Page 71 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

56 Martijn Oosterbaan

specific church, pastor, or adherent to confront and overcome the
demonic. Crucial for this dynamic is the ability of evangelical churches
to link different scapes to one another as domains that are eligible for
purification through the power of the Holy Spirit. The body, portrayed
as a vessel for powers of good and/or evil becomes homologous with
both the cityscape and mediascape (Appadurai 1996) of the favela and
as such opens up the possibility of purification of all these scapes
through deliverance or other ritual practices.
The evangelical churches are able to sustain a homology between the
scapes by convincing people that a spiritual battle between God and the
devil is taking place in each and every one of them. The remediation of sym-
bols, practices, and sounds from different media forges a strong bond
between different scapes. People of the churches continuously attempt to
5
link features of everyday life to the popular media and vice versa. One of the
main concerns of evangelical churches is the rottenness of the “worldly”
media and they continuously discuss other television programs, films, and
music in their own media to demonstrate its heretical nature. Through their
discussions of these “worldly” media, the churches try to create a sense of
alterity and to impose a mode of self-discipline with regard to the consump-
tion of media.
Notwithstanding the fact that the evangélicos are indeed often rep-
resented as quite a solid community of converts, in practice such a
community is under constant threat of erosion. The multireligious
popular culture of Brazil offers people a wide variety of spiritual prac-
tices and people often choose to stay with a certain church or religious
practice as long as it serves their individual needs. To strengthen the
unity of evangelicals, churches oppose certain media and certain prac-
tices, while at the same time incorporating elements of other popular
(religious) practices and popular media styles into their own modes of
representation. This tendency to incorporate other styles fractures the
distinctiveness of the community of evangélicos vis-à-vis the other
inhabitants and demonstrates the fluidity of the different cultural
practices and subject positions in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (see also
de Abreu in this volume).

Evangelical Politics, Media,
and Spiritual Purification

The state and federal elections of the past decade have demonstrated that
the evangelical churches in Brazil have shaken off their hesitation to