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Purity and the Devil 55

domain of pleasure that seduces people and leads them astray. Evangelical
preachers criticize these “playgrounds of the devil” and urge their audience
to avoid them. During church services pastors repetitively persuade their
listeners to separate themselves from the people who live “worldly” lives.
Indeed, during my ten-month stay in the favela, many people who fre-
quented the evangelical churches told me “they were in the world, not of
the world. They were different.” Often, when I asked them what it meant
to be different from the other inhabitants, people explained they could no
longer watch certain television programs, listen to particular music, or be
seen in the company of specific neighbors. This insistence on difference
kept me puzzled during the course of my stay in Rio de Janeiro. How do
people who live in a social environment saturated with mediated popular
culture, enmeshed in the politics of daily life decide what is “of the world”
and what is not? And how is such a difference, once established as a social
category, enacted and legitimized in a complex urban social environment,
characterized by constant flux and indeterminate social positions? Many
adherents claimed they were not “of the world”; other inhabitants would
contest such claims and accuse them of hypocrisy. “Who were they to
claim that they were different from the rest, hadn’t they danced the samba
and courted with them in the past, weren’t they still listening pagode or
watching telenovelas (soaps) when they had the chance?”
Surely, it would not be hard to side with these voices and underscore the
fragility of the boundaries between social groups or the superficiality of the
conversion to Pentecostal faith of some inhabitants. Nevertheless, plenty of
people radically changed their lifestyle, media preference, and mode of con-
duct after joining an evangelical congregation. Furthermore, as many oth-
ers have noted in relation to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, to portray oneself
as an evangélico (evangelical) is generally regarded as serious and powerful
expression of collective identity. How should we understand this collective
sense of alterity in such a social environment and what can it tell us of the
reproduction of socio-religious boundaries in a very dense life world full of
mass mediated images and sounds from a wide variety of sources?
In this chapter I discuss the efforts of two evangelical churches—
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the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus and the Assembléia de Deus —to

attract adherents and to instill in them a sense of a community. I will
argue that one of the important strategies is to classify, incorporate,
and purify the many so-called worldly phenomena that surround peo-
ple. Evangelical churches attempt to strengthen the sense of the divine
order by classifying and incorporating popular cultural practices, sym-
bols, media, and spaces. Such dynamics operate as a double-edged
sword, on the one side aiming to attract people through established
popular practices and on the other side demonstrating the power of a