Religious discourses and politics in Brazil: The conservative evangelical parliamentary front

The arguments embraced here are those that examine the discourses of parliamentarians and their proposals that represent Evangelical fundamentalism with the support of conservatism of a moral and religious character, no longer exclusive to the right-wing Catholics, as pointed out in the literature of Political Science. The interpretation of religious politicians’ speeches is as legitimate and necessary as the discussion of the reverse of secularization and the increasing presence of religion in politics. Secularity is only an issue in Brazilian politics nowadays because of the conflict between conservative evangelical parliamentarians and Brazilian scientists. The latter are representatives of the scientific theories of evolutionism and proponents of scientific research on stem cells and embryos, considered as early as the beginning of the 20th century as threats to Christian civilization according to the Bible. The former, some of them propagators of the Bible, repeat this argument in public discourse, a symptom of fundamentalism as defined by Marsden. It discusses then the dispute between politics of morality and the process of informalization and permissiveness that have gained much widespread support of the young population since the 1960s. This dispute is still going on in Brazil, a country that has aroused the interest of missionaries because of its customs and non-Christian religions, especially Afro-Brazilians. The political crisis and the flaws of a fragmented public security policy has also called attention to the issues relative to the possession and use of guns as well as the role of repressive policies considered by the fundamentalist members of a divided Evangelical Front as the only way to stop violence and crime. This discourse is in flagrant contradiction with their defense of life in pregnancies.