Page 72 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Purity and the Devil 57

interfere in worldly politics. From the local to the national level, pastors
have run as candidates and many politicians have openly demonstrated
their evangelical background. One of the recurring explanations of the
religious/political transformation in Brazil is the increasing appropria-
tion of mass media by evangelical movements, especially by the Igreja
Universal (Freston 1994, 2003; Fonseca 1997; Campos 1997; Conrado
2001; Novaes 2002; Sá Martino 2002; Oro 2003). The Igreja Universal
has demonstrated the highest rate of expansion during the past few
decades and it has become by far the most visible church in Brazil.
According to its own silver jubilee publication in 2003, it has 6,500
churches in Brazil and a total of 8 million members in more than
70 countries worldwide. Over the past 20–30 years, it has built many
huge temples throughout the country and it has also bought one of the
6 national public television broadcast networks, Rede Record, which con-
sists of 30 broadcast stations. It has a professional Internet site, its own
publishing house and record company. It publishes the weekly newspa-
per the Folha Universal and owns several radio stations that broadcast 24
hours a day. The Igreja Universal is one of the few evangelical churches
that have undertaken a nationwide political project and it is broadly rec-
ognized that their mass media have been pivotal in the constitution of
the political support of voters (Birman and Lehman 1999; Conrado
2001; Corten 2001; Novaes 2002).
The messages that are broadcast by the evangelical churches on radio
and television are mostly aimed at people living in relative poverty, faced
with the insecurities of the urban spaces of the large cities. The churches
present utopist visions of a better society, based on Christian values, and
they offer concrete practices such as church services, collective prayer,
and exorcism of evil spirits, which the churches claim to counter the
socioeconomic and personal problems of many people. Charismatic
evangelical politicians (men of God) present themselves as trustworthy
because they answer to a “Higher Authority” than mankind (Oro 2003;
Oosterbaan 2005).
Evangelical movements have launched aggressive media campaigns
against other religious and cultural practices (Sanchis 1994; Montes 1998;

Birman and Lehmann 1999). Instead of portraying practices such as samba
and carnival as the epitome of Brazilianness and of national pride, the
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evangelical organizations link them to the many social problems of Brazil.
Based upon a fundamentalist reading of the Bible, Catholic-, and Afro-
Brazilian religious practices are depicted as idolatrous or even as devil wor-
ship. Especially the supposed alignment between social misery and
Afro-Brazilian spiritual practice has laid the ground for the practice of spir-
itual purification as counteroffensive to social desolation. Most important