Navigating Faith, Negotiating Politics: Evangelical Political Subjectivity in São Paulo’s Urban Periphery

• In Event: Transformations of Right Wing Politics

Abstract

Scholars agree that the evangelical support behind Brazil’s far-right Jair Bolsonaro was the catalyst to his 2018 presidential win. But that support was not guaranteed. Extending structuralist accounts that identify the church and urban periphery as critical political sites, this paper provides an ethnographic account of how congregants negotiate politics at the conjuncture of two presidential elections. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork in São Paulo and 72 in-depth interviews conducted in two phases: the first, in the critical months before Bolsonaro’s 2022 re-election bid, and the second, following Lula’s return in 2024, I depict the bottom-up processes by which evangelicals shifted from far-right and back to the left. I argue that Brazil’s evangelicals navigate presidential elections in ways that are more contingent and situated within the class positions and material realities of the urban periphery. While macro- and meso- accounts identify the broad structures of this shift, they fail to fully capture the dynamic interactions that drive it. This paper centers an analysis that is socially embedded and positioned closer to the interpretive processes and negotiations that informs political change on the ground.

Author

• Guilherme Miranda Baratho, University of Chicago