Syncretism and pluralism in the configuration of religious diversity in Brazil

Abstract

Using the Brazilian case as a reference we demonstrate that since the country’s first republican constitution “religious diversity” was legally constructed as a form of allocating in the field of religion popular practices perceived as dangerous and or superstitious. My hypothesis is that this religious diversity does not at first signify pluralism, given that it was organized under the aegis of Catholicism, within the ideology of syncretism. Using the constitutional congress of 1988 as an important point of inflection in the form of treating differences, I argue that since this time, pluralism became instituted as the main legal and political organizer of differences and in particular of religious diversity. Associated to the decline of the hegemony of the Catholic Church, this principle, by defining religions as relative to each other, promotes competition among religious organizations for social influence and primacy in their relationship with the state. In this combative context, the “inter-religious dialogue” led by the Catholic Church was presented as a political strategy for the construction of civic unity; in the Pentecostal configuration this unity is pursued having in mind the establishment of a mass public culture, which is generically demarcated and recognized as evangelical, based on the proliferation of media technologies that produce large publics that guarantee occupation of territories of cities and administrative spaces of power.