By JOÃO MARCOS DUARTE*
Commentary on André Castro's recently released book
“The critical tradition of Candido and Schwarz found in literature a privileged space for interpreting the formation and deformation of the nation, given that the nation itself was also a community of readers where identity was forged through reading. The times of deconstruction, on the other hand, seem to present an experience outlined as religious imagination, so that it is in its theoretical (theological) formulation that we find a privileged space for mapping the forms of the end” (André Castro).
Although convoluted, our religious scientist’s statement is not without purpose. In his most recent book, he seeks to map precisely what he calls “religious imagination.” More precisely, the latest of its figures, the apocalyptic Bolsonaroist.
First things first. The passage we are commenting on begins with no less than two of the main couplets of what has come to be called the Brazilian critical tradition. Some say that this tradition is a radical fringe of the wing of the bachelors[I] which has always had the objective of making the transition from colony to nation. The critical fringe tries in a certain way to give up the mannerisms and authoritarianism applied to the saga of national construction, in addition to perceiving the impasse as a problem – somewhat different from their ancestors, who saw precisely in this process the mark of the national identity that they should map out in order to then realize (or vice-versa).
Getting straight to the point: without apology, our two literary critics mentioned see in national literature an important source of research on this problem called Brazil, with its idiosyncrasies and possible contributions to try, on the one hand, to uncover the false bottom of a world-system based on infinite accumulation and, on the other, counting on the good will of some and the absence of others, a certain possible contribution to the future society. Either way, the rejection of the current situation and the investigation of possibilities of having a say in the construction of the New.
The key point is that literature formed for the first time in Brazil what we could call a “community of readers”, the words are from the passage in the epigraph. The origin of the expression, which, although not used by Antonio Candido, is the result of his journey through other paths, is due to Benedict Anderson.[ii], by mapping how newspapers, with news and serials, made it so that here and there, in Portugal or in the colonies, in the Indies and in Great Britain, when they came into contact with the same document and were affected by the same air, stock market news and adventures of the young lady in question, readers felt like they belonged to a community that would later be called a nation.
Despite the colonial plunder, what brought together the shipmasters who lived in the palaces, the pirates and colonizers, as well as the family men who traded through vessels, was precisely the common air of sharing the same pages and, here is the great discovery of the Irish historian, imagining that their equals on the other side of the Ocean were doing the same.
For reasons internal to the family of our tradition, which had as its ideal the union of what was most enlightened with what was most down-to-earth in indigenous and Afro-diasporic rituals, which culminates in Brasilia, they overlooked another document full of facts and stories that was being constructed over more than two millennia ago and that forms, since its first ten laws, another imagined community, this one without fixed territorial limits, at least. beforehand, and which invites humanity to unity through diversity.
With two aggravating factors, a community of periodically enslaved pilgrims, whose citizenship is not of this world, but whose entire path is already mapped out and whose end is certain – the formula for permanent insurgency.
Going further in retrospect, we have three main moments of formation of this other imagined community composed of insurgent pilgrims. The first of these, the Decalogue written by the voice of the Creator himself and delivered to his first messenger, the one who frees the people of God from the greatest empire of the time. This Creator, upon realizing that he was rejected by the people he himself chose to call his own, condemns him to wander for forty years through a desert, going around in circles to find himself, without being able to stop for a single moment, having only his own sacrifices and army to survive and never give up on his promised land – a place that had long been his, but which, due to the pilgrimage, ends up being populated by strangers and which, to be reconquered, depends on much sacrifice and military training. After all, when the first man made the first frontier, the time of militarized slaughter had been decreed.
After the laws, the profession of faith that comes a few thousand years later: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” uttered by Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, whom some consider to be the Zealot, another tribe of insurgents who did not surrender even to the Roman Empire, once again the largest at the time. The will: to rescue the world that lies in the power of the Evil One through the people who call themselves by his name, a feat made possible by the vicarious mission of the same carpenter’s son whom we mentioned earlier, the center of the Scriptures.
Finally, the final realization of the Promised Land, the Kingdom of Heaven that makes the Creator's presence on Earth physical, and at once the fulfillment of the Decalogue, by granting that the will of the Almighty be done both on Earth and in Heaven. This coming – that of the Kingdom – will only be possible after the Message of redemption has been preached throughout the face of the earth and the People of God have been persecuted for not denying their faith and their Mission. From start to finish, once again, a people of insurgent pilgrims in their war for eternity. So far, nothing new, in one paragraph, the saga from Genesis to Revelation.
What our theologian discovers is a simple detail that makes all the difference. Religious imagination itself is of little importance. What matters is precisely how the history of those who call themselves the people of God is lived as a religious experience.
Proof and counter-proof happen in three stages, in the mentioned little book: Liberation Theology,[iii] at the moment when the horizon of expectation and space of experience were immeasurably distant and the revolution was coming; evangelical progressivism[iv] and the Bolsonarist apocalyptic[v], now that times are different and the dimension of the world is that of imminent catastrophe – experienced by the former as the opposite of the Creator’s Plan, and by the latter, as a necessary part of the inexorable denial of the current state of things given that their citizenship “is not of this world”, and that, therefore, they do not care and even congratulate themselves on the destruction of everything, so that then, when the End comes, they can say: “Old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
The components of an ultra-worldly citizenship, the incessant pilgrimage, the Kingdom that is established after endless battles and much persecution with certain final victory, the religious imagination that animates enthusiasts and those who want to postpone the end of the world.
Coming closer, a few words about the core of what André Castro identifies. Unlike Judaism, which is messianic, Christianity, once progressive (with Protestantism), now in its evangelical form, has eschatology as its core. In both senses of the word: revelation and end times.
As for the first, the certainty (“of things hoped for and evidence of things not seen” [Hebrews 11:1]) that at all times the Almighty wants to say something behind what is happening: the driving force of what is commonly seen, obviously out of shortsightedness, as a tendency towards conspiracy theories. As for the question of time, the fuel of a certain theology that leaves some people with their hair standing on end (here understood as a doctrine and a community practice that goes far beyond the request for material blessings).
Being certain that one is always living in the last moment, one must bargain to buy time – like bankers, with money. The supposed adherence to the world that evangelicalism represents is nothing more than a mutation of the manifestation of the same consciousness, that there are only a few seconds left until everything ends – whatever this unit of time means to these people, since for them, “a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Pedro 3: 8).
Still on the subject of the end of time, the engine and fuel of all efforts against those who oppose your faith: the last battle that is already happening, Armageddon. Hence the repeated use of Old Testament. A warning to those in a hurry, however: Pentecostalism, the largest evangelical denomination in Brazil, is not Old Testament – any Catholic priest or Protestant pastor can preach for years only the Old Testament, and many do –, is that part of the Bible which prepares for the war of conquest announced in the book of Revelation of John (reason for the repeated return to the first pages of the Holy Book).
Pentecostalism, the real one, not the one imagined by evangelical progressivism as something imported from the United States of America and which, due to whiteness, would be another manifestation of black skin and white theologies, is apocalyptic.[vi]
The material background of each of the mutations of this religious imagination and which alters the entire equation of this experience in its own dimensions, adding to this the Brazilian matter, forming a revived Brazil, a power project now trumpeted in every corner of the national territory. and beyond – besides, our daily ground? The next nonsense.
*Joao Marcos Duarte is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at UFPB.
Reference
Andre Castro. The struggle within the gods: from Liberation Theology to the evangelical far right. New York, New York, 2024
[I] Luiz Felipe de Alencastro. The burden of bachelors. New Cebrap Studies. n. 19. 1987.
[ii] Benedict Anderson. imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008.
[iii] I refer to the essays “Assumptions, if I am not mistaken, of Liberation Theology”, “What remains of Liberation Theology?”, “From Liberation Theology to Ecotheology”.
[iv] The passage through this group can be found in the essays “Who is afraid of evangelical progressivism?”, “Left and right in the mirror of evangelicals” and “The resentment of the integrated”.
[v] The apocalyptic in question has been broken down, in addition to the aforementioned “Left and Right…”, in the two luminous works “It is the king who governs this nation” and “On the struggle that exists in the gods”. The reader must have wondered about the absence of the first essay, “The counselorist apocalyptic”, and the short “The others of ecumenism” in this description. Therein lies the germ of the discussion that moves the entire book and brings the great novelty of the whole.
[vi] Still on the subject of Pentecostalism, its similarity to a certain popular Catholicism, it is worth saying, derives, once again and always, from its apocalyptic family air. From the point of view of Revelation, just like Pentecostalism, Catholicism was a religion whose mediators between the human and the divine were present. As for the end of all things, its constant need to try to somehow direct divinity and its war for Jerusalem – a ghost city that inspires different efforts ranging from the conquest of America, Manifest Destiny, the counter-reformation, a certain counter-revolution and currently in the cutting-edge military technology that turns the Middle East into a hell with its touch point for those who are unlucky enough not to be pure blood. In addition to those already mentioned, it is worth mentioning the similarity with the monastic orders of Catholicism, which ranges from the anti-worldly asceticism of the first Pentecostalisms to the aforementioned prosperity theology. The background, a dimension that takes contact with the Magnum Mysterium. It is true that in Brazil, it can be argued, there is a great distance between the aforementioned poles, because Pentecostalism has many similarities with religions of African origin, which would place the body on stage, something that would not happen in Catholicism. This is exactly what is at stake, to the surprise of some and others, especially regarding the fact that many of the religions of the peoples of the diaspora had uncontrollable deities with which it was necessary to dialogue through rites. Regarding this, however, two considerations. The first concerns the fact that some claim that both Pentecostalism and Candomblé have their roots in the same rural popular Catholicism (Vagner Gonçalves da Silva. Religião e identidade cultural negra: afro-brasileiros, bispos e evangélicos. Afro-Asia. 2017. No. 56. pp. 83-126). The second is about the synesthetic character of Pentecostalism, mainly because the Order that was present for the longest time and in the most profound way among the enslaved, black and indigenous people was the Jesuit Order, which has in synesthetic contemplation, which at times borders on trance, the opposition and denial of the current order and affirmation of contact with the mystery, a constant practice. Every non-Pentecostal church that claims to be great goes through the process of Pentecostalization with regard to its way of functioning in order to try to have some voice in the evangelical world and beyond. Those that do not go through this process, but want to claim for themselves a certain Brazilianness that would give them the appearance of real bearers of what Christianity should be in Brazil, with so-called advanced agendas and insertion in the third sector, transforming this amalgam exposed above into a fetish, are left to evangelical progressivism. The general explanation of the phenomenon of what I call here “evangelical progressivism” is in the aforementioned: “Who is afraid of evangelical progressivism?” (in: André Castro, on. cit., pp. 157-187).
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