it is called “the Temple’s memorial”, and under it the history of Israel and its twelve tribes is displayed through objects and videos.

The construction of UCKG’s Temple of Solomon, according to the official history on their website, was due to “Bishops Macedo’s inspiration during a travel to Israel, where he expressed the desired that all people could touch the rocks that are testimonies of Biblical events”. In this sense, this construction indicates the importance of the sanctity of the soil. One of my interlocutors who is a UCKG pastor told me that it was “extremely important (to visit Israel), someone understanding of God’s Kingdom is completely changed after stepping on holy soil”. This life-changing experience is replaced at the new Temple, a place that was constructed as “the Holy Land itself”.

To understand the meaning my interlocutors give to Israel, and the possibility of how this place is somehow brought to Brazil, we need also to remember the complicated relationship with the land of the scriptures and with Jewish materiality that is not exclusive to UCKG, but is part of different Protestant traditions. James Bielo researches different sites of biblical replication and has already documented some 400 different “attractions” around the world. This means that the Temple of Solomon is part of a historical and worldwide phenomenon of materialization of the Bible. In different replication sites, there is an immersive effect that aims to transport visitors from the here and now to a biblical there and then. Bielo (2018) points out that the historical relationship between Protestants and the Holy Land results in an imagination that is inscribed on the body. There is a tradition of seeking the land of scripture through sensory engagement. In this sense, in the Temple of Solomon visitors are encouraged to build relationships simultaneously with a sacred past and potential Messianic future. This is possible to see in the following speech of an attendee at the inauguration of the construction event. “…many people who didn’t see their dreams come true, their lives transformed, the fact of them coming and stepping here, step in this temple, I believe the abundance of that time is going to happen in our lives”[xii]. The words of this woman, as well as the words of the pastor quoted above, were collected in different places and at different times, but both express the same language towards Israel and the Temple of Solomon in São Paulo. In both cases, the relation with the soil makes possible a simultaneous connection with the sacred, through a holy past and a “transformed” future.

The Temple of Solomon is one of the most emblematic examples of what I have been calling a Jewish materiality at the Universal Church. The temple was inaugurated in July, 2014. There was a choir singing for a whole hour before the beginning of the ceremony, while the invitees were coming inside. The ceremony itself was hosted by a pastor, who was always introducing to those present to what was going to happen in the steps ahead. During the night, there were presentation of videos, choir performances, the singing of the Brazilian and Israeli national anthems, testimonies, and at the end, Bishop Edir Macedo closed the ceremony with a sermon. The first thing the host pastor did when he came to the pulpit for the first time was acknowledge the people who were present, from the founder of the church to regular pastors, TV presenters, journalists, and politicians and authorities. Amongst those in attendance were Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, the governor of the State of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, the mayor of the city of São Paulo, Fernado Hadad, and the Israeli consul, Yoel Barnea.

Figure 5: Temple of Solomon appears among other buildings. Author’s photo, 2020.

Following the expression of thanks to those present, the host pastor announced the presentation of a video, representing the construction and fall of the two previous temples. He also pointed out how the Ark of the Covenant marked the presence of God at the Temple, thus being the reason why a replica of the Ark of the Covenant would also be present in the Temple. The presence of God, materialized by the Ark of the Covenant, was said to be inside the Temple of Solomon exactly after the fall of the previous building was made clear. The reason for this is that in the ceremony, the Universal Church’s Temple of Solomon was presented as a repository of God’s presence and His covenant. Furthermore, the hosting pastor announced the presentation of another film, which according to him would recount in some minutes four thousand years of history. The first sentence spoken in this video was: “Through history, God has been attracted by those who are thirsty and hungry for justice, by those who revolt against suffering, and use the faith with intelligence. It’s been like this since Abraham’s time.”

Here we can see that the Universal Church as an institution presents the history of Christianity through their interpretation of what is true Christian practice. The words “revolt” and “intelligent faith” are not only part of the vocabulary taught to the faithful but are also part of the constitution of the born-again self of the members of this church. As was told to me by Mrs. Maria, one of my interlocutors, “I learned the word revolt. I knew the word before, but not in that way, of not accepting the things the way they are, and that changed everything”. These words are important parts of UCKG’s leadership and membership, answering the question “how to live?” (Lambek, 2015); but it is also part of a system of ethics that is both transcendental and daily. This means that I agree with Daswani’s (2015) ideas about the role that immanence and imminence play simultaneously, in the life of born-again Christians. As he saw among Pentecostal Christians in Ghana, here through revolt and intelligent faith, UCKG’s members are constantly involved in shaping the near future, while remaining hesitant about what this future will bring.

In the same video, it was also possible to see UCKG’s institutional understanding of who the chosen people of God are. The pastor who hosted the ceremony had announced before the beginning of the screening that there we would see the heroes of the faith. In the presentation of Judeo-Christian history, the presentation of the greatest characters was indeed how the video was developed. It is interesting to highlight here the words in this video about Jesus: “loved by few and hated by many. Their words were hard to take.” If highlighting how Jesus was persecuted and misunderstood is a common practice in most Christian churches, it seems important here to point out that those are also the words used to show how the UCKG itself is persecuted. During my fieldwork, I witnessed many different pastors begin sections of their preaching by asking “Do you know why the Universal Church is so hated outside? Because not everyone is prepared to hear what we said.”

The video also argued that the “Romans” had “joined” the Christians only when they realized that they “could not beat them”. According to the video, that church was “an apostate church”, where “the real faith was substituted by traditions and power”. According to the narrator in the video, only after 1,200 years another man “with the same revolt and intelligent faith of the elders appeared”: Martin Luther. After presenting Luther, the voiceover said, “now we arrive at the 1970s, where a Christian family is in pain with the congenital malformation of their daughter”. The last minutes of the “four thousand years of history” are about the establishment of the Universal Church, creating a connection between the characters presented unto the present. This means that this video not only provides a narrative of Christian history or of the creation of the UCKG; it is also their claim of being the people of God, the ones directly connected to Abraham and who, like him, know the real way to access God.

Some moments afterward, Bishop Edir Macedo spoke, bringing about the last part of the ceremony. In the same style as every service at UCKG, he began by requesting that God be between them. When he referred to the public for the first time, he stated that he was inviting the Holy Spirit to come to all those present, “independent of your religion”. Macedo also declared during the service that if he died today, he would be happy because he “really knows Abraham’s God”. The choice of words of “Abraham’s God” points to the direct connection being made between UCKG and the Jewish God. However, one of the most important parts of his speech to the argument developed here was his words explaining the meaning of the word mezuzah to them.

“This candelabrum, it has a big meaning. To us. The priests on the tabernacle were obliged every morning and afternoon to fill a new olive oil, to keep the lamp on. (…) And what does this mean? The olive oil, fuel of the lamp, is the Holy Spirit, the spirit of God. And the olive oil, when it is on us, we are the candelabrum, our life is on. Our life is illuminated, our faith grows, and we do not have fear of anything. (…) Because we know there is a living God.”

These elements of the opening ceremony of the Temple of Solomon and Bishop Edir Macedo’s speech about the candelabrum help us to understand the significance of Jewish materiality to this church. Here, Jewish elements and history are understood in a phenomenological way (Durbin, 2013a). They are not Jewish in the sense that they belong to Jewish people, but in the sense that they are signs of the Abrahamic God. In this manner, the UCKG successfully traces the lineage from Abraham to Edir Macedo and declares them great men of God who know Him personally and know how to access their faith through “revolt” and “intelligence”. Furthermore, what we read in the Bible that was declared to Abraham and his offspring is not only also true today to those who believe in God. Rather, it is for all great men of God in his lineage, which has as its newest branch Edir Macedo himself. As Matan Shapiro (2017) has pointed out, this is not only a passive incorporation of Jewish elements, but the transformation of Brazilians as the people of God on earth. I would complete this by saying that here members of UCKG, regardless of origins, are the people of God on earth, and Brazil, more specifically the Temple of Solomon, is the Holy Land.

Figure 6: Side of the Temple of Solomon. Author’s photo, 2020.[xiii]

(OTHER) JEWISH MATERIALITY AT THE UCKG

The Temple of Solomon is the center of a Jewish materiality at the UCKG, but around it we also find other Judaic elements present in the services and daily life of the members of the church. All temples have a menorah. At the “cathedrals”[xiv], you can also see pastors dressed as “Levites” at the entrance, welcoming members who are arriving before Sunday services. Menorahs and stars of David can be seen on members’ necklaces and bracelets.

Jewish materiality has been present in Universal Church through “campaigns” and “purposes” for some time. A “campaign” is the name given in this Church to a practice requiring months of sacrifice made by their members, culminating on the last day, when a sacrifice is given to God on the altar. Most of the sacrifices made by members are financial sacrifices, for which they will cut out specific expenses, sell properties, or even find a temporary job for the duration of the campaign. On the last day, they will take the money collected and literally place it on the church altar, in an envelope sealed together with their prayers and requests to God. However, it is also important that people also perform other sacrifices, including fasting, not watching TV, staying away from social media, and so on. The importance of talking here about the campaigns is also to point out that they are called “Israel saint bonfire campaigns”. The name describes how the prayers that members have written in papers are afterwards burned and turned into ashes before being brought to Israel by pastors who spread them on a mountain. Every Israel bonfire campaign has a different name that refers to a sacred Bible place or story that is usually connected to where the ashes will be then be spread. The last one, for example, was the campaign of Mount Carmel, and after sending their prayers and making their sacrifices, members could see videos of their pastors on this mountain praying for them.

Another large campaign at the Universal Church is Daniel’s fasting. Based on the biblical passage where the prophet Daniel fasted for three weeks, fasting is an emulation of Daniel’s actions is not particular to the Universal Church, but different churches have their own idiosyncratic interpretations of the process. At the Universal Church, the fasting is specifically about media usage such as TV, radio, and internet used without “the purpose to connect with God”. This means the member is invited to only use their cellphone to look at church posts, or to listen only to Christian songs, and only watch TV Christian movies or TV novellas with biblical themes. According to the church directions, the free time resulting from not using these media should be spent in prayer.

In different ways, both these campaigns are a process of deep immersion and emulation of the scriptures in their lives. In both cases, is it necessary to know what you want, to pray and do something that is understood as a sacrifice, to then establish a connection with God. This means that it is through a process of discipline, where these campaigns are special moments to learn from, that the faithful can embody the subject who “knows God” (Elisha, 2015). As an interlocutor told me “I arrived here during the Israel bonfire campaign. And I thought, I will do it, and I will meet the real God” (Mrs. Ana). It is through discipline that the legitimation of the faithful experience is testified. This means that it is through your sacrifice that your achievement can be understood as part of God’s plan. Marcos, 32 years old, is an assistant who was particularly keen on an Israel saint bonfire campaign because of a business opportunity. He was well known for his dedication as an assistant and often stayed at the church after services to help the pastor with different issues. During this particular campaign, he saved money, fasted, and deprived himself of media pleasures. When, after the end of the campaign, Marcos could tie his business proposal, his discipline made clear that he had only achieved it because of his behavior not only over the long term, but also in the previous weeks. However, it is important here to highlight this legitimization also happens through Israeli soil and Jewish history. It is there that God receives the prayers and requests at the Bonfire campaign. Marcos’s sacrifice was taken to the mountain with holy soil where God received it.

We can say that “purposes” are like smaller campaigns. They last less time (days or a few weeks); they can (but do not necessarily) include sacrifices; and, as in Israel bonfire campaigns, always emulate a Biblical element or passage. Among “purposes” that I was able to follow at the church, I could see the use of different Jewish elements, for example: the wearing of a kippah for communion with God during a financial endeavour; the use of the sentence “holiness to the Lord” written in Hebrew and worn by members; and the distribution of oil from the Holy Land.

Olive oil from Israel is one of the most popular elements connected with Israel. It is distributed to the faithful and used during service by spreading a little at the forehead or hands for protection, or in big vases where prayers and requests are immersed in it. The members or visitants that bring the oil home, spread it on their bodies to heal different sicknesses, on their family’s heads for their protection, in parts of the house or in the cooking of their food. While this olive oil is distributed in small bottles around one centimeter in diameter, at the Temple of Solomon shop it is also possible to buy big bottles of olive oil and kosher grape juice from Israel.

Figure 7: Golden dome replica, seen through the door of a nearby bar. Author’s photo, 2020.[xv]

Another important element in this sense in the UCKG is the water. Usually, the faithful brings a bottle of water that the pastor consecrates during the service. Nevertheless, in the last church where I did my fieldwork, I arrived there at the same time as a new pastor was sent to this small temple. He had a bottle of water he brought from Israel and was very enthusiastic about the distribution of this water among his new community. To do that, he established a “purpose”: people would bring a bottle of water every Sunday and assistants would add a little drop of the water from Israel in the bottle. During the service, the usual consecration of the water would occur, and by the end, people would drink a little. This consecration meant that even though the water from Israel is by itself understood as saintly, it is necessary to the faithful to channel it to their specific problems or need. At the end, the pastor would also advise that the water be drunk every day until the next Sunday, as a slow but efficient healing process connected with the weekly presence at the church.

We can see in these elements what we discussed in relation to Shapiro (2017) above. There is a double process through which these elements become sacred. First, with the contact with the holy soil – the water comes from Israeli fountains, the oil and grape juice came from fruits cultivated there, the requests to God are spread on the top of an Israeli mountain. Then, in Brazil, the sanctity is increased with the establishment of a direct connection between the faithful and God, where the oil, juice, water or the envelope are the medium.

Gavin Feller (2018) calls attention to two different kind of media at the Universal Church. However, he is not only talking about mass media. Media here, clearly based in McLuhan’s ideas, is the extension of the human sensorium alongside the extension of institutional religious power. In this way, he talks about the existence at the UCKG of two kinds of media: contractual media and portable media. The portable media are the objects the faithful bring to the church to be blessed, which are then brought back home to their family. The contractual media are the artifacts used to establish a connection between the church and faithful. This means that when the pastor distributed a menorah between members of his church before handling it, he said “only who will come on Monday during five weeks must take it, or you will be breaking a promise with God, to take the Menorah is to make a promise”. The faithful who obtain these objects are agreeing with these terms. Nevertheless, I want to highlight here how through this process, the faithful also agree that this specific Jewish materiality is part of their religious practice and is recognized as sacred.

All these elements are material signs that are important in the formation of a UCKG Christian discipline or ethics. According to Webb Keane (2008), signs have forms and material properties and through them, it is possible to have access to ideas. In his theory, religious languages are linguistic practices that practitioners take as marked or unusual in some aspects. Keane writes that what circulates are not ideas or experiences but semiotic forms, which are public entities. This means that they are available as objects for the senses and not confined to inner or subjective experience. They are repeatable and have the potential to persist over time and across social contexts. Using Keane’s work, we can say that the use of Jewish materiality by the UCKG in their temples and by their members are public semiotics. They are originally Jewish material signs that are repeated and re-experienced in different social contexts, and, therefore, have different significations attributed.

In the words of one of my interlocutors, who was explaining to me Purim celebrations and feast, help us to understand these processes. UCKG’s women’s group annually organizes amongst themselves an event that includes food, dance, special clothing and a moment of prayer conducted by a pastor’s wife. Jewish people celebrate Purim as the event where Queen Esther exposed her Jewish identity to her husband and asked him to save her people. Its contemporary celebration can include candy, parades, costumes and carnivals. Nevertheless, UCKG, through their view of what would be typical and historical Jewish clothing, decoration, and dance, helps us to understand how the access to ideas changes through social contexts: “we celebrate Queen Esther’s actions, because without them all the Jews would die, and the Christ would never be born” (Angélica, 23 years old).

For Bruno Reinhardt, “Pentecostal norms are not boundaries per se, but relatively stable ways of overflowing them and accounting for this overflow” (2015, 413). In this sense, the claim made by the Universal Church as an institution is that a Christian is someone who inherited Abraham’s covenant, and elements that are understood initially as Jewish are between them a sign of their inheritance as the chosen people. Nevertheless, it is important to remark that at the individual level of the faithful practices, norms and boundaries of how this happens are not necessarily stable either. Since, as we discussed with Keane (2008), semiotic signs are open, they can be accessed and understood in different ways, giving the faithful the possibility to attribute many different meanings to them.

HOLY LAND

There is a recent special interest in the subject of sovereignty with special focus on the State’s monopoly of violence and how this authority is challenged by forms of “outside power”. If at first, Michel Foucault’s theory was the starting point of every study about State, Power and Sovereignty, in the last years the conversation has been established specially with Agamben’s theory and his dialogue with Smith and Benjamin’s works. This means sovereignty sets boundaries in spatial and temporal terms, deciding how and when the rules are applied (Kauanui, 2018; Wachpress, 2009). In Agamben’s terms, it is exactly through the sovereignty of the State that religious acts are defined as such and are authorized or not as part of the “good life”.

In the work developed here, this means that more than understanding how it is an imbrication between religion and politics, I prefer to agree with Ali Agrama (2010) who sees that we cannot talk about overlap or imbrications because that would mean we have stable concepts of what religion, politics or secularism are. The definition of the religion and of the secular are an important part of any governments’ sovereignty, and that is what Brazilian evangelicals realized. They understood that the best way to deal with their situation constituted as minority (Burity, 2011) is to be in the center of the power itself and retain the ability to define how appropriate their participation is there.

Therefore, the goal here is to understand how a set of beliefs and practices connected with these churches are part of contemporary Brazilian politics and sociability. If Harding (1991) has called our attention to the advantages and disadvantages of studying the repugnant other, Marshall (2014) has argued that the real reason why we as researchers understand Christians as the “repugnant other” is their “political difference”. This means that Pentecostals embody the liberalism and the conversionist cultural superiority that anthropologists understand as the opposite of their work. In this sense, we easily fall into our own trap, since our analyses can easily be understood as a defense or an offense against these groups. Overcoming this problem, in a particularly troublesome moment, is my aim here.

Figure 8: Temple of Solomon lateral side and golden door seen through snack bar. Author’s photo, 2020.

What is to act politically?

We talked above about how, until the former President Dilma’s Rousseff impeachment, the Universal Church was an ally of the Labor Party since the beginning of their period in presidency. In the 2018 presidential elections, UCKG, Bishop Macedo and Rede Record had important roles in Jair Bolsonaro’s political campaign. Jair Bolsonaro had already been a congressman since 1990 when he became a presidential candidate, but in 2014 he was the most popular congressman in the country after he became a well-known figure for defending the facilitation of gun acquisition by civilians and opposing sexual education in schools[xvi]. During this period, he also gave many interviews and declarations that inflamed large discussions in Brazilian society, owning namely to his admiration for the military dictatorship, for his belief that women should be paid less because their maternity leave rights are prejudicial to companies, and his positions against LGBTQI rights[xvii].

The 2018 presidential elections in Brazil happened in two processes. The first occurred between thirteen candidates, and the second between the two who came out on top in the first poll. Only a few days before the first election day, Bishop Edir Macedo, after being questioned by a regular member of UCKG on one of his social networks about which candidate he would be voting for, he answered that it would be Jair Bolsonaro. After this unofficial and personal declaration of Macedo, UCKG and Rede Record gave support to the current president’s candidature. This means, in the case of UCKG, a campaign was carried out amongst members of the church, including asking for their votes during the service, articles in church newspaper, websites and blogs, and the recommendation to the faithful to watch TV shows from Rede Record about the candidate. Rede Record, in its turn, gave space for Bolsonaro’s declarations and interviews, especially at the same time that political debates between other candidates were happening on other TV channels. Debates that Bolsonaro refused to participate in.

It is important to remark that during the 2018 elections, Brazilian citizens could also vote for congressmen, senators, and governors. During this year, I was doing fieldwork in Recife’s central cathedral, and I could see that even though the elections would only be in September, the pastors who would be running for congress were, by May, already being introduced to members and visitors of the church in many ways. Bishop Osséssio Silva was running for re-election as a congressman at the federal level, and Bishop Willian Brigido was running for the first time to be congressman at the local level. Months before the election day, both of them were regularly called to the altar to show that they were “men of God”. This proof was demonstrated through the exorcism of demons that manifested between members and visitors during the service. Bishop Alexandre Mendes, who was the main person responsible for UCKG’ Recife Cathedral at the time, would repeat while the exorcisms were performed, “If God was not with these men, they would not be able to fight against demons like this”.

Figure 9: The rooftop of the Temple of Solomon, and construction over it can be seen through other neighborhood buildings. Author’s photo, 2020.

Months before the election every person who crossed the gates of the cathedral would receive a flag of Pernambuco[xviii]. Minutes before Bishop Alexandre Mendes arrived at the altar, a song with the lyrics, “Pernambuco, Pernambuco” began to play. Mendes would come and continue singing along the song that repeated the name of the state continuously, asking people to stand and wave their arms. Along with the song, Bishop Alexandre repeated every Sunday “You should be proud of the place you live, it is an amazing place, it is a gorgeous place… You have the privilege to live where many people come to spend their vacation…”. Further, he also broadcasted on two big screens at each side of the altar, two kinds of videos. The first was of the action already made by Bishop Osséssio as a congressman. The second was his visits to places in Pernambuco lacking infra-structure – dirty spots of rivers, neighborhoods with no sewerage– following his speech about how all that could be fixed with the right politicians. During these different moments, Bishop Alexandre would claim the importance of prayer to the place you belong and live.

This institutional way to deal with elections, and the official and unofficial campaigns to elect their own representatives, is not new at the UCKG. At the micro level, assistants at UCKG not only help the pastor with needs specific to the moment of service but are also divided into groups for different kinds of community work. This also includes a group or a person (depending on the size of the community) responsible for assisting and informing members about elections details, such as registration, change of the city where one votes, legalization in case of any missing document, and distribution of educational and campaign material. Their work is not about specific candidates or elections, but an educational process of the importance of organization to be able to act as a group.

Pastor Ivo, leader of a small temple at the periphery of Great Recife, repeated over the period of the election campaign to the Children Council[xix] of the town: “I transfer my vote to this town where I live now, because it is important to vote on people who are going to do things in the place you live. If you still vote somewhere else transfer your vote.” In Brazil, voting in the main elections (Federal, State and City Hall levels) is not only a right, but also an obligation. Nevertheless, there are a few smaller elections to decide local administrative positions, for which there is no obligation to vote. That is the case of the Children Council. In this sense, there was not only the need to introduce a candidate, but also to explain the importance of voting in this situation, convincing members to vote despite the fact they were not hearing about it through TV and radio campaigns or large amount of advertisement material on the streets, as happens in the main elections. In that respect, pastor Ivo repeated on several different occasions in the months that preceded the Children Council elections:

“There is a girl in the community that has problems. She is a sweet girl, but there are demons acting on her. She has been violent many times already. Last time she threatened her mom with a knife, her mom called the Children Council, and what did they say? They said that if they went there would be with a police officer in a police car. Her mom didn’t want that, of course. So, you know who helped this woman? Me. Me and an already elderly assistant. We helped this mom and this kid.”

Through this story, Pastor Ivo made the importance of the Children Council visible. However, he still needed to show the general relevance of it, returning to discussions of the past year’s election. “There are many kids in this situation who are sweet kids, and they are exposed to things they shouldn’t be. She is sweet, she needs God, and not the police… Our kids are innocent and sweet, they shouldn’t be exposed to these things of gender ideology… They need people to take care of them. Do you know there is no woman in the Children Council in this town? No woman. We need a woman to help the kids and their mothers.” In this sense, the photo and the number of the candidate supported by the Church were distributed, and the pastor would also explain during services that she was the Church candidate, someone that they could trust to “protect the kids” against “the gender ideology that is going on here”.

These same words and argument were repeated by another pastor, Bishop Osséssio, supported by the Church and re-elected as a congressman in 2018. He visited this little temple, together with the children counselor candidate supported by UCKG a couple of weeks before the election. He went to the altar at the end of a Sunday service. Here, I will break his speech into three sections: the first is thanksgiving, the second, the idea of “a better future”, and the last to “have faith in the present”. The thanksgiving was the largest one. His first words were “I am here to say thank you. Thank you for your votes, thank you for the people you convinced to vote for me, thank you for defending the church and me against other people’s ill speech”. Following this, he introduced the candidate to the Children Council and talked about the need to protect the kids. By the end, without saying the name of President Jair Bolsonaro, he declared to those present that it was a historical moment because “we have someone who we could consecrate to God…It’s not the time to doubt of him, it’s time to pray for a better country”.

We can see the different level of institutional politics where the Universal Church has been working. They do not limit themselves in supporting the executive power and electing congressmen. They also elect their own executives, as Rio de Janeiro’s mayor Marcello Crivella who is a UCKG bishop, and on the local level of politics, they had major influence on the election of the Children Council. These different levels of action are strictly connected though, at least in the current scenario.

One of the major discussions around the 2018 elections was what constituted appropriate institutional school education towards sexuality. This subject, as stated at the beginning of this session, was one of the discussions that made Jair Bolsonaro famous a couple of years before being elected president. The current president and many congressmen connected with the so-called “evangelical caucus” were in favor of not introducing the topic in school and argued that it should be the responsibility of the families to talk about matters concerned with sexuality. They also considered the anti-bullying actions towards non-heteronormative people as what they called “gender ideology”. During his campaign, Bolsonaro publicized how a vote for him was a vote for an anti-gender ideology program. In the same way, when congressman Bishop Ossésio came to the small temple where I was doing my fieldwork, his speech in support of their candidate to the local children council included “We need to protect our kids against this terrible gender ideology”.

Figure 10: Street next to Temple of Solomon. Author’s photo, 2020.

Christ’s Nation

After going through one of the major subjects of contemporary political debate in Brazil, the question of how to understand the different political support shifts that Universal Church performed remains. First, they shifted from not supporting former president Lula as presidential candidate to being an important part of his political base, then shifting back to opposing this party, and finally moving to support Bolsonaro. In an article from 2002, Ari Pedro Oro (2002), a Brazilian anthropologist, draws on his interview with Bishop Rodrigues – back then, Republican party president and main articulator of the relationship between Universal Church and institutional politics – to explain the support for former president Lula, something that had never happened until then. Interestingly, the reasons presented by the UCKG and its politicians to support the Labor Party in 2002, and twelve years after to support the impeachment of the president connected with this party, to finally support Bolsonaro, are the same. UCKG never left their argument that corruption was something that could not be tolerated, and that was the argument used in all these changes of political support and to banish pastors from politics and from the churches when they were caught in corruption scandals (Oro, 2002).

Besides the official justifications presented by the Church itself, it is important to consider the big picture here to understand this process beyond cases of corruption, since UCKG did not pull their support from the Labor Party when years before there were corruption accusations. They have also ignored similar evidence in Jair Bolsonaro’s past. Between UCKG support for the Labor Party and its support for President Jair Bolsonaro, there was a moment when it was clear some kind of social changes were happening in Brazil, but the same could not be said about their meaning and destination. The massive protests against different political institutions in 2013, followed up by the re-election of former president Dilma Rousseff and protests against her that culminated in the 2016 impeachment, were the most spectacular moments of this process, which was also involved in the articulation of other changes. During this time, anthropologist Cleonardo Mauricio Junior (2019) noticed how his interlocutors at Assembly of God in Brazil were demonstrating more interest in politics than before.

Mauricio Jr. (2019) calls this subject “the citizen believer”. According to this author, the citizen believer is the result of an ethical project to turn yourself in the kind of person who is always ready to defend Pentecostal ideas. This means that the youth researched by him, especially in spaces like the university, would develop the arguments they need to use when confronted with negative perceptions of their faith or with behavior understood as sin. Nevertheless, this does not mean that they would always be prepared with a combative posture. The idea of preaching through their actions and love is for them also accessed in this realm. In the same way, they would agree with their leaders’ idea that “believers” should take their place as citizens but would not necessarily agree with all their opinions and postures with regard to the most polemical discussions – such as homosexual marriage and abortion regularization (Mauricio Jr., 2019).

This process of understanding themselves and their rights through the idea of citizenship was something that I could see happening in UCKG in the previous year, with special highlight on Godllywood (created in 2010) and its Raabe project. This project advocates for women who have suffered domestic violence, bringing them their rights through the Maria da Penha law[xx]. In 2012, they started to promote political protests against domestic violence with the goal to teach women their rights, and their campaign had as its theme song the lyrics “raise your head it’s time to fight, stop the violence break the silence”. This means that Mauricio Jr. (2019) could see the emergence of the “citizen believer” and its importance in the last political elections, and I was able to agree with him through my observation of the previous years in my fieldwork. However, I am mentioning the woman’s group again here to highlight how changes kept happening towards different ends. If first I could see the emergence of institutional members of the Church advocating in a very public way for women’s rights, there was a point when another change could be observed. This change came to me through the words of D. Wanda, a pastor’s wife who told me at the beginning of 2018 that the Raabe would focus more on the spiritual dimension and less on the political and juridical, because that was the new guidance sent by the Holy Spirit.

Nevertheless, it is also important to understand that different authors (Shapiro, 2017; von Sinner, 2007) had already recognized the centrality of the idea of citizenship in Brazil since the 1980s. Furthermore, this country was also developing its central image as a plural and secular democracy. Matan Shapiro (2017) argues this image in the past few years has been gradually changing to a Pentecostal biblical literalism. He argues that since the 1990s, past governments have developed a rhetoric about the centrality of citizenship that touched the population, especially with the growth of consumerism power.

He recognizes as an important landmark in this process, the exorcism performed by a congressman and pastor in the Brazilian Congress in 2016. Congressman Cabo Daciolo argued that there were many demons in the congress and used his speech time to exorcize them “in Christ’s name”. Shapiro (2017) shows that this is an example about how the political sphere is framed cosmologically through extra-human agents competing over eschatological plans. This means that the name of Christ in this context is used not merely in a metaphorical way. To this author, such biblical literalism has a cumulative effect, and thus the country started to be seen through a cosmopolitical presence (Shapiro, 2017).

Shapiro (2019) helps us to understand that the political changes that happened in UCKG are not an isolated case. When it was decided that the Raabe project would “focus on the spiritual part by the guidance of the holy spirit” (D. Wanda, 65), a transition between the language of the political rights and the language of religious power became evident. This reflects a gradual shift that has being happening in Brazil over the past few years, reaching the large population but also the Pentecostal churches. The inauguration of the Temple of Solomon, telenovelas about biblical stories, and TV shows with similar ideas to church services through Record TV are part of a biblical literalism where all these elements turn everyday life decisions in a metonymy of Biblical times.

During the 2018 campaign, the Assembly of God newspaper called “O Mensageiro da Paz” published a chart with the title “Each candidate position in matters important to Christians”. The column on this chart that I want to highlight here was “embassy in Jerusalem”, meaning the relocation of Brazil’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Brazil is one of the important cases of the development of philo-semitism in the Global South. It is in this context that Jair Bolsonaro is understood as the best candidate for the Christians, since he not only was the only one who supported the move of Brazilian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, but also confessed to believe in the power of the Holy Land when he travelled to be baptized in the Jordan River.

In this sense, as is pointed out by Matan Shapiro (2017), Jewish elements are not only passively incorporated, but actively support the transformation of Brazilians as the people of God on earth. Or in Sean Durban’s (2013) terms, here these Jewish-Christian elements work as “fetishized signifiers of stability”, that confirms God’s words are true. I would complete this point by saying that here, members of UCKG – regardless of origins – understand themselves to be the people of God on earth, and Brazil, more specifically the Temple of Solomon, as the third Temple itself. According to these millennialist beliefs, Jesus would come back after the third building of the Temple. Here, the Temple of Solomon in São Paulo becomes the Holy Land itself, and Brazil the stage of biblical words. It is through these perceptions that we can understand the importance of President Jair Bolsonaro’s visit to the Temple of Solomon. In an interview, he affirmed that he called Edir Macedo, saying that they should meet and that he himself wanted to visit the Temple of Solomon, and so they should not meet in the presidential palace. There, in the manner discussed before, he was blessed in a ceremony by Edir Macedo. Between my interlocutors I could hear “When before did we have a president that accepted that? This government is blessed”. The consecration of the president at the Temple of Solomon is a sign of divine power and protection. It is a sign that in the country where the People of God live, but which is still full of demons, there is a political covenant against the devil and his investments in politics.

References

Ali Agrama, Hussein. 2010. Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State? Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52 (3):495–523.

Ariel, Yaakov. 2013. An unusual relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews. New York: New York University Press, 2013

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. Estado de Exceção. Boitempo Editorial: São Paulo, 2005.

Bielo, James. 2018. Flower, soil, water, stone: Biblical landscape items and Protestant materiality. Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 23(3) 368 – 387.

Birman, Patrícia & Lehman, David. 1999. Religion and the Media in a Battle for Ideological Hegemony: the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and TV Globo in Brazil. Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 145 – 164.

Birman, Patricia and Leite, Marcia Pereira. 2000. Whatever happened to what used to be the largest Catholic country in the world? Daedalus 129 (2): 271-2.

Burity, Joanildo. 2011. Religião e Cidadania: alguns problemas de mudança sociocultural e intervenção política. In: BURITY, Joanildo; ANDRADE, Péricles. Religião e Cidadania. São Cristovão: Editor UFS; Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco.

Machado, Maria das Dores & Burity, Joanildo. 2014. A Ascensão Política dos Pentecostais no Brasil na Avaliação de Líderes Religiosos. Dados – Revista de Ciências Sociais, vol. 57, n. 3, july-september, p. 601-631.

Carpenedo, Manoela. 2017. “Becoming Jewish Believing in Jesus: Conversion, Gender and Ethnicity in the Production of the Judaizing Evangelical Subject”. (dissertation)

Carpenedo, Manoela. 2018. Collective memory in the making of religious change: the case of ‘emerging Jews’ followers of Jesus. Religion 48: 83 – 104.

Daswani, Girish. 2015. “Looking Back, Moving Forward: transformation and ethical practice in the Ghanaian Church of Pentecost”. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

Durbin, Sean. 2013a. ‘I am an Israeli’: Christian Zionism as American redemption. Culture and Religion. Vol. 14, No. 3, 324–347.

Durbin, Sean. 2013b. “I will bless those who bless you”: Christian Zionism, Fetishism, and Unleashing the Blessings of God.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Towards a Critical Moral Anthropology. In: Fassin, Didier (ed.) A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Willey-Blackwell.

Fradkin, Jeremy. 2017. Protestant Unity and Anti-Catholicism: The Irenicism and Philo-Semitism of John Dury in Context. Journal of British Studies 56: 273–294.

Freston, Paul. 1995. Pentecostalism in Brazil: A Brief History. Religion 25, 119 –133.

Feller, Gavin. 2018. Portable power, religious swag: mediating authority in Brazilian Neo-Pentecostalism. Material Religion 14 (3): 389 – 413.

Griessman, B. Eugene. 1976. Philo-Semitism and Protestant Fundamentalism: The Unlikely Zionists. Phylon 37 (3), 197-211.

Harding, Susan. 1991. Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other”. Social Research 58 (2): 373-393.

Kauanui, J. Kehaulani. 2018. Sovereignty: An Introduction. Cultural Anthropology 32 (3): 323–329.

Keane, Webb. 2008. The evidence of the senses and the materiality of religion. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (N.S.), S110-S127.

Lambek, Michael. 2015. Living as if it mattered In: Lambek, Michael; Das, Veena; Fassin, Didier; Keane Webb. Four Lectures on Ethics. Anthropological Perspectives. HAU Books.

Macedo, Edir. & Oliveira, Carlos. 2008. Plano de Poder: os cristãos e a política. Thomas Nelson. Brazil: Rio de Janeiro.

Mariano, Ricardo. 1999. Neopentecostais: sociologia do novo pentecostalismo no Brasil. Edições Loyla: São Paulo.

Mariz, Cecília & Machado, Maria das Dores. 2004. Conflitos Religiosos Na Arena Política: o caso do rio de janeiro. Ciências Sociais e Religião, Porto Alegre, year 6, n. 6, 31-49.

Mauricio Jr., Cleonardo. 2019. Como os Evangélicos Discutem Política? A constituição do crente cidadão entre os jovens universitários da igreja de Silas Malafaia. Dissertation, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife.

Oro, Ari Pedro. 2002. Organização eclesial e eficácia política: o caso da Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus. Civitas – Revista de Ciências Sociais 3(1).

Oro, Ari Pedro 2003. A Política da Igreja Universal e seus Reflexos nos Campos Religioso e Políticos Brasileiros. RBCS 18 (53).

Reinhardt, Bruno. 2015. A Christian plane of immanence? contrapuntal reflections on Deleuze and Pentecostal spirituality. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 405–436.

Sansi, Roger. 2007.“Dinheiro Vivo”: Money and Religion in Brazil. Critique of Anthropology 27 (3): 319 – 339.

Shapiro, Matan. 2017. Brajisalem: Biblical Cosmology, Power Dynamics and the Brazilian Political Imagination. In: Power, Politics, and Religion in Brazil: Ruptures, Continuities, and Crisis. (A workshop funded by the Centre for Contemporary Latin American Studies, University of Edinburgh), 2017.

Shapiro, Faydra. 2015. Christian Zionism: Navigating the Jewish-Christian Border. New York: Cascade Books.

Smith, Robert O. 2013. More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stoll, David. 1990. Is Latin America turning Protestant? the Politics of Evangelical Growth. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Tavolaro, Douglas. 2007. O bispo: a história revelada de Edir Macedo. São Paulo, editora Lafonte.

Topel, Marta. 2011. A Inusitada Incoporação do Judaismo em Vertentes Cristãs Brasileiras. Revista Brasileira de História das Religiões. ANPUH, Ano IV, n. 10, 2011.

von Sinner, Rudolf. 2007. The Churches’ Contribution To Citizenship In Brazil. Journal of International Affairs, 61 (1).

Wachspress, Megan. 2009. Rethinking sovereignty with reference to history and anthropology. International Journal of Law in Context, 5 (3): 315–330.

Whalen, Robert. 1996. ‘Christians Love the Jews!’ The Development of American Philo-Semitism. Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 6 (2): 225-259.

[i] On “Bible’s Day”, many congressmen spoke, at the National Congress, recognizing the importance of the date. At the pulpit, Congressman Daciolo repeated words commonly heard at exorcisms in evangelical and Pentecostal churches, repeating that the demon would leave the congress and the country “in the name of Jesus”. See https://fernandorodrigues.blogosfera.uol.com.br/2016/12/08/que-todos-os-demonios-saiam-do-congresso-em-nome- de-jesus-diz-deputado/ HYPERLINK

[ii] Bishop Edir Macedo, UCKG founder, not only calls it a plan of power, but also give his book about the subject the same title: “Plano de Poder: Deus, os Cristãos e a Política”.

[iii] This was a very important election in Brazilian politics because, after a period of dictatorship, a new Constitution was created with the contribution of the politicians elected there.

[iv] UCKG grants special leave to their bishops and pastors elected to political roles.

[v] While I was writing this article, the leadership from the party formal known as PRB requested an official change to be now named “Republicanos”.

[vi] Former president, elected two times through PT, but was impeached in the second year of her second election.

[vii] See: https://www.camara.leg.br/noticias/485855-prb-critica-governo-e-apoia-impeachment-de-dilma-rousseff/ http://g1.globo.com/politica/processo-de-impeachment-de-dilma/noticia/2016/04/presidente-do-prb-anuncia-que- bancada-votara-pelo-impeachment.html HYPERLINK

[viii] Dispensationalism is the belief that human history is connected with the Bible, over dispensations through which God’s plan for his chosen people unfolds. However, because Jews had not accepted Jesus, God broke with his timeline of dealing with Israel and raised up the Gentile church. This is an eschatological perception that finds no agreement about what would happen with the Gentile church during the time called tribulation. Most evangelicals in U.S. believe that the real believers are going to leave the earth and live with Christ, while disasters happens on earth (Shapiro, 2015). This is also UCKG’s position.

[ix] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/21/solomon-temple-brazil-christ-redeemer HYPERLINK

[x] The Temple of Solomon was supposedly built twice; it was destroyed by the Babylonians and the Romans, respectively. In Jewish theology, and even some evangelical eschatology, the end of times will follow the construction of the third temple.

[xi] That is how people responsible in different ways for the Temple of Solomon are called in the Bible, since they were part of Levi’s tribe.

[xii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcxFS5CftZk HYPERLINK

[xiii] The snack bar on the right of the photo is well attended by people who work at the Temple of Solomon (see also figure 7).

[xiv] Main churches of different regions are called Cathedral or Cenacle of faith by UCKG.

[xv] This is a very popular kind of bar in the neighborhood, where people, especially men, go to drink beer and sugar cane liquor. The owner told me that, despite the fact that church attendees are not the same public as those who patron the bar, he likes the fact that his street is now more lit up by the Temple. In addition, people visiting the church often stop to buy bottles of water to be blessed.

[xvi] The PCN (National Curriculum Parameters) is a document that established as a criterion the basis that each educational institution needs to accomplish. At the beginning of the 2010s, a discussion about an alteration of this document that would include specificities about gender identity, teaching it respectfully, and specificities about sexual education all caused a great discussion in Brazilian society. HYPERLINK: https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/educacao/noticia/2017-04/mec-retira-termo-orientacao-sexual-da-versao-final-da- base-curricular

[xvii] See: HYPERLINK https://veja.abril.com.br/politica/doze-vezes-em-que-bolsonaro-e-seus-filhos-exaltaram-e-acenaram-a-ditadura/ https://revistacrescer .globo.com/Familia/Maes-e-Trabalho/noticia/2015/02/jair-bolsonaro-diz-que-mulher-deve- ganhar-salario-menor-porque-engravida.html https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2018/10/06/politica/1538859277_033603.html

[xviii] Recife is the capital of the State of Pernambuco.

[xix] The Children Council, Conselho Tutelar da Criança e do Adolescente in Brazilian Portuguese, is an office connected with each municipality, but not subordinated to it, with the objective to be the branch of society that guarantee Children and Teenage rights are followed.

[xx] Group of Brazilian laws and regulations that aim to protect domestic violence victims.

The Holy-Land in Brazil:Jewish Elements and the Relation between Pentecostalism and Politics

The Holy-Land in Brazil:
Jewish Elements and the Relation between Pentecostalism and Politics