This book is a timely and comprehensive study of the influence of religion, and in particular Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Catholic congregations, on twenty-first century Brazilian politics. Spanning the last 15 years, Amy Erica Smith's study analyzes a wealth of data via a bold mixed approach that includes numerous national surveys, electoral results at all levels of government, ethnographic observations, focus groups, and individual interviews. While the author discusses presidential and federal politics at length, she also conducted an in-depth study of religious mobilization in the mid-sized city of Juiz de Fora, in the state of Minas Gerais, covering a period of nine years. Offering the city's political composition and voting patterns as evidence, Smith justifies her qualitative study of clergy's and congregants’ political behavior in Juiz de Fora as representative of Brazil. To prove her point, Smith details how the evangelical mobilization against a front-runner mayoral candidate who ran as openly lesbian in 2008 tilted the balance in favor of her opponent. As Smith repeats throughout the book, the culture wars that mobilize Brazilian religious voters revolve around “the triumvirate of abortion, homosexuality, and church-state relations” (19).
Smith articulates her book around two main ideas. First, religious mobilization does not lead to partisanship in a country where a record 30 parties won representation in Congress in the 2018 election. Competition between congregations and denominations, according to Smith, ensures that partisan fragmentation will continue to be the norm for the foreseeable future, even if religion-driven political affiliation moves solidly to the right. Second, religion in general, and Evangelical and Pentecostal congregations in particular, increase citizens’ involvement in political debates, but they simultaneously undermine democracy with escalating intolerance and combativeness. As stated in an afterword written after the election of Jair Bolsonaro in October of 2018 (Smith's book was concluded in July of 2018), the far-right president proves her point, for he paradoxically favors dictatorship as a system of government over the democratic process that got him elected (177).
The book offers a summary of its main theses in a lengthy introduction, followed by six chapters unevenly divided in three parts. The parts offer an in-depth examination of the clergy's political behavior, congregants’ political response to religious mobilization, and elected officials’ relationship with the clergy and congregants who elected them. As previously mentioned, the book utilizes a mixed-method approach and moves its focus back and forth between its case study, the city of Juiz de Fora, and the country at large.
This multilayered approach might be needed to dissect Brazil's complex political system; however, constantly alternating among different research methods, subjects of study (clergy, congregants, and elected officials), and levels of government (local, regional, and federal) reflects the Brazilian political chaos in a somewhat chaotic way. This study suffers from a lack of focus that manifests itself both stylistically and structurally. Besides its repetitions (almost identical contentions are continuously restated throughout the book) and asymmetrical organization, virtually every assertion is followed by its opposite, by means of a “but,” “yet,” “however,” or “nonetheless.” This lack of focus may have prevented Smith from more fully anticipating how religious mobilization would for the first time coalesce in October of 2018 around a candidate, Bolsonaro, who was elected with 70 percent of the Evangelical and Pentecostal vote.
From an international perspective, the book hastily dismisses the influence of global Evangelical and Pentecostal movements on Brazil's voting patterns (28), even though questions about the topic prove mostly absent from the surveys, interviews, and focus groups that the author conducted in Juiz de Fora.
Despite its flaws, this is an important book that addresses with painstaking attention to detail the intricate, complex influence that religion exerts on Brazilian democracy. The nuanced extended conclusion (162–75) corrects some of the issues stated above and closes the book with a clear summary of findings that situates the Brazilian case in the larger context of the Americas.
