Page 83 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

68 Martijn Oosterbaan

bands under its own record label and play these on its own radio stations.
In their weekly newspapers they copy the reports on urban violence in the
daily journals and use the genre to factualize the spiritual battle (Oosterbaan
2005). In their glossy magazines they discuss the same issues one would
encounter in the Cosmopolitan or the Elle, illustrated with similar photos of
well-groomed women and men.
Other evangelical churches have also stylized their appearance in rela-
tion to “worldly” forms. Several fashionable artists and celebrities have
publicly defined themselves as evangélicos and have thus changed the char-
acter of these churches from dull or restrictive to creative and empowering.
Gospel singers appear no different from their colleagues on Brazilian
MTV, and it is hard to distinguish some evangelical television programs
from talk shows we see all around the world. Furthermore, hardly any so-
called worldly phenomenon was left untouched in the Folha Universal or
the evangelical magazines that people liked to read in the favela. Sex, alco-
hol, drugs, passion, partying, anything the devil could think of to seduce
the men and women, was discussed. The glossy photos in the evangelical
magazines Ester, Plenitude, and Enfoque Gospel are often quite seductive,
but framed within the evangelical narrative they are purified and thus
supposedly harmless.
While I have demonstrated that the evangelical movement is quite suc-
cessful in persuading its audiences to experience the acute presence of the
spiritual battle in different scapes: cityscape, soundscape, and telescape,
one wonders what the effects of these techniques are on the persistence of
boundaries of evangelical communities. Is it truly harmless when “the
demonic” appears in evangelical media? When pictures are not seen as
“mere” representations of evil but as presence of a dark force, as Meyer
describes for Ghanaian representation of evil (Meyer 2008a), does it suf-
fice to contain them in a Christian dualist frame of representation in
which Jesus interferes to overcome the powers of evil? Does depicting evil
not also involve a risk of transgression, when “evil bursts out of the frame”
(104)? Some evangelicals criticized the Igreja Universal for this reason,
claiming they showed how to do harm to other people when broadcasting
the evil of Candomblé. It might seem that all this contradicts the rigid

distinctions most evangélicos wish to safeguard. The break between past
and present, between new self and old self, or between the community of
evangelicals and the others is not clear when boundaries are blurred.
Yet, the very fragility of the boundary is what makes this evangelical
movement so attractive. The power to differentiate between different domains
has largely been delegated from the hands of the church authorities to the
people themselves. Since purification is never achieved once and for all, it
requires a continuous evaluation and confirmation of one’s place vis-à-vis the