“God told us that it is not the deputies that will change this nation, it is not the government that will change this nation, it is not politics that will change this nation (...) It is the evangelical church, when it rises up” (Damares Alves). As strange as these phrases are, they are not new in Brazil. It is the archaic religious program of imposing a theological – political power – as Spinoza enunciated in his time – so that Catholics and Protestants could control the State and social life. Such power used war, reciprocal massacres, assassinations, coups d'état and terror to define hegemonies. Crimes in the name of Jesus washed the European streets with blood. Masses were interrupted by Protestant knights and those present were trampled to death. Protestant cults invaded, similar result. Anyone who follows the history of Europe and religions encounters violence from everyone involved, in the supposedly divine mission of reclaiming the Gospel, whose core is peace and fraternity.
The end of the religious wars was unfavorable to the churches, the Catholic and the Reformed. The State punished the contenders (plus the Protestant) by narrowing the combatants' room for maneuver. G. Naudé (Political Considerations about the coup d'état) praises Saint Bartholomew's Night and sees in it an important decision to show fanatics that social and political life would be the prerogative of civil authority, not of the sacred hierarchy. Pastors and bishops say they are completely right and monopolize the truth. We come to the biblical question: “This is truth?”. Let’s see what philosophers say in the midst of the battles for “religious truth”.
According to Montaigne, “reason always goes, crooked and limp, messed up and with lies and truth. Therefore, it is difficult to discover your mistakes and unruliness. I always call reason this semblance of speech that each of us forges in himself” (Trials, II, 12). Each sect advances Essay, generates its imaginary model and no one agrees on what it is and what should be done. With each new imagination we add others, which proves that we are unequal in relation to others and ourselves. Another thinker, Le Vayer, states: each person approves “in the morning what they will condemn in the afternoon, and often in different ways if their temperament wants it that way”. Worse are the remedies brought to the inconstancy of life, especially in religion. To combat the mutability of thought, mechanisms of opinion are produced which are called “faith”. Monoblock of consciousness, “own opinion” is a reactive desire for constancy. This is what happens with Protestants and Catholics who cling to belief more out of desire than out of a desire for truth, not wanting to fall like others in the infinite variation of opinion. The hardening of conscience is also due, philosophers say, to self-love that prefers the false to the confession of ignorance. According to Le Vayer, dogmatism results from all discord or eristics, the eroticism of contradicting. Holy war goes from inconstancy to inflexibility, from unbridled criticism to dogma. Few are satisfied with the probable but everyone affirms their theses without doubt. If in the Catholic Church the Pope does not make mistakes, in the Protestant conscience everyone is infallible. The infallible kill each other and civil war prevents any safe state. Such is the lesson of events in France in the confessional wars.
With dogmatic warmongering, the people disobey the princes. The text by Etienne de La Boétie is known, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. His other writings are rarely analyzed, Mémoires de nos troubles sur l'Edit de Janvier 1562. With the religious struggles in Guyana, the court sends the doctor to the places to collect legal suggestions. La Boétie's caution towards the people is clear. Religious wars spread “an almost universal hatred and malice among the king’s subjects”, and the people “become accustomed to irreverence towards the magistrate and with time learn to disobey voluntarily, allowing themselves to be led by the lures of freedom or license, the sweetest and most pleasant poison in the world. This occurs because the people, having known that they are not obliged to obey the natural prince in religion, make terrible use of this rule which, in itself is not bad, derives from it the false consequence that it is only necessary to obey the superiors in things. good and judgment is given about good and bad. He arrives at the idea that there is only the law of his conscience, that is, for the most part, the persuasion of his spirit and fantasies (…) nothing is more just nor more in accordance with the laws than the conscience of a God-fearing religious person , honest and prudent, nothing is more crazy, more foolish and monstrous than the conscience and superstition of the indiscreet mass.”
Therefore, “the people have no means of judging because they lack what provides or confirms a good judgment, letters, speeches and experience. As he cannot judge, he believes through others (today we would say, he believes in social networks and never in research, in examination, in prudent science). The crowd believes more in people than in things, it is more persuaded by the authority of the speaker than by the reasons stated.” In the political crisis of legitimacy, says La Boétie, caution is needed against the many-headed creature “vagabond, wandering, crazy, drunk, without conduct, without spirit or judgment….the mob and popular ilk, playthings of agitators: orators, preachers, false prophets, impostors, cunning politicians, seditious, rebellious, spiteful, superstitious.”
The battles between reformed people and Catholics, jurists think, threaten the State. It is necessary to put an end to the rebellions. In January 1562, l'Hospital speaks on behalf of the king to the Assembly of Presidents and Counselors of the Parliaments of France meeting in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The attempt is to mitigate the physical fights between the Catholic and Huguenot parties. Charles IX opens the States General (13/12/1560) and participates in the Colloquium of Poissy organized by Catherine de Médicis and Michel de L'Hospital, with the aim of bringing enemies together. Only result: the list of disagreements. On 31/01/1561 an Ordinance was signed by the king prohibiting persecution against Protestants. The quarrels increase. The Catholic Duke of Guise does everything to generate civil war in the “Wassy Massacre”. He wants to attend mass, gets irritated by the Protestants' chants and massacres them. The Huguenots commanded by Louis de Condé and Marshal Coligny lose battle at Dreux (19/12/1562). Guise besieges Orléans but is murdered by a Protestant. Antoine de Bourbon, a retired chief, is killed in Rouen. Catherine de Medici took advantage of the disappearance of both leaders and offered freedom (only private) of worship to the Huguenots.
Condé falls in the battle of Jarnac, and is soon executed. Marshal Coligny takes refuge in La Rochelle. Catherine de Medici signs peace in 1570. The king tries to unite his enemies. In 1570 guarantees were given to the Huguenots and La Rochelle, Cognac, Montauban, with freedom of worship, except in Paris. This policy is inspired by Michel de L'Hospital. Catarina risks a new civil war. The Guise family wants to avenge their boss and tries to kill Coligny, hiring assassins for hire. On 22/08/1572 Coligny suffered an attack, received a visit from the king but the sovereign accepted Catherine's idea of annihilating the Protestants accused of subverting the civil rule. The Marshal is executed, after his death “The Night of Saint Bartholomew” takes place (in fact, the nights…) and also in Paris, Lyon, Dijon, Blois, Tours, with around 15 thousand dead. The king loses the trust of his subjects and the weakened Protestants do not surrender and rebel in 1573.
Charles IX does not unite his subjects under his authority. This is l'Hospital's wish at the aforementioned meeting in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1562: “The king does not want you to enter into a dispute about which opinion (religious, RR) is the best. Because this is not about constituenda Religione (….) seat of constituenda Republica. And many can be Cives, who non erunt Christiani, and one can live in peace with those of different opinions, as we see in a family, where Catholics do not fail to live in peace and love those of the new religion”. We have the secular form imposed by the State. The unity of command was visibly dissolving in the national territories. Opposed to the skepticism that drives social and political secularization, religious imagination engenders self-love as if it were divine love, accompanied by attachment to an idea, which weakens critical judgment and demands adherence to the “truth”.
The sequence of horrors continues in the following centuries. Catholics persecute Protestants, a minority religion that brought together nobles and rich bourgeoisie. In the 18th century, intolerance still sowed hatred and disunity in Europe. The culmination of this process can be seen in the Calas case. Protestant, he had a son who listened to music in Catholic churches. The boy is killed, rumors spread throughout the city and, of course, the fake news of the moment is that Calas murdered his son out of fear of his conversion to Catholicism. Calas was publicly dismembered with hot oil put on his joints. His family lost their assets and was threatened with exile. Voltaire resumed the process and showed the legal inconsistency of the courts. Finally, he achieved the defendant's innocence. It is not appropriate here to describe the Hell promoted by “pious” Protestants and Catholics. At that moment, the secularization and secularism of the earthly sphere kept away those who thought they were the owners of heaven.
The 19th century inherits the struggles between secular and ecclesiastical power. The Church, increasingly weakened, advances absolutist formulas in favor of its rule. With the Reformation the strongest shock to the absolute power of the Supreme Pontiff occurred. In France, Gallicanism proves a deep crisis between the targets of the Holy See and the national powers, supported by a significant number of faithful and clergy. Since the Council of Trent, the Church has sought new ways to exercise the command exposed by Roberto Bellarmine. This is the Pope’s “indirect sovereignty”, which challenges the State’s claims to control bodies and minds.
The separation between Church and State, central to the French and North American Revolutions, was never accepted by the Holy See. In the Lateran Treaty with Mussolini, Pius XI wrote to Cardinal Gasparri, negotiator between the powers: “In the Concordat they stand before each other , if not two States, certainly two full sovereignties, that is, each perfect in its order, an order necessarily determined by the respective ends where it is almost not necessary that the objective dignity of the ends determines no less objectively and necessarily the absolute superiority of the Church”. The same logic follows the Concordat of the Vatican and Hitler. With it, Catholic resistance to Nazism was disarmed. In exchange came State protection for the Church. Article 5 of the Concordat: “In the exercise of their priestly activity, ecclesiastics enjoy the protection of the State in the same way as State employees”. Nazi salutes from bishops afforded such protection. Catholics who did not make such commitments were dismantled by the Vatican. They were consigned to “obsequious silence” in the slaughter committed by totalitarian power. Still in the recent debates on the European Constitution, the Church pressed for its role as the historical, social, cultural and political foundation of Europe to be proclaimed.
With the industrial revolution, new ways of thinking about economic and legal life emerged, which affected Catholic theses about collective life. The model of medieval Christianity is attenuated. Max Weber shows, in Economy and Society that, after the industrial revolution, middle and working sectors of the population left the protective mantle of the Church and assumed secularized ways of thinking, heading towards liberalism or socialism.
Brazil in the 19th century receives the weight of ecclesiastical centralization in the Vatican. A Religious Question it was caused by the impetus to control the national Church by defenders of state secularism and ultramontanes. The clashes led to the arrest of bishops, their isolation, etc. In the Catholic imagination, the Church would be the support of institutions, from the family to society and the State. Catholicism would be at the root of Western peoples, like Brazil. Every thought (liberal, socialist, Protestant) should be combated by the police force. In 1922, Father Soares d'Azevedo identified evangelical sectors as spies for... “North American imperialism”. Patriot, only the Catholic obedient to the Holy See. (Alarm Shout, Rio, Typography Des. Lima Drummond, page XV and following).
Although happy with the end of the Padroado (“the golden cage” according to the bishops), the Church demands to be seen as the basis of the entire Nation. This program includes a movement to subjugate institutions to ecclesiastical plans. The Good Press Crusade, Correct Cinema, the Catholic Electoral League and others emerged. The teaching came from the Chair of Peter: “The Church and the State must be united to each other as soul and body, which constitute a natural whole in man” (Immortal Dei). The same Encyclical affirms the Church's indifference to forms of government, as long as the spiritual supremacy of Catholicism is maintained.
After the ebb of positivism that marked the first republic, Brazil experienced a strengthening of liberal ideas. Against the Church, the 1891 Constitution affirms the secularity of the public sphere. But from 1930 onwards, the Estado Novo provided powers to the ecclesiastical field. A reaction to modernism and liberalism (communism, socialism, freemasonry, spiritualism, etc.) asserts itself. The leadership was from the team of intellectuals gathered at the magazine The Order (The IFCH library has part of the collection). The Church collaborates in the formulation and practice of the Estado Novo. Shocks occur when she embarks on Catholic corporatism, different from that imposed by the State. As in the agreements with Mussolini and Hitler, the agreement between the Church and Vargas helps both by removing liberalism and socialism from the political scene. Already in the work for the 1934 Constitution, the religious bench went to war against liberalism which, according to the bishops and lay people, would answer for the “evils from which civilization has suffered, since it was implemented in 1789, with the French Revolution”. And Luís Sicupera, quoted by LW Vianna, follows: the Church is “modern thought directing and inspiring, as always, the Estado Novos, which without it accomplish nothing”. Liberals denounce Catholic “imperialism”, led by a foreign State with agencies in the country, which brings obstacles to national sovereignty. The Church would bring the principle of inequality within its midst. “An essential measure of progress and even public security is the decree of the perpetual divorce of ecclesiastical Rome from political Brazil” (Saldanha Marinho, cited by MS Bresciani Martins).
We have literature about the period in which State and Church came together in Brazil in the 20th century. Jessie Jane Vieira, when analyzing Catholic corporatism (Círculos Operários), Romualdo Dias, who examines the links between Church and Vargas, in large mass demonstrations, are part of the list of those who present data on the coexistence between Catholicism and power.
Let's move on to Protestantism. Accused of, as we saw in the case of Father Soares d'Azevedo, invading sacred Catholic territory in the service of North American imperialism, Protestant churches are persecuted. Just open the Brazilian Ecclesiastical Magazine (REB) or Voices Magazine, to demonstrate the fierce campaign against Protestantism. The Reformed, especially the Presbyterians and Methodists, prepare intellectual elites for struggles against hegemonic Catholicism. Pastors and believers acquire theological concepts and rigorous ethics, modest in feelings and expression. Everything that Max Weber describes in his well-known essay.
Over time, emotional and fundamentalist cults arrive, especially those of North American origin. In them the role of philosophy and theology in the formation of pastors and practitioners is attenuated. An economy of salvation enters the scene that breaks with transcendent ideas. Now miracles are promised in immediate time, fervor replaces faith combined with rationality. In a country where theological-political practice was seeded since the 16th century, but which increased in the 20th century, liberal certainties and other secular aspects weakened. Politics and religion unite in the consciousness of the masses, like Siamese. Just remember the cult of Father Cícero Romão to understand the intimacy between the two factors. Religious fervor follows the cult of great men, lending them a salvationist aura close to apocalyptic hopes.
When churches of Protestant origin with greater weight in emotional elements emerge in the country, they fill a neglected passion deficit in the Catholic Church and Protestant Churches. To the bureaucratic and political rationality of the first, the weight of reason in the second, the new cults oppose emotions and miracles. Gradually, this miraculous imagination is directed towards economic and social advantage. In addition to salvation in paradise, the new associations promise a change of social status for the betterment of individuals and families. When the number of followers reaches a high level, the training of pastors and lay people begins to exercise political life in defense of religious interests. The new political theological scenario has been set up with the Bible Bench, which, due to its strength, has attracted support from sectors of the political right and left.
With Bolsonaro's election, evangelicals want to impose their agenda on the country, like the Catholic Church has for 500 years. The war of Catholics against the secular, liberal or socialist State is taken up by Protestant denominations that become the majority. The spirit of a Crusade against state secularization, the search to reform laws that defend minorities, a retrograde patriarchalism, all emerge in current ideological struggles. Oh! In his opinion, evangelicals do not have ideology, but faith. Ideologues are the others. Minorities beware. Fertilized by centuries of religious rule against secular democracy, we have a land full of dogmas and anathemas. Now it is no longer defined by Index Librorum Prohibitorum but by the dictates of the Escola Sem Partido (only the evangelical or right-wing party is valid), by the Syllabus (but the evangelical elite has its table of dogmatic and moral prohibitions), or by Pedro's chair. Damares Primeira's pulpit will serve as Brazil's political north. Social and political salvation is placed in your Church. Glory, Hallelujah.
