Page 75 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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Fig. 2.3. Close up Fire of Israel. Photograph by Edlaine Gomes. Used by permission.

ing among people with completely different customs, with almost prehistoric
hygiene? Confronting racial segregation or totalitarian regimes?
A pastor’s wife gives her opinion in the same report:
I thought we were going to the interior of Brazil, but when he told me we were
going to Africa, I didn’t know what sort of culture we would ¤nd. My children
were small, 6 and 8 years old. I was aghast. How could we go to an unknown land,
far from family and friends? But then something spoke in my heart: Leave your
family and go to this land you don’t know, and I will make of you a conqueror.
(Plenitude 2000, 33)

The Perfect Pastor
In October 2002 Rio de Janeiro, for the ¤rst time, elected a senator of
the Republic who belonged to the Universal Church: Bishop Marcelo Crivela,
nephew of the church’s supreme mandatory bishop Macedo. Bishop Crivela’s
public image focuses on the way he gave direction to his life as a faithful execu-
tive of the UCKG’s projects. His obedience to the plans of the church trans-
formed him personally, while enabling his church to grow. At the same time his
work picked him out as someone capable of bringing the country’s poverty to
an end. His biography, published in Folha Universal and partly reproduced in
the electoral propaganda broadcast on radio and television, tells us:
Bishop Marcelo Crivela has possessed the wish to evangelize since the age of seven,
when he ¤rst became acquainted with the Bible. Trained in civil engineering and a
member of the UCKG from the outset, he coordinated public works undertaken

64 Patricia Birman