Page 63 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

2 Future in the Mirror: Media,

Evangelicals, and Politics in

Rio de Janeiro

Patricia Birman

When the world’s biggest football stadium, Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã, hosted a
non-Catholic religious event in the mid-1980s it was clear that something in the
city’s traditional religious patterns was changing. Even so, it had taken several
years for the stadium to be used in this way by what was then still a low-pro¤le
religious group, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), but was
to become a regular feature of the city’s religious and political calendar, closely
connected with the incursions of the church into the media. The ¤rst “evangeli-
cal” television channel was launched in 1990, operated by the same Universal
Church, and today religious mega-shows in football stadiums have become rou-
tine events throughout Brazil. The TV channel of the Universal Church regu-
larly broadcasts coverage of gatherings around the world, placing heavy empha-
sis on the lavish extravagance that accompanies them. The Pentecostalist UCKG
revealed an early attraction toward the spectacular in its religious, social, and
political enterprises, and has never denied its penchant for turning disused cine-
mas, theaters, and nightclubs into religious spaces. This tendency has been in-
tensi¤ed by its keen pursuit of the triple formula of stage, pulpit, and virtual
space.
A decade later the sheer number of religious rituals presented as public shows
is a clear sign of the social, religious, and political importance that Pentecostal
churches have now attained in Brazil, clearly demonstrating the new religious
face of what was once the “largest Catholic country in the world.” Along with
an increasingly diverse range of religious actors, it appears that public acknow-
ledgment of one’s evangelical af¤liation is becoming ever more frequent. Thus
evangelicals are not just growing in number but are also growing in visibility
through the adoption of new ways of displaying their faith. Their presence is
felt in performative settings in politics, musical events, religious spectacles, on
television, and in both the secular and the religious press. In turn, this visibility
is translated into a close connection between personalities linked to the Univer-
sal Church, public shows, and the media.
Between the 1980s and 1990s Brazil’s identity as an essentially Catholic coun-