Petra Costa’s documentary tells a grim story about modern Brazil and leaves it up to us to decide if there is a happy ending. It is about the country’s leaders’ addiction to rightwing Christian fundamentalism and US-style prayer breakfasts, a strident political mannerism linked to the fact that evangelical Christians make up an estimated 30% of the population; it is on their behalf that Brazil’s religious right, via its substantial bloc vote in Congress, has now created what amounts to a minority-rule theocracy.
This movement was originally imported after the second world war through colossal enthusiasm for the ministry of Billy Graham, and it was covertly encouraged by the US government. The evangelists and their fellow travellers show a particular enthusiasm for the Book of Revelations, whose apocalyptic rhetoric is used to amplify and justify all manner of conspiracist, xenophobic screeching.
The tone is set by televangelists like the always angry Pastor Silas Malafaia, interviewed at some length here; he is a man clearly thrilled and energised by his own national celebrity and wealth, though irritated by questioning about his private plane, whose value, he says, has depreciated from over a million dollars new to about $800,000. (Perhaps this means that the needle’s-eye that we’re squeezing the camel through has correspondingly increased in size by around 20%.) Malafaia is someone for whom an ear-splittingly shrill and boorish rant about gays and communists is a natural mode of communication.
The Christian caucus helped deliver the fiercely reactionary, blandly self-satisfied Jair Bolsonaro to the Brazilian presidency in 2019, though Bolsonaro’s callous and incompetent handling of Covid probably sowed the seeds for quiet discontent with his posturing rule. But the film also shows that the Workers’ Party ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – known universally as “Lula” – ran again for the presidency and was careful to court the evangelical vote. He won in 2022 – and Bolsonaro, in fine Trumpian style, refused to concede, encouraged a coup and incited his supporters to storm government buildings. (The film shows one of them actually taking a dump on an official desk.)
Bolsonaro was finally discredited, although the history of extremism is littered with cases in which imprisonments, disgraces, prosecutions and the like are merely career-phase setbacks to be spun by partisans as “lawfare” oppression by the deep state.
And what now – is Lula simply the Brazilian Biden, ageing and uninspiring? Will someone else be the second coming of the Brazilian far right – could it be the gruesome Pastor Malafaia himself perhaps? Or would he find the subsequent press scrutiny of all his personal dealings disagreeable? Democracy has never looked so vulnerable.
• Apocalypse in the Tropics is in cinemas from 11 July and on Netflix from 14 July.
