Page 78 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

a curious way: by presenting a special “project associate” card in those super-
markets indicated by the church, members of the UCKG can donate a percent-
age (which is not shown) of the costs of their monthly supermarket shopping
to the New Canaan Farm and the Northeast Project. This act of participating
is thus a way of becoming part of a community, which strives to achieve its
income redistribution project on a national level. The image projected by the
New Canaan Farm, associated with the bishop, is also that of a prosperous coun-
try without poverty, constructed by the church and above all by those followers
possessing a sense of business, evangelical initiative, and practical solidarity.
Bishop Crivela’s biography also depicts, therefore, the image of a successful
entrepreneur. The Universal Church offers this particular ideal-type “business-
man” to all those who liberate themselves and gain the chance to win prosperity
through active participation in its rituals. These converts, men of God, aim to-
ward a social position whose supreme value is given by the three positions of
entrepreneur, pastor, and benefactor of the nation.

In effect, the success of the UCKG and its public image is associated with
innumerable symbols that belong to the world of business and global values. It
has broken into public space through a type of religious participation that raises
the church’s pastors and followers to another social level: having once been the
poor hidden away in the parish, they now become people perfectly adapted to
a world hitherto reserved only for the rich and the well-off. Through its mega-
shows, the church has created nontraditionalist images of a religion practiced
by the urban poor and its followers (seen until then as common people), de¤ni-
tively disassociated from the stereotypes associated with the “Brazilian people,”
a suffering population according to the long cultivated paternalistic view of
the Catholic Church. It has thus created, on the one hand, a new image of the
religion of the poor and, on the other, a new image of the poor as religious,
belonging to the church. The way pastors and obreiros (church attendants or
workers) are dressed is highly signi¤cant: they wear uniforms designed to make
them look just like “executives” belonging to the international business world,
or like politicians in Brasilia: white shirts, black ties, costumes, and the like.
The ideal UCKG member is someone who belongs to the world in another
way. Through the church the person’s presence gains forms that contrast with
the marks of poverty, above all the territorial marks, which possess an enormous
power of provocation. The UCKG follower tries to move in social circles formerly
considered the monopoly of the rich. Removed from their traditional circle, and
therefore from a ghetto image of the poor, its members are invited to broaden
their horizons and participate in other national and international circles, asso-
ciated with the world of the rich. To achieve this opening, the church’s rituals
and the media have been mobilized. The UCKG started to frequent transnational
circles and public spaces of high social and political visibility, such as television
and newspapers, which have become increasingly amenable to showing scenes
of the UCKG Pentecostals. 22
The production of spectacular events by the Universal Church has been fun-

Future in the Mirror 67