Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) was not a big fan of the idea of publishing, in the middle of the electoral campaign, a letter addressed to an electorate that was quite refractory to him, the Evangelicals. Until Marina Silva (Rede) entered the game.
Along with senator Eliziane Gama (Cidadania-MA), she spoke with Lula’s team so that a direct message to the segment could finally get off the ground. Lula was aloof from the idea of directing his speech towards a single religious group, as he felt that this was contrary to the secular nature of the State.
Marina, who attends an Assembly of God in Brasilia and is a church missionary, helped convince him of the need to deflate the ill will in churches with the PT candidacy, nourished by years of Bolsonarist propaganda demonizing the left. The letter only came out in the middle of the second round, but it did.
Elected deputy, Marina will skip Congress to go straight to Lula’s Esplanada, appointed this Thursday (29) to the Ministry of the Environment, a position she already held under the PT’s first terms, from 2003 to 2008. It is, for now, the only evangelical cadre known in the first echelon of the future government.
A counterpoint to the administration of Jair Bolsonaro (PL), who even highlighted the Protestant faith of ministers as a curriculum attribute. Damares Alves (Women, Family and Human Rights), Fabio Faria (Communications), Onyx Lorenzoni (Civil Staff) and Milton Ribeiro (Education) are examples of believers allocated to the Bolsonarist prow.
Marina likes to repeat that religion and politics don’t mix well. In 2014, on his second presidential run, he made a distinction between “political evangelical” and “evangelical politician”. The second group “instrumentalizes the faith” by transforming “pulpits into platforms” and vice versa. That’s where the danger lies, she said. “You know I never did that.”
The problem is that, in Brazil in the 21st century, it is very easy to see these borders turn to jelly. That very event with Marina, eight years ago, was an agenda with pastors like the current Bolsonarist Valnice Milhomens.
Also there was my friend Ed René Kivitz, a Baptist pastor with more progressive views. Marina, he said at the time, “goes crazy” when she sees the evangelical milieu immersed in “ufanismo and messianismo”. “Church cannot be part of the government, just as Corinthians cannot be part of Lula’s government.”
The new Minister of the Environment ran for the Presidency three times, and on the first occasion she presented her religious credentials. In a video posted in 2010, she gave a testimony about her conversion to the evangelical faith.
Raised in Catholicism, she considered becoming a nun in her teens. In 1995, then a senator, she went through health struggles, invoice charged by the youth in rubber plantations of Acre.
He faced five malaria cases, three hepatitis infections and one contamination by heavy metals, probably caused by an overdose of drugs to treat leishmaniasis, which triggered a process of neurological degeneration. He jumped from doctor to doctor. Until he met one who recommended “a miracle”.
Marina found that “out of line for a doctor”. She felt “angry” when the doctor called a 20-year-old pastor with an elderly voice and put her on the line. Pastor André prescribed a battery of prayers. She recounts the experience in the biography “Marina: A Vida por uma Causa”, published by Mundo Cristiano.
He received the preaching as a “revelation of a spiritual nature” and, after that meeting, he began to attend a prayer group. She entered sick lines to be anointed by pastors.
To an evangelical audience, Marina said that she came to God “through the language of pain”. She saw herself as “a broken vessel for which God paid double the price, with advance payment, to receive the vessel 37 years later.”
In 2010, this is how he compared his transition from Catholic to Evangelical, in an interview with Rolling Stone Brasil magazine: “Suppose you fall in love with a girl and suddenly, without knowing it, without wanting it, you fall in love with another. Why did you change?” .
And does being evangelical change anything in your way of doing politics?
At that evangelical event in 2014, Marina rejected the “mistaken view” that, as an evangelical, she would try to impose her religion. She cited her political habitat as an example: she did not try to “transform” either the Jew Walter Feldman or the practicing Catholic Luiza Erundina, both coordinators of her campaign at the time.
She has already acknowledged that her conversion met with unsympathetic reactions within the PT itself, her party at the time. In her biography, she says that some party colleagues were unforgiving. One said he always thought of her as an intelligent woman, not an evangelical.
A left reticent to evangelical religiosity, seen without any nuance as a fundamentalist project, feared for the future of agendas dear to it if Marina assumed the leadership of the Executive. The former senator, for example, declared in 2018 that she would veto the legalization of abortion if Congress approved it, as she preferred a plebiscite on the subject.
She raises distrust on both sides: conservatives who demand a more incisive position, and progressives suspect that her faith prevents her from advancing on the issue as they would like.
“Every time the left undermines someone like Marina, it creates a void that will be filled by a Damares Alves”, says sociologist of religion Paul Freston, bringing Bolsonaro’s minister to the table who called for a “terribly Christian” country.
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