Page 65 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

academic discussion insofar as a relatively natural cross-section of social phe-
nomena and their forms of comprehension have been thrown into doubt, ques-
tioning the possibility of any stable or universal de¤nition of where religion
starts and where, for example, politics or economics ends. The boundary blur-
ring produced by contemporary phenomena provides us with a rich ¤eld for
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debate. These spectacular events can be seen to threaten a world order con-
ceived in terms of a normative European ideal, upsetting the balance between
reason and emotion, the religious and the secular, the public and the private.
By generating new meanings for religion and politics, while simultaneously
mixing the religious with business and ¤nance, the Universal Church creates
spectacular events and media personalities out of the ways in which various
distinct levels and spheres are associated, hierarchized, altered, and extended.
Despite its quasi-of¤cial standing and its enduring links with the Brazilian
state, the Catholic Church has so far failed to match the success of the Univer-
sal Church in projecting a close association between stage, pulpit, and the vir-
tual domain on such a grandiose scale, a success that indeed now threatens the
Catholic hegemony.

A Holy War or an Industry of Miracles?
References to religion in the public sphere have acquired an ever higher
pro¤le in Rio de Janeiro, as well as in other Brazilian states. The reasons for this
are many and complex. New religious cults and movements appear to be linked
to a weakening in the unifying and collective value of Catholic beliefs within
national society.
Catholicism remained the country’s of¤cial religion until the last decade of
the nineteenth century, when a republican constitution was promulgated. But
despite its of¤cial status, the Catholicism that developed in Brazil always paid
limited attention to the dissemination of Christian values. From the early colo-
nial period on, it adapted itself to the beliefs and practices of a local population
made up of Amerindians, African slaves, Portuguese heretics, and exiled crimi-
nals who inhabited what many contemporary observers—especially Jesuits—
labeled the “Tropics of Sin” (Vainfas 1998). This adaptation resulted in one of
the most persistent features of the colonial church in Brazil, namely, the dif¤-
culty it faced in achieving any effective and exclusive conversion to its doctrine.
Despite enjoying its status as the of¤cial state religion, the Catholic Church
was unable to eradicate non-Christian values and practices (Birman and Leite
2000).
Given this situation, the Eurocentric hierarchy of the church sought to main-
tain its place within the local power structures by turning something of a blind
eye to the non-Christian practices of landowners and the populace in general.
Thus, as Gilberto Freyre (1963 [1938]) argued, the church long remained sub-
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ordinate to the representatives of the Portuguese crown and to the dominant
order in the slave enclaves, particularly the sugar cane plantations of the North-
east. From the viewpoint of most of those taking part in Church rites, the

54 Patricia Birman