O segredo do voto dos evangélicos

Summary

Ronilso Pacheco argues that Brazilian evangelicals are often treated as a single, uniformly conservative voting bloc, despite their diversity and capacity to make independent political choices. He points to recent electoral defeats for established evangelical candidates and leaders—including the children of pastor R. R. Soares, former Rio mayor Marcelo Crivella, and candidates associated with the Foursquare Church—as evidence that pastors do not simply determine how their congregations vote.

Pacheco says evangelical political support was historically divided. He notes that leaders such as Silas Malafaia have supported different candidates at different times, including Lula in 2002 and 2006. In his account, 2018 marked a major shift: many conservative religious leaders rallied behind Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s campaign, he says, used biblical language, turned the March for Jesus and church services into political platforms, promised Christian influence in government, and portrayed political opponents as enemies of God and the church. Pacheco describes pressure from pulpits and religious media to vote for Bolsonaro as electoral coercion, not proof that evangelicals naturally or unanimously supported the right.

He traces hostility toward evangelicals to political conflict that predates 2018, including backlash after Marco Feliciano became chair of the Chamber of Deputies’ Human Rights Commission in 2013. Pacheco argues that some leaders claimed to represent all evangelicals, while opponents came to treat the entire community as fundamentalist or intolerant. This mutual stereotyping, he says, helped deepen political division and made it easier to use faith for political power. He also criticizes the promotion of “Christophobia” as a persecution narrative, contrasting it with the violence faced by practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions.

Pacheco presents findings from an ISER survey conducted with Quaest, based on more than 15,000 people in 412 municipalities. The results suggest that many religious people reject political campaigning in worship spaces:

• 82% oppose religious leaders discussing politics in church.
• 83% oppose leaders telling congregants how to vote.
• 90% oppose candidates campaigning in churches.

Among evangelicals, the survey also found support for sex education in schools (79%), opposition to facilitating gun sales (70%), and strong opposition to homeschooling (90%). Pacheco says these findings challenge the priorities promoted by some conservative leaders and suggest that Flávio Bolsonaro may face a more difficult effort to secure evangelical support than his father did.

He concludes by urging non-evangelicals to avoid stereotypes and encouraging evangelicals to resist pressure that uses faith to demonize opponents. He argues that Christian values should emphasize service, care, humility, justice, dignity, and respect for a diverse society—not religious domination or a political “war between good and evil.”

Presenter/contributor: Ronilso Pacheco, theologian and pastor.