Page 67 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

petition from the church (it bought a concession for a TV channel) as well as
from the country’s elite, whose ethos has long been predominantly Catholic. An
intense campaign was waged against the Universal Church by the nominally
secular media, implicitly re®ecting a Catholic sensibility wounded by the meth-
ods of this emerging cult, that is, its combining of televised shows of exorcism
with successful business through an “industry” of miracles and the payment of
a tithe by its followers. Bishop Macedo, the church’s religious leader, was de-
picted on TV as someone who cheated the poor by promising wealth and hap-
piness. Dishonesty and charlatanism were associated with the economic exploi-
tation of the poor through false promises. 6

Fight the Devil, Fight Poverty,
Fight the (Sources of) Disorder

One of the ways in which the campaign against the Universal Church
was waged was through the systematic exploitation of a supposed similarity be-
tween religious intolerance and the violence of the poor, associated territori-
ally with favelas (squatter settlements) and the outskirts of Rio, regions held
to be dominated by drug traf¤cking. The 1990s saw the media giving ever more
prominence to the theme of violence in society, primarily linked to what was
once called the dangerous classes, a group that for a time included the Pente-
costals, identi¤ed on the whole with the poor and especially with followers
of the UCKG. The most powerful media companies sustained a discussion on
violence between 1993 and 1994 that placed heavy blame on the Pentecos-
tals (among other people) for causing a historically unparalleled internal split
among the poor. By conducting a holy war against traditional and popular
religiosity, they were accused of producing intolerance and religious con®ict
7
where before there had only been peace. The media at this time treated the two
social factions shown to be the sources of disturbance and con®ict—the poor
and the fanatical Pentecostals from the UCKG—as one and the same. Coinci-
dentally these two groups came from the same urban regions. In Rio de Janeiro
the denunciation of religious violence combined with virulent attacks on an-
other faction widely accused as a source of danger and violence in the city,
namely, the young funkies, blacks who came from favelas and urban outskirts
and invaded the more upper-class areas of the city.
In Rio de Janeiro the media has played a key role in building up an image of
a violent city, producing highly emotive imagery in which blacks and youths are
shown to be the most dangerous source of social upheaval. Identifying these
youth groups with drugs has consolidated a terrifying pro¤le of the poor zones
in the imaginations of the city’s respectable and conservative classes. The crimi-
nalization of poverty among youths, especially the young funkies, which initi-
8
ated in 1992 and 1993, reveals a profound shift in the city’s social imagination.
In the case of Rio de Janeiro these polemics also frequently reinforce a projec-
tion of social polarization in terms of urban geography. In other words, the

56 Patricia Birman