Page 68 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

public image of poverty has strong territorial implications. The impact of this
endless stream of TV imagery contributes to a strong and widely held belief
that we are in a state of war fought between the police and so-called heavily
armed bandits and drug dealers—and this is accepted as legitimate (cf. Leite
1997).
However, the association cultivated in the public imagination between a holy
war waged by Pentecostals from the UCKG against other cults and the drug war
or the general image of a city at war failed to last very long. Not only were the
violence and social con®icts disassociated from the churches but the churches
became—with the willing complicity of the media—a new instrument for paci-
¤cation. 9
In recent years, then, the image of a peaceful society, which historically co-
incides with the predominance of a Catholic ideology espousing the unity of
the Brazilian people, has lost ground to a disruptive and con®ict-ridden image.
This in turn has been absorbed into Pentecostalist discourses concerning the
paths to salvation, which proclaim Pentecostalism as one of the sources of peace
in the world. New entrants are transformed into people capable of combating
evil with the Word and through Exorcism. Those who have taken Jesus into their
hearts are the new messengers of Good, Peace, and Prosperity.

Faith Is the Star
One of the clearest signs of the religious transformation in society—and
of its impact in the communications media—is the importance given to the re-
ligious af¤liations of public ¤gures. Mention of the religious beliefs (or virtues)
of media personalities has increased both in frequency and importance. This
has become a form of identi¤cation demanded by the faithful themselves as part
of their religious practice, a tendency reinforced by the media, which conse-
quently rei¤es identity-based categories in its reporting and analysis of con-
®icts. The media also ensures that, in addition to declaring their religious af¤lia-
tion, these personalities openly display their emotional responses to the events
in which they participate. Hence the value produced by insistent reference to
evangelicals as social actors in religious/political interactions is not entirely in-
nocuous. The media, in fact, creates ways of identifying attributes that guide,
institute, or simply reinforce certain modes of religious intervention in society.
A wealth of reading matter has been published by the media on the signi¤-
cance of being evangelical in today’s Brazil. During the initial stages of the Pen-
tecostal explosion in the media, led by the UCKG, the Pentecostals were branded
as a disruptive presence, provoking con®ict and disorder. As this image was
transformed, so was their name, and from “Pentecostals” or “believers” they be-
came “evangelicals.” This originally more restricted term, used to refer to de-
10
nominational groups, is used indiscriminately today by all groups. The Uni-
versal Church of the Kingdom of God, formerly designated as “Pentecostal,”
also began to call itself “evangelical,” thereby aligning itself with the broad
spectrum of Pentecostal or Protestant-leaning groups now existing in Brazil.

Future in the Mirror 57