Mountains of Immorality and Molehills of Corruption: Managing Scandal and the Rise of Evangelical Christianity in 20th-Century Brazil

While the rise of Evangelical Christians to power and even dominance is undeniable in contemporary Brazil, the contours of that rise remain ill-understood. As part of the effort to explain conservative Christians’ ascendancy, this paper focuses on a critical tension at the heart of the empowerment of the national and transnational Religious Right. On the one hand, I argue, evangelicals used moralism itself as a point of entree into national politics. Propagating and sensationalizing a sense of scandalized outrage at what they called “waves of immorality,” conservative Christians presented themselves as saviors of the nation’s spiritual and behavioral compass. At the same time, this very tactic led to a highly corrupt series of relationships with the abusive military regime. These relationships became the fundament of the Religious Right’s media dominance in Brazil; yet they also entailed ethical and moral compromises that might easily have—but, significantly, did not—undermine evangelical politicians’ and pastors’ carefully constructed assumption of moral authority. My paper explores the management of these scandals—the ways in which propagating certain forms of scandal, while ignoring or quashing others, allowed Brazil’s protestant conservatives to effectively silence their progressive counterparts, laying the groundwork for the religious and political landscape of the coming decades.