4. Ritual, text and politics: the evangelical
mindset and political polarisation

David Lehmann

In a pre-election poll published shortly before the 2018 election, 69 per cent of evangelicals questioned said they would vote for Bolsonaro, compared with 51 per cent of Catholics and 56 per cent overall.1 That is an astonishingly high degree of consistency for a group representing 30–40 million voters. Evangelicals may be broadly conservative, but in previous elections their vote had not been anything like so concentrated. In the pages that follow I will provide two sorts of background interpretation of this high degree of convergence: one is a broad picture of the growing involvement and rising profile in recent years of evangelical leaders and churches in Brazilian national politics, and the other is an account of a small messianic congregation who offered a microcosm of what looked to me like a collective panic that gripped the country in 2018.

The management of the evangelical vote

Pentecostalism at first inspired distrust and puzzlement in the political class, but soon they realised the political gold mine represented by pastors who enjoyed such strong influence among their faithful. Membership of the Congressional evangelical bancada (caucus) has risen from 13 in 1982 to 32 in 1986 and then 51 in 1998 and 73 in 2014 (Rodrigues-Silveira and Urizzi Cervi, 2019, p. 562), and in 2020 to 195 Deputies and 8 Senators.2 The evangelical voice in the National Congress became audible during the debates of the Constituent Assembly in the 1980s on issues of importance to them – notably the death penalty, to which they were opposed, as well as same-sex marriage and abortion. But their more ideological voice only became prominent some ten years into the new century when vociferous pastor-politicians began to make provocative pronouncements against permissiveness and tolerance in the fields of sexuality, education, the repression of crime and occasionally race relations. They denounced the estado laico (exclusion of religion from the sphere of the state) as a mechanism to silence religion and they contributed to the climate of opinion in which the Federal Deputy for Rio de Janeiro, Jair Bolsonaro, created his own noisy lone-ranger profile around similar themes. Some pastors stood for their own Social Christian Party (PSC) but others stood for other parties – in any case affiliation in such small parties is largely a matter of convenience. Individual candidates to national, state and local legislative bodies are obliged to have a party affiliation, but their standing in the hierarchy of the elected depends on the number of surplus votes they generate, which can be passed to other candidates further ‘down’ their party’s list.3 Rather than money, they extract concessions of a different kind. The growing salience of issues of morality and state regulation has encouraged local church leaders to coordinate their efforts politically, leading one article to liken their modus operandi to a closed-list system in which it is the churches, rather than the parties, which take over the coordination and prioritisation of candidacies. In the municipal elections of 2020, the Institute of Studies on Religion (ISER) found that almost 13,000 candidates for municipal councillor were registered with a religious title (e.g. ‘pastor’) – 24 per cent more than in the previous elections. However, only 679, or 14 per cent, were successful, while only 30 mayors using religious titles were elected in the whole country. Note that pastors are not necessarily outsiders or even newcomers to the political stage: a survey of legislators showed that 39 per cent of evangelicals among them have family members who have previously held elected office – this is lower than Catholic legislators but higher than others (Rodrigues-Silveira and Urizzi Cervi, 2019, p. 565). The figure reminds us of the extent to which politics, like the pastoral profession itself, is a family affair in Brazil. The time may have come to ask whether people with political ambitions do not sometimes choose a pastoral vocation primarily as a stepping stone on the way to achieving those ambitions.

Laïcité lite: porous lines between religion and state

Evangelical politicians protect their fiscal exemptions and successfully resist the implementation of rules governing the separation of religion from the state (laicidade, or laïcité). For example, under French laïcité it would be unheard of for religious professionals to take partisan political positions, and even in the United States to do so would in principle endanger the tax-free status of their churches – a frequently violated principle, it must be said (Lehmann, 2013; Hamilton, 2014). Evangelicals have fought hard to receive the same exemptions and privileges as the Catholic Church on grounds of equality of treatment. Their church status exempts their media operations, their publications, their real-estate dealings and their cash income from tithes and donations from taxation.

Churches have also extended their freedom of action into spheres from which strict laïcité would exclude them. Thus in 2014 Magno Malta (a Baptist pastor and former senator) successfully stopped a measure that would have prevented churches from proselytising in publicly funded drug-treatment programmes (Smith, 2019, p. 18).

In any case, judges’ interpretation of what is ‘necessary’ for the conduct of religious services has been generous. For example, in June 2014 the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, henceforth IURD) won a case against the imposition of customs duties on 39,000 square metres of stone cladding for its flagship Temple of Solomon (seating for ten thousand) in São Paulo. It is surprisingly easy to set up a church with the corresponding legal qualifications: in February 2011 two reporters from the Folha de São Paulo registered a new church in a space of five working days at a cost of US$250 – the procedure was far cheaper and simpler than opening a bar (Folha de São Paulo, c. 16 February 2011).

There are rumours that churches offer drug traffickers a convenient channel for money laundering disguised as cash donations (Abumanssur, 2015). Detailed ethnography in a low-income Rio neighbourhood describes less collusion than coexistence: people, mostly young men, profess a respect for pastors but have trouble giving up a life which, however sinful, enables them to earn five times the minimum wage (Vital da Cunha, 2015). The pastors are running small neighbourhood churches, and, unlike Catholic priests, cannot afford to refuse their donations.

Surveys of evangelical opinion

Evangelicals tend to take a hard line on divisive moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage, but they are not far removed from the Brazilian public as a whole. In 2014 the Brazilian Electoral Panel Studies (BEPS) found that even among those professing no religious affiliation at all, only 14 per cent favoured liberalising abortion laws and 26 per cent favoured tightening them, to the point of making abortion completely illegal (Smith, 2019, p. 104). (Existing legislation is so restrictive that abortion is almost entirely illegal.) A 2013 survey by Datafolha confirmed the sometimes highly repressive responses of the Brazilian public to questions about personal morality but also revealed surprising differences between the evangelical public and evangelical politicians. Thus approval of criminalisation of abortion (including imprisonment) was above 60 per cent for all religions except spiritists, above 70 per cent for evangelicals and above 50 per cent among the religiously unaffiliated, whereas evangelical members of Congress were less enthusiastic. In a similar pattern, evangelical Congress members were only half as likely as the evangelical public as a whole to support reduction in the age of criminal responsibility for violent crimes, which had an approval in public opinion of over 70 per cent (Prandi and dos Santos, 2017).

In a study combining survey material from Rio and from an evangelical conference in Fortaleza with quantitative and qualitative data collected in Juiz de Fora (Minas Gerais), Amy Erica Smith also concluded that evangelicals went beyond the overall conservatism of Brazilian opinion, growing increasingly homogeneous and separated from other citizens and developing ‘the most active repertoires of political engagement’ (Smith, 2019, p. 129). Although their views on economics, poverty and anti-racism were compatible with a social democratic or liberal democratic outlook, what Smith calls their ‘below average willingness to extend civil liberties to groups they dislike’ (Smith, 2019, p. 145) pointed in another direction. To this should be added the group pressure that comes from church attendance: according to the 2014 LAPOP Barometer surveys of Latin American opinion, a crucial explanatory factor for intolerance (in this case towards gay people) in Brazil is frequency of church attendance, principally at an evangelical church (Smith, 2019, p. 141).

These elements, taken together, bring us to the state of near-hysteria that descended on Brazilian political life after the re-election of Dilma Rousseff in 2014 – described by Smith (2019) euphemistically as ‘affective polarisation’. The atmosphere was darkened by the gathering Lava Jato storm from 2014. The ensuing fiscal crisis led the government to adopt austerity measures and brought about the worst recession since the 1930s. The weight of revelations fuelled antipetismo and above all antilulismo more than hostility to other politicians convicted of corruption – like the speaker of the Chamber, Eduardo Cunha, who orchestrated the impeachment of Dilma only himself to end up in jail after being removed from office by the Supreme Court. This imbalance in public indignation was turbo-charged by a no doubt well-funded torrent of fake news and scare stories spreading fears of an undermining of the foundations of family life and distasteful, innuendo-filled campaigns against Dilma, against the PT and against Lula. (Some will remember the scatological misogynistic booing to which she was subjected by a prosperous upper middle-class crowd at the 2014 World Cup.)

Already in 2010–11, a scare had been propagated that the Ministry of Education was to prescribe a sex education booklet, popularly labelled a kit gay (a supposed children’s guide to becoming gay), to shape children’s sexuality and encourage them to become homosexual (Carranza and Vital da Cunha, 2018, pp. 490–2). The spectre of ‘gender ideology’, first brandished by Pope Benedict, became a repeated theme of attack. The topic, and the kit gay trope, were still very much alive in the 2018 election. The infatuation of Brazilian evangelicals with Israel – though not precisely with Jews – provided the opportunity for further demonisation of the PT, which was said to be engaged in a worldwide anti-Israel alliance, while Lula was accused of channelling funds to Hamas in the triple-frontier area where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet.4 The theme was not entirely new – Israeli flags have been a standard item of Brazilian church furniture for many years – but the confluence with Bolsonaro’s campaign and its emphasis on primordial themes of sex, gender and family sharpened its toxicity, accentuated by WhatsApp campaigns. For the first time since the military regime, Brazilian politics was drawn into the phantasm of a cold war which aligned the PT with Venezuela, Cuba and UNASUR (the ephemeral South American association of states inspired by Hugo Chávez) against Israel, God and the family.

Neo-Pentecostalism upends the religious field and the rules of the political game

Before the 1990s Brazil saw a steady growth of small-scale chapels in the ‘classic’ model associated with – though not controlled by – the worldwide confederation of federations, the Assemblies of God. Having developed steadily since the early twentieth century, at first in rural areas and small towns, Pentecostal churches had by the 1990s spread deep into major urban centres. Chapels were usually founded and led by independent pastors who, having found their vocation in other churches, then struck out on their own. Other brand names were the Four-Square Church (Igreja Quadrangular) and the Renewed Baptists (Igreja Batista Renovada), but their practice of worship varied little. Today evangelicals and Pentecostals number above 20 per cent and, according to some, 30 per cent of the Brazilian population, though because of the fleeting nature of affiliation in many cases and the ease of joining and leaving, these numbers need careful dissection. (The Datafolha poll estimated them at 31 per cent of the electorate.)

Neo-Pentecostal churches, which developed from the 1970s and gained prominence in the 1990s, are far larger than the classic chapels, build organisations directly controlling numerous local churches, and adopt a different pattern of praise and worship. They devote more time and energy to asking for donations: in addition to the regular ‘tithes’ (10 per cent of income) common across Pentecostalism, they imply or even proclaim that those who give will be rewarded by finding prosperity, and they warn people and their families fearfully against invisible forces of evil emanating principally from the candomblé and umbanda possession cults. Those themes are not unfamiliar in classic Pentecostal church life, but they are proclaimed with greater force in Neo-Pentecostal churches, and the balance between financial and other contributions, and between this-worldly and other-worldly blessings, is changed.

Neo-Pentecostal churches have established centralised global apparatuses for training church officials and obreiros (uniformed volunteers who take care of good order during services), to raise and manage resources, and to project their brand, their message and their claim to legitimacy in the religious field. They have also built imposing structures across the world and a strong media presence in many languages. The big names in this at first were the IURD and Deus é Amor (God is Love). In 1991 the IURD founder and leader Edir Macedo bought a bankrupt TV network, TV Record, which is now the second biggest free-to-air network in the country after TV Globo. TV Record is more than ‘just’ an evangelical broadcaster: during daytime it broadcasts mainstream programmes, but at night it is devoted to religious topics foregrounding the church, and its website foregrounds much IURD news and propaganda. Ownership lies with Macedo and his family and not with the church itself. There are rumours that the church pays generous fees for advertising on TV Record as a way of channelling funds from its followers to the company, but these are only rumours. The IURD’s three million or more followers are a minority among evangelicals, but the TV station plus its imposing buildings located in central locations of major urban centres have given it a high profile, to the point where everyday parlance among the secular and Catholic middle classes uses the words evangélico and universal almost interchangeably.

The Universal Church must be the biggest single evangelical or indeed religious organisation in Brazil in terms of people employed and liquid assets. It has extended and institutionalised its reach into fields untouched even by other Neo-Pentecostal churches like the Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus (the Worldwide Church of God’s Power) and the Igreja Internacional da Graça de Deus (the International Church of God’s Grace), both founded by former Macedo associates. The Catholic Church is weighed down with invaluable but illiquid real estate in its churches and schools and cannot rely on such a large army of volunteers. The Assemblies of God have far more followers but they are not a centralised body, rather a confederation in which autonomous state-level Conventions are more important than the nationwide body in terms of resources, and in which local churches are independent, relying on their subscriptions to the Assemblies for access to certification, branding, advice, training and materials like bibles and prayer books, but limited financial support. Occasionally ambitious pastors from the Assemblies have broken away and built their own Neo-Pentecostal operations like the ‘Assembleia de Deus – Ministério Madureira’. Aside from those affiliated to the Assemblies, there are thousands of independent churches and chapels. Unlike Catholic or Anglican priests, pastors do not depend on any institution to confer that title: if you lead a church, however small, you call yourself a pastor. The ritual of baptism by full immersion is a spiritual or performative rite of passage and also signals a purging of previous diabolical associations with the cultos Afro, but membership depends on attendance and tithing. Membership is also tiered, distinguishing between those who attend occasionally (que frequentam), or regularly, and setting apart obreiros, who are very numerous.

The IURD has built a more elaborate and formalised organisation even than other Neo-Pentecostal churches, creating a hierarchy of obreiros, pastores and bispos, while preserving Edir Macedo’s apparently firm grip on the organisation. Perhaps to secure that control, it shifts people around frequently and at short notice. In 2015 I interviewed a bishop at their church in Tel Aviv, and a few weeks later their pastor in Haifa (who came to Israel from Brazil as a footballer and then became his team’s talent scout) told me he had been recalled to Brazil. In London one of their people told me that the church’s personnel have no possessions, no house or car, and are ready to move at a moment’s notice. In the range of its activities and the concomitant scale of its ambition the IURD seems to aspire to take the place of the Catholic Church, creating a separate religious public space by building monumental constructions called cathedrals, as well as the Temple of Solomon (Gomes, 2011; Oro and Tadvald, 2015) and a dense network of satellite organisations. These include youth groups engaged in community service or campaigning against drug use, and a social welfare army of ‘257,000’ volunteers nationwide providing services to members of the police, the military and the fire protection service, truck drivers and prostitutes, including manicures, haircuts and legal advice – always ending with a prayer.5 They claim to offer similar provision in 92 countries. In addition to building itself up this public-service provision, which is said by some to include subcontracting arrangements with local and state government social services, TV Record transmits blockbuster TV miniseries recounting biblical episodes shown across Latin America and (in English) worldwide with great success (e.g. ‘Moses and the Ten Commandments’, ‘The Rich Man and Lazarus’). The church’s weekly newspaper, Folha Universal, is a professional production with a focus on people’s personal lives as well as on national stories.

The IURD has taken care to institutionalise its political interventions, taking an approach driven less by ideology or proselytism and more by an aspiration to power: its elected federal deputies seem to keep their distance from the more controversial politician-pastors and also from the evangelical caucus. It has also kept a low profile on questions of personal morality (Oro and Tadvald, 2015). Its first candidate to a federal position was elected in 1986. At that time the church would provide candidates for different parties (Machado, 2006), but in 2005 it created its own Partido Republicano Brasileiro (now known as Republicanos). It supported Cardoso against Lula in the 1990s and then Lula and Dilma Rousseff twice each. As impeachment loomed, though, Macedo deserted Dilma, joined her replacement Temer, and, somewhat late in the presidential campaign, offered his support to Bolsonaro. These moves were accompanied by ministerial appointments for Macedo’s nominees. Macedo anointed the current president with oil at the Temple of Solomon in September 2019, with the following words: ‘I use all my authority to bless this man and give him wisdom . . . that the country be transformed and that he enjoy determination, good health and vigour’ (Schmitt, 2019).

The institutionalisation has extended its reach into the field of social movements, and the IURD has created its own women’s movement. Macedo’s son and daughter-in-law appear in person online with matrimonial advice, and have developed a system of doctrine and support directed entirely at women for the building of a lasting ‘iron-clad’ marriage – matrimonio blindado. Starting with closed discussion groups known as a ‘sisterhood’ (the English word is used) under the leadership of ‘big sister’ Cristiane Cardoso (the daughter-in-law) in which membership was subjected to a careful vetting process, Godllywood, the church’s women’s brand, has now evolved to the point where they call it a movement, easily reachable on Facebook. It even has a ‘signature’ greeting for adepts, holding the back of their hands against their cheeks. Godllywood offshoots include ‘Love School’ and ‘Love Walk’ (Teixeira, 2012, pp. 90–120; Teixeira, 2014).

In another example of the leader’s readiness to break with conventional evangelical practice, Macedo has encouraged families to limit their size and has in the past given discreet support to abortion in the name of a rational approach to marriage and child-rearing. For presumably political reasons he later downplayed the subject, but the strong emphasis on rational rather than romantic and emotional motivations in choosing a partner and in planning family life continues to figure prominently (Teixeira, 2018, p. 103).

Text, origins and authenticity: a case study

In the pages that follow I complement the above ‘big picture’ with evidence from a very small messianic congregation that I attended every Shabbat, in a major Brazilian city, during September–November 2018. The word ‘messianic’ is used here loosely to refer to congregations of diverse origin which combine adherence both to Jesus as Messiah and to the Jewish Old Testament. Messianics follow the laws as given by God to Moses in the Sinai desert and see the coming of Jesus as the fulfilment of that cycle. They denounce the separation of followers of Jesus from Judaism and the later establishment of a state church in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, and they have no interest in rabbinic Judaism – that is, in Judaism as it evolved after Jesus, which they also reject precisely because it was a rejection of Jesus as Messiah (Carpenedo, 2018, 2021). Their adoption of some paraphernalia of contemporary Judaism, even ultra-Orthodox Judaism, should not mislead us in this respect. The core of messianic Judaism is this direct line to the children of Israel crossing the desert, as opposed to an approximation to contemporary Judaism. This explains why, although this congregation accepted me as an observer, they were uninterested in, and even puzzled, by me as a Jew.

The name ‘messianic’ does not only refer to Jesus’ first coming: it also looks forward to the second coming, and the establishment of the state of Israel is seen as a stage in the fulfilment of prophecies in the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, among others. For this reason messianics should be seen as an offshoot of evangelical Christianity and not as Jews. Their occasional curiosity about the idea that they might be descended from the forced converts or secret Jews (anussim and marranos) who had taken part in the colonisation of Brazil is just that – curiosity.

Their fervent support for Israel and its government was one of several factors drawing them to support Bolsonaro, who had been baptised in the River Jordan in 2016,6 who promised to transfer the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem, and whose campaign events were routinely swamped with people waving the Israeli flag.

The ideas that circulated among them were similar to those circulating in evangelical churches and on evangelical media, although unlike most messianic congregations in Brazil, they were not ‘emigrants’ or ‘refugees’ from evangelical or Pentecostal churches. They all had different stories and were finding their own way through texts studied together and online.

They offered prayers in Portuguese and Hebrew, they chanted melodies drawn from the Jewish tradition and modern Israel, and they read the weekly portion (following the Jewish calendar) from a reproduction Torah scroll. They had a loose structure – their leader, known as ‘Rosh’, the Hebrew for ‘head’, was not in the style of the evangelical pastors who rule over all aspects of their congregations, but rather a first among equals. They were mostly middle-class and lower middle-class, but included two visibly very poor women, one of whom took on some housekeeping duties. Women and men were on an equal footing in their rituals.

Although prayers were quite discreet on political themes, not mentioning their favourite presidential candidate by name and praying for peace and the good of the country, the opinions expressed by the most vocal members repeated widely circulated rumours and conspiracy theories which seem to have been promoted through ‘bots’ on WhatsApp in support of Bolsonaro’s campaign. The spectre of a PT victory leading to government-sponsored or even government-controlled sex change or gender reassignment was contemplated with horror; nostalgia for the military government which had ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1984 went together with hostility to the ‘inhuman rights’ that leave criminals unpunished while respectable citizens (cidadãos de bem) hide in their houses. A WhatsApp message circulated depicting young schoolgirls provocatively performing in tutus with their bottoms turned towards the audience, contrasted with a picture from bygone days when schoolgirls wore modest uniforms. The country was ruled by a political class and legal profession whose disagreements were a mere smokescreen enabling them to preserve their privileges and sustain a corrupt system. In another picture that circulated, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Lula were campaigning together against the military regime in the late 1970s, and this was taken as proof that they were still today allies leading Brazil to communism. These were representative of memes that fuelled the hysteria which gripped the country during the campaign and echoed far beyond religious fundamentalists or evangelicals.

What might these kinds of ideas, and the mindset in which they are grounded, have to do with the cult of the text which is observed in messianic congregations, far more than among evangelicals generally? The cult of the text is expressed in a search for hidden meanings, signs and correspondences across a multifarious consecrated compilation (the Old Testament). The search emphasises images, symbols and words that crop up in different parts of the text, and how they can be fitted into a chosen narrative – in this case, the messianic unfolding. Thus the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) was renamed as the day of the Messiah, and the words of God in Deuteronomy 13 are seen as foreshadowing the end of days.7 Life is thought to be full of coincidences because, in a widely quoted evangelical saying, ‘nothing happens by chance’: coincidences are signs, and anything can count as a coincidence. The attempt on Bolsonaro’s life during his campaign was a glaring example, implying that it helped his cause but miraculously did not kill him.8 The cult of the unadulterated and consecrated material biblical text opens the way towards accepting conspiracy theories, a disposition with a well-established history in Latin America (Senkman and Roniger, 2019).

In contrast to the ‘bolt of lightning’ and other supernatural experiences which characterise standard Pentecostal conversion narratives, members of messianic congregations speak of a gradual awakening: they often use the Portuguese word pesquisa (research) to describe an inexhaustible search for origins. Thus a laboratory pharmacist told me that each person is entitled to their own interpretation, and when I asked how she could know which is the correct one her reply, repeated for emphasis, was that she ‘always says’ vai para a origen (‘go to the origins’). ‘The Tanach [Old Testament] tells us the functions of the Messiah, the purpose of his coming and what are the things he did not fulfil . . . so one has to study so that God will open our eyes.’ She reads Hebrew and says her prayers from the Jewish liturgy daily.

In her words text and origins are core elements contributing to authenticity, three key words in the messianic interpretation of texts. This is important for people who, dissatisfied or disillusioned with the demands and impossible promises of Pentecostal and especially Neo-Pentecostal churches (Carpenedo, 2018, 2021), have found another way of recognising Jesus as Messiah. This involves adoption of his Aramaic name Yeshua, in accordance with standard practice in messianic congregations worldwide which do not recognise the name used in Christian churches, heirs to the rejection of Jesus’ status as a Jew. One significant reason for the shift in adherence is that followers were checking what pastors were saying about the Bible against the biblical text itself and finding that they were ignoring or even denigrating the laws given through Moses.

Thus the search for a true original religious faith and practice associates the foundational elements with the authentic; messianics say the truth was hidden or distorted by the Emperor Constantine and the Church founded for political purposes. Yeshua is not just the Messiah, but also a prominent rabbi whose disciples were marginalised in the creation of a pagan Church. The very idea of a Christian Church is described as a betrayal of Jesus himself. Those origins are pushed further back to link in to a genealogy, for example, of Jewish rebels like Bar Kochba.9

The text is composed less of signifiers than of signs: Kabbalists are drawn to the significance of Hebrew letters which, as in Latin but much more extensively, are also numbers (Hebrew gematria), and the multiple associations available through the roots of Hebrew words. Messianics are drawn to correspondences across the entire scriptural corpus. Treating the Bible as a single undifferentiated source is a way of saying it is a text written by divine hand, so the idea of origin is not historical. The words ‘authentic’ or ‘untouched’ open the way to those who claim special or privileged insight, like preachers who persuade others that they control or liberate demonic forces possessing them, and their esoteric claims point to what is behind the text, what is hidden; in particular, hidden prophecies. Thus in a derasha (exposition) on Shabbat Bereshit – when the cycle of weekly Torah portions recommences at Genesis shortly after Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles marking the harvest) – the meaning of nakedness is discussed in the context of Adam and Eve’s disobedience: God ‘made garments of skin for the man and for his wife’ (Genesis 3:21) – ‘maybe’, the speaker remarks, ‘it was body hair rather than a garment or tunic . . . There are disagreements.’ Later he refers to the ‘giants’ (nephillim, unusually formed beings in some understandings, Genesis 6:4) – were they the deformed offspring of Cain or maybe the fruit of angels reproducing with humans? In these discussions (amid interjections from the group) there was less affirmation of decrees or commands than curiosity and something like wonderment: what are the texts hiding? Of course they are authoritative, of course they are immutable, but their meaning is not at all clear. Circumcision is another subject of constant fascination for messianics.10 Quoting Exodus 12, he explains that in Moses’ time if a gentile male wanted to take part in the Seder – the Passover service and accompanying meal held in the home, telling the story of the exodus from Egypt – he would have to be circumcised, and although in the modern world he could attend, he could only partake of the lamb, not the matzah (unleavened bread).11

The correctness of such interpretations is not at issue – rather, our interest is the mindset, digging deep into Bible stories to uncover their hidden meaning or the stories that lie behind them. For if the biblical text is, in the standard English phrase, ‘holy writ’ (‘set in stone’) it is also, unlike a conventional work of literature, but like myths and fairy stories, full of non sequiturs and omitted connections, leaving later generations for ever to fill in the gaps – as in another discussion about whether the children of Israel (as they were then) kept the Sabbath before they had received the Law, and with it the instructions to observe the Sabbath day, at Sinai. This sort of inquiring urge has much in common with the conduct of Talmudic discussion: there are always more questions to be asked.

When the congregation gathered to celebrate Sukkot, they read passages featuring the feast including Leviticus 23 (which lists the main occasions in the prescribed annual sequence of festivals, each marking a stage in the agricultural cycle), Revelation 7 (cataclysmic explosion heralded by seven trumpets) and Zechariah 14 (alternating prophecies of destruction, untold suffering for those who will not accept the reign of the Lord in and over Jerusalem). (For some evangelicals Sukkot is the time when Jesus comes to dwell – tabernacular – among men, and Pentecostals do indeed converge on Jerusalem from all over the world to mark it with prayers and processions.)

The readings were then linked to the campaign for foreign embassies in Israel to move to Jerusalem. The speaker said that so far only nine nations had moved their embassies, but predicted that all the others would repent as in Zechariah’s prophecies and that ‘all nations will obey the reign of God Almighty’, as those who denied Yeshua would also repent. There was also a reference to warning signs in Israel before the attempted assassination of Bolsonaro.

In this congregation, the one point of certainty was that the foundation of the state of Israel was a step towards the Second Coming and the subsequent establishment of messianic dominion over the world. This infatuation with the state of Israel sits side by side with a puzzling and perhaps puzzled disposition towards Jews themselves as a collectivity. (They accepted me as a Jew, and welcomed me to their services and celebrations, but were naturally puzzled by my admission, on questioning, that although I was respectful of tradition I could not say that I believed in the existence of God.) On the one occasion when I broached the subject of the Holocaust, the leader of the congregation told me with a straight face, and without any hint of defensiveness, that it was explained by Deuteronomy 28 (where the punishments for not fulfilling God’s commandments are listed in gruesome and prolonged detail). He was saying that the Holocaust was a punishment for the Jews’ disobedience (an explanation not unknown in rabbinic pronouncements over the years). ‘And in any case,’ he went on to say, ‘it opened the way for the creation of the state.’

One of the more learned congregants, who delivered expositions at the Shabbat service and has been teaching himself Hebrew and the Bible for several years via the internet, told me of his personal voyage of discovery. He had gone ‘back to the beginning’, and had rid himself of all his preconceived ideas in pursuit of a personal contact with original texts. He said he was not even looking for a single absolute truth, for there are various truths and his was not the only valid one. His questioning extended to questioning the very purpose of rituals: he knew that there is no biblical basis for the Jewish practice of covering one’s head with a skullcap (kippa) but he happened to like it (‘achei legal’). For him the formalities of ritual did not count so long as the underlying purpose was fulfilled. In support of these doubts he cited the example of Zipporah the wife of the prophet Moses who ‘took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin’ (Exodus 4:25). What counts, he said, is the substance, not the ritual forms. Women are not allowed to conduct circumcisions, and yet the circumcision of Moses’ son was performed summarily by a woman without any ritual or ceremonials. On this basis, among others, my interlocutor argued that ritual is not important. Yet he had chosen an example involving circumcision – itself a ritual of no practical consequence yet of central importance to Jews (as well as many other peoples across Africa and the Middle East).12

This person also told me how at crucial junctures in his religious life and in his career he had heard mysterious voices or experienced strange coincidences which determined the path he then chose. He seemed sceptical about ritual, yet lent credit to supernatural experiences and was also alert to mysterious coincidences.

This congregation is on a journey. They develop new rituals and perform selected established ones: they celebrate the conclusion of the Sabbath in their own manner, giving leading parts to women and children; they blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah; they follow certain procedures, pronounce blessings and sing many tunes from the Jewish prayer book; they dance the Israeli horah. They add the name of Yeshua to the Jewish blessings – saying ‘in the name of the Lord and of Yeshua’. Unlike Pentecostals they do not invoke the supernatural to solve this-worldly problems, but rather take their place in the unfolding of a millennial destiny.

Nevertheless, texts are not their whole story: their lives are surrounded and foretold by supernatural signs: the man just quoted is one example. Another came from one of the strongest personalities in the group, who spoke of a protector bathed in white appearing at many junctures in her life; the head of the congregation spoke of the ‘ingathering of lost Jews’: ‘That’, he said, ‘is what motivates people to move from evangelical to messianic congregations – they do not even realise they are answering God’s call.’ Their small community reinforces their beliefs and hopes and fears; their Sabbath and holiday rituals create bonds of obligation and draw them into a common exploration, and like Pentecostals they have supernatural explanations of what has brought them to this point in their lives.

Finally, what do we make of the obsessively precise arithmetic and chronology of millennial prophecy? Intuitively, one might assume that prophecy would be stated in simple straightforward terms so that it can be easily absorbed and recalled, but instead the opposite is the case. Just as the details and apparently incidental features of ritual are the aspects that ‘really count’, so in prophecy there is no simplified version: at one gathering a congregant wondered ‘how many messiahs [i.e., messianic returns] are there – two or three?’ The books of Daniel and Revelation show the importance of endless details, each inviting interpretation, in building up a millenarian vision. The following computational acrobatics, in a publication from an evangelical/theological university, illustrate the point:

The seventieth week of Daniel 9 will immediately precede that kingdom. During the last three and a half years of that week, 144,000 Israelites will be God’s major witnesses to the world. Revelation 7:1–8 introduces these servants of God who are sealed on their foreheads to protect them from God’s wrathful visitation against earth’s rebels. They will bear the brunt of the dragon’s anger while the bulk of believing Israelites find protection from that anger (Rev. 12:17). In their faithful witness for Christ they will suffer martyrdom but subsequently will rise from the dead to join Christ on Mount Zion in His kingdom on earth (Rev. 14:1–5). At some point near the end of that seventieth week, a great revival will come in Jerusalem (Rev. 11:13), perhaps provoking the massive attack on Israel resulting in the battle of Armageddon (cf. Rev 16:16). Then the King of kings and Lord of lords (Rev. 19:16) will usher in the millennial kingdom. In that kingdom Jerusalem, ‘the beloved city’ (Rev. 20:9), will be the focus of all activity. Christ will rule sitting on David’s throne as indicated throughout the Apocalypse (Rev. 1:5; 3:7; 5:5; 22:16) . . . Then the Messiah’s salvation will reach to the ends of the earth through the channel of Israel (Isa. 49:6). Israel will fulfil God’s purpose for her (Thomas 1997).

The intricacy of the sequence, making it hard to remember in detail, is a structural feature of this type of narrative. (I have heard a similar style of recounting a biblical story from a guide, himself a messianic Israeli Jew, addressing a Brazilian evangelical tour group in Israel.) The detail adds further layers of opacity, as can also be seen in the prophecies of Daniel and in Revelation, which are very long on detail but short on the meaning of their visions. Opacity is a structural element of mythology and of the language of prophecy – hence the word ‘delphic’, alluding to the opaque soothsaying of the oracle at Delphi. We describe this as a language of prophecy but it is better called a language of soothsaying, standing in contrast to the classically prophetic voices of, for example, Jeremiah and the later Isaiah with their powerful and transparent moral charge.

Foretelling the messianic and millenarian future in this type of language is an interminable inquiry. Scriptural textual fascination plays out in the search for correspondences, as in this exploration of the theme of the shofar and the seven soundings: the seven trumpets sounded as the children of Israel laid siege seven times to the city of Jericho, and the word used to describe their sound is terouah (‘alarm’ – the sound of the trumpets), which also figures in the shofar-blowing at Rosh Hashanah – then reappears in Revelation, in which the number seven makes numerous appearances. The point of the correspondence was to show that Rosh Hashanah heralds the return of the Messiah, or, as mentioned above, is itself the ‘day of the Messiah’.

Conclusion

In addition to replacing the Catholic Church, playing the role of powerbroker in high politics and carving out a place in the provision of social services, the IURD is also trying to reshape the cultural substratum of Brazilian life. Terreiros have been closing in the face of the rise of Pentecostal churches for some time (Vital da Cunha, 2015) but the IURD has a strategy to resignify core elements of their pantheon.

Both the IURD and my messianic congregation place themselves in a lineage from the patriarchs of the Old Testament through Moses and Jesus to the modern state of Israel, and in an utterly different way they re-enact the instructions given to the children of Israel in the desert. The messianics do not have power ambitions and they do form a community – they invite each other to birthday parties, they contribute together to a Shabbat meal at their meeting place, their children perform roles during services and they contribute financially to maintaining the premises and their association, which has legal standing (pessoalidade juridica). The Universal Church recruits its followers into a larger-scale enterprise and is little interested in family or community, as demonstrated by its discouragement of family life among its pastors and bishops.

Whereas in a future political conjuncture the Universal Church’s leader could well orient his followers in another direction (with unknowable success), the political inclinations of the messianic congregation members were deeply felt and ideological. Their attachment to Israel was emotional as well as political. Their interaction reinforced their political partisanship and the near-infatuation of some members with Bolsonaro. The Universal Church does not provide an atmosphere for such involvement.

Brazilian politicians ignore the evangelical vote at their peril. Macedo has been successful in placing his nominees in ministerial posts on the basis of the 32 deputies (out of 594) and two senators (out of 82) belonging to his Republicanos party, and in addition the myriad of other chapels and congregations may also create reserves of strong commitment. Recent research based on pre-2018 data has argued that in addition to a tendency for people in the lowest-income groups to vote against parties advocating redistribution – or at least against the PT – the effect of evangelical religious affiliation on voting in presidential elections was strong even when controlled for education, age and social class. This shows Pentecostalism capitalising on the attachment of its poorer and poorly informed followers to conservative personal morality (Araujo, 2019, pp. 35, 106). But it is also possible that, in a clientelistic political culture, Araujo’s equating of a vote for PT with a vote for redistribution may be mistaken: those voters may think of redistribution in terms of personal or localised benefits such as low-paid but secure jobs in government agencies, a school, a road, a health centre or even building materials for their church, rather than the PT’s universalist project. It seems that if parties of the left (PT, PSOL and PCdoB) are to make headway in this very large constituency in time for the next election they would have to think of cutting a deal with Macedo and, like Lula in his post-2000 campaigns, of neutralising or cordoning off their egalitarian and progressive positions on reproductive rights, gender and sexuality – thus alienating younger, urban, educated voters. An emollient ‘Lula Paz e Amor’ would help, but still they face a big challenge.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Katerina Hatzikidi and Eduardo Dullo for their patience and their comments on drafts of this text, and Manoela Carpenedo for contributing key insights.

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