Imprisoned for credit-card fraud in 2010, Joao Luiz Francisco da Silva faced a choice between the filthy, treacherous cells ruled by drug cartels and the tidy ones run by evangelicals. Like a growing number of Brazilian convicts, Da Silva joined ranks with Christian inmates.
“It was necessary to survive psychologically,” said Da Silva, noting that pastors used a kiddie pool for jailhouse baptisms. He now works for an organization of former prisoners seeking to influence debate on Brazil’s penitentiary system.
There’s nothing nefarious about a church seeking lost souls. But the rapid pace of jailhouse conversions and the way many converts can combine church activism with crime when they get out says a great deal about Brazil as it faces national elections starting this Sunday. Jair Bolsonaro, an ex-army man and legislator of Trumpian tendencies who’s backed by a major association of evangelical pastors and other church leaders, is leading in the polls before the most polarized election since democracy was restored three decades ago.
Seeking to end all gay unions and abortion and fighting minority rights, as well as gambling and hate-crime laws, evangelicals—who control a fifth of the Lower House of Congress—seem certain to increase their power this month. The presidential race’s second and final round is in three weeks if no one wins more than half on Sunday. Any regression on minorities and human rights could affect trade talks with Europe and Canada and cause some foreign investors to hesitate.
A mere 9 percent of the population a generation ago, evangelicals today account for 29 percent of Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country. Their growing role highlights, in part, disillusionment with a state overwhelmed by soaring crime, corruption and joblessness a decade after being embraced as a star of the developing world. Brazil’s moral and institutional crises are being tackled by ambitious church leaders who recruit in prisons and slums. As part of a broader legitimate fundraising and campaign effort, some have also shown—in violation of the law—willingness to accept drug-money contributions and to recommend candidates from the pulpit, according to members and researchers.
“Evangelicals could define the country’s future over the next generation,” said Jeffrey Lesser, a Brazil specialist at Emory University in Atlanta. It will not be smooth sailing, given the country’s instability, he said, adding that evangelicals are increasing “cultural and religious polarization.”
The majority of evangelicals are Pentecostal and Neo-Pentecostal, although in Brazil, unlike the U.S., the term includes denominations such as Presbyterian and Baptist.
Evangelical leaders deny that they endorse candidates from the pulpit, contribute to campaigns or accept drug trafficking donations; Bolsonaro says he takes no church contributions.
For the churches—especially the most powerful one, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God—recruiting inmates is the beginning of a process. “At Universal, first we get the people inside the prison, then we go after the entire home,” said Marcos Sergio Lucas, who remains in prison, where he converted after a decade behind bars for armed robbery. Most of his family, including his wife, brother and daughter, are now members. Money is tight, he said, but they all donate a portion of their earnings to the church, a tithing system that Universal pushes its flock to honor.
Once out of prison, many converts end up in one of the country’s infamous slums, or favelas, where biblical graffiti decorates chipped walls. The amount of drug money flowing into collection plates is growing, especially in Rio de Janeiro, where almost a third of drug traffickers identify as evangelicals (up from 17 percent in 2004), according to a study from Observatorio de Favelas, a nonprofit group.
Christina Vital, a researcher on the intersection of religion and drug trafficking, says many dealers give money to their church, and pastors have no problem accepting such donations.
“I always gave some of what I made to the church,” said Anderson Monteiro of his days running an illegal brothel that was popular with people selling and using cocaine. Monteiro is about four years into a prison sentence, partly on drug charges, in the State of Sao Paulo.
On a recent Sunday, a 23-year-old evangelical drug lieutenant chain-smoked marijuana and gulped cold beer through the morning and into a balmy afternoon. When his graffiti-decorated AK-47 wasn’t on the table, his top soldier was training it down the road in case unwelcome guests rolled up. As a walkie-talkie updated from dozens of checkpoints, the lieutenant said he’d make it to church later in the week. There, when he steps inside to accept the pastor’s blessings, his guards wait outside.
Borrowing from U.S. Pentecostals, Universal espouses “prosperity gospel,” a claim that the more you give to the church, the more good fortune you will reap.
“Universal combs the Bible for the best verses for extracting money from people,” said former pastor Fabio Rodrigues, who spent almost 20 years with the organization before walking away.
Former pastors describe an environment in which high-pressure sales tactics are taught, and target-focused bishops breathe down their necks demanding revenue updates. Top achievers are awarded better homes, cars and bonuses, but those who fall short are punished, temporarily demoted to menial tasks like janitorial work, according to the former pastors and employees.
A Universal spokesperson called these accounts inventions of former pastors and rejected any suggestion of illegal or improper activity on its part or those of its pastors.
Of course, with clean, well-lit community centers in ramshackle slums, evangelicals have benefited many in need. “The first thing that happens when a father enters an evangelical church and converts to that faith is he stops beating his wife because he stops drinking,” said Juliano Spyer, an anthropologist with Alexandria Big Data, who spent more than a year living among evangelicals in Bahia State.
Some pastors refuse drug money and try to pry traffickers from their practice. “Back in 2007, when I was buying a new building, they tried to buy one for me, for 50,000 reais ($12,200). I didn’t accept it,” said Dione dos Santos, a one-time narco bag man-turned-imposing evangelical preacher whose small congregation, he said, is filled with former and current drug traffickers.
Evangelical churches once welcomed the social policies driven by the leftist Workers’ Party and former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Today, Lula is in prison, and many blame his party for Brazil’s demise, along with dozens of other politicians who have been ensnared by corruption investigations. That’s creating a vacuum the church is filling.
Millions of evangelicals translates into millions of votes. Evangelical lawmakers now routinely work with Brazil’s right wing, reinforcing the fiscal protections that can shield churches from inquiry and opposing laws that define crimes of hate and intolerance, fearing restraints on their pastors’ speech.
“In the next 10 years, evangelicals will make up half of Brazil’s population,” evangelical pastor and Congressman Roberto de Lucena said in an interview in Brasilia. “It’s natural that this resonates in all spheres of representation.”
He and several other evangelical lawmakers and pastors had gathered to pray and sing in Congress’s main building, an activity that has been common there for more than a decade. Another pastor lawmaker who attended, Ezequiel Teixeira, said it’s God’s will that “Evangelicals help Brazil avoid tragedy.”
“If we are taught to obey, why shouldn’t we also make the laws?” asked Teixeira.
In an effort to reduce corruption, Brazil recently prohibited campaign contributions from companies, but the authorities still struggle to track how churches funnel money into the campaigns.
Bolsonaro’s presidential bid has been counting on evangelical might, much as U.S. President Donald Trump and the new presidents of Chile and Colombia did. In August, Bolsonaro, who remains formally a Catholic, took the stage at an evangelical church and concluded his remarks, saying: “The state may be secular, but I’m Christian.” After Bolsonaro was stabbed at a rally last month, an evangelical preacher and senator prayed over his hospital bed, saying the Lord had entrusted to them a mission to change the nation’s reality. Bolsonaro’s popularity has increased since then.
He has cultivated an incendiary image, praising a dictatorship-era torturer, saying a legislator wasn’t attractive enough to rape and saying he’d rather see his son with a broken arm than playing with dolls. Among his few legislative achievements was being a leading participant in a conservative campaign that banned a tutorial to educate public school students about sexual diversity and homophobia, which he dubbed the “gay kit.”
A prominent example of an evangelical who’s politically active is Bishop Edir Macedo, a self-made billionaire and Bolsonaro supporter who is Universal’s founder. Besides being the subject of an ongoing money-laundering investigation, Macedo has built a brash brand. He owns the second-largest television network, TV Record, constructed a replica of Solomon’s Temple with stones imported from Israel and produced his own blockbuster biopic—the country’s highest-grossing of all time.
Universal’s press office said Macedo was cleared of earlier charges of financial impropriety and will be exonerated again.
One consequence of the growing power of evangelicals has been an increase in religious intolerance. It begins with sermons on the only way to worship God and devolves in some places into violence. Jaqueline da Cruz, a practitioner of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble, says she’s been threatened numerous times over her faith. Four armed drug traffickers spouting evangelical slogans recently startled her group as they were beginning a ritual.
“‘You don’t have Jesus in your heart, you don’t deserve to walk this earth, so we’re going to kill you in Jesus’s name,’” da Cruz recalls them saying; the youngest was about 15 years old.
In assessing what evangelical political power might mean, some look to Marcelo Crivella, a Universal bishop and Macedo’s nephew, who has been Rio’s mayor for almost two years. The onetime gospel singer’s tenure has had decidedly mixed results. Critics have lambasted Crivella for cutting public financing for a festival honoring an Afro-Brazilian deity, an LGBT parade, a samba music event and Carnival, while allowing his church and religious allies to use city-owned venues to host events free of charge. After a leaked recording appeared to show him favoring local evangelicals by offering to facilitate surgery for cataracts, varicose veins and vasectomies, state congressmen tried to impeach him. Crivella’s office denied that anything inappropriate had occurred, but a local judge later formally prohibited him from using his office to benefit evangelicals.
The controversy has discouraged many who view the evangelicals and Bolsonaro as a threat to civil society. But for Rafael Almeida—who will be behind bars in Sao Paulo State for the foreseeable future after murdering four people—an evangelical president is exactly what Brazil needs.
“Someone who serves God, his mind is totally different, his heart is transformed—he’s not just thinking about himself,” said the 35-year-old Almeida, a converted evangelical who likes to wear a pink tie and dark blue suit to church as often as he can.
Almeida did acknowledge that once someone gains authority and feels the intoxicating lure of power, righteousness can be hard to hold onto.
“Evangelical or otherwise, anyone can become corrupted,” he said.
—With assistance by Kariny Leal
To contact the authors of this story: R.T. Watson in Rio De Janeiro at rwatson71@bloomberg.netDavid Biller in Rio De Janeiro at dbiller1@bloomberg.netSamy Adghirni in Brasilia at sadghirni@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Ethan Bronner at ebronner@bloomberg.net, Melinda Grenier
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.
