The flight of religious faith to the radical right

Religious faith became embedded in political faith precisely at the moment when the social democratic parties were born and with them modernity with all its ideological and moral ramifications. Since ancient times, religious lines have passed through various ideological fields, from sorcerers to monotheistic religions. Already in modernity, religion was metamorphosing according to political currents. From the Catholicism of the religious wars, the Inquisition, and the dogmas, he passed to the modern and revolutionary theology of liberation that immediately allied itself with the most revolutionary social currents.

Today everything seems to have changed suddenly with the emergence of dissident evangelical churches, born to the right of the Protestant movements. And these new churches are moving today, and even beginning to dominate politics in the sphere of the radical right. They are at this moment the greatest danger in the political-social whirlwind that moves politics and even the world economy because they are millions and easy to be politically co-opted because they are the most economically punished world, the most excluded from the goods of society, the poorest.

And the phenomenon embraces not only Brazil but the United States and many Latin American countries. In Brazil alone, evangelicals exceed 30 million. And this army is increasingly closer to a radical right under the belief that it is the one who will defend their fundamental values, such as the rejection of abortion and the new doctrines of gender freedom, and the defense of the traditional family.

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This explains why it is increasingly difficult for the new politics of modernity, and even more so for openly left-wing policies, to obtain such votes. Suffice it to remember that here in Brazil, the progressive Lula, who already had good relations with the evangelicals in his first two governments, today, according to the latest polls from days ago, is rejected in that evangelical sector by 62%. And in the United States, the democratic one, 86% reject Biden.

At this moment, the rejection of Lula by evangelicals represents one of the biggest obstacles in the new and democratic political era after Bolsonaro's obscurantist disaster.

As the political analysts of the national newspapers point out, Lula is disconcerted in his effort to approach those 30 million evangelicals who see him as an enemy of the traditional values ​​that they defend and that have become more acute with the arrival of the fascist extreme right. . As the newspaper

O Globo

has highlighted :

the evangelical is evangelical, but he is also a resident of the periphery, poor and a woman. And to conquer them politically, it is no longer enough to improve them economically. Even evangelicals have changed and that is perhaps what Lula has not yet managed to understand. Today it is more difficult than in the past to materially buy those millions indoctrinated more in the harshness of the Old Testament of the Bible, which is used by the new extreme right that tries to insert it into schools, than in the openings and freedoms of revolutionary Christianity. .

It is true that religious faith since the arrival of

Homo sapiens

has evolved, from the first gods being feminine, emphasizing fertility, to the harshness of the masculine gods with their dogmas, anathemas and persecutions of their enemies. From faith being considered “the opium of the people” to revolutionary liberation movements and Christian mysticism, religious faith has gone through the sieve of infinite nuances.

And it is precisely because of the strength that religious faith has had since the beginning of Humanity to exorcise atavistic fears that even today in the revolutionary era of AI, the religious issue with its inclination increasingly towards the extremist policies of right, is becoming a first-order element in the tangled obscurantist politics of our time, even in the much praised European Union, which seemed to have put an end to the monster of the great world wars and demonic holocausts.

Politicians are deceived who continue to consider that the religious element, whether we like it or not, is embedded in the skin of consciences and is beginning to influence more than one might suppose, in the construction of modernity and in the new, dangerous and revolutionary discoveries that even scientists recognize could end up destroying the planet if used incorrectly.

I know that atheism is in some way a form of religion and that the mystery of death will always be linked to that of religious faith. Even doctors reveal it to us when they tell us that at the moment of death those who cling to some type of faith, whatever it may be, say goodbye to life less desperate.

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