LO SPIRITO NEOLIBERISTA TRA DIAVOLO E DENARO. EVANGELICI, GOVERNAMENTALITÀ E LOTTE A RIO DE JANEIRO

In Brazil, one of the most important social phenomena of recent decades is the importance that evangelicals have acquired in society as a whole. Not only has the number of churches and faithful expanded, especially in the favelas and peripheries of large cities, but evangelicals have taken on an increasingly relevant role in the political and cultural fields of the country. One of the most important segments of this phenomenon is the so-called neo-Pentecostalism, whose churches were constituted from the adoption of a theology that has a close relationship with neoliberalism, the Theology of Prosperity. The main objective of the thesis is to understand the role played by neo-Pentecostalism in neoliberal governmentality. To this end, the thesis makes use of a methodological choice related to neoliberalism. More than a set of economic policies accompanied by ideologies applied to societies through the articulation between national States and corporations, as a certain Marxist discourse wants, the definition of neoliberalism adopted by this work is based on the research of authors such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval, Wendy Brown, among others, for whom neoliberalism is a form of governmentality, which conduct of conducts is based on a mixture of apparently contradictory principles that involve freedom and conservatism. A covert ethnography conducted in one of the headquarters in Rio de Janeiro of the main representative of Brazilian neo-Pentecostalism, the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, and the follow-up of the publications of that church revealed how religion and neoliberalism meet during services and publications: individual accountability for everyday suffering, rituals of exorcism, rejection of salaried work, individualism, encouragement of entrepreneurship, motivational speeches, coaching techniques and support for the extreme right are among the highlights of the observations made. However, as I got to know the evangelical environment through the bibliography and the contacts I had with many pastors in the city of Rio de Janeiro, two other questions emerged. The first refers to the insufficiency of talking about only one type of evangelical governmentality - the one that associates neo-Pentecostal theology and neoliberalism - and, thus, presenting the articulation of some evangelical churches and some pastors with other forms of “classicals governmentalities ” of the favelas and peripheries of the city, due to the strong penetration that these churches and pastors began to have in these spaces. Through interviews and secondary data obtained from books, articles and newspaper articles, I show the reciprocal relationships between some evangelical churches and pastors with public security policies, with the policy of removing favelas, with drug trafficking and with militias. The second question is related to the attempt to present a diverse evangelical environment that I came across during my fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and which involves the participation of evangelicals in different struggles for social justice in the city. Using discursive interviews, I present three cases: an evangelical woman who leads the fight against the removal of the favela where she lives, an evangelical woman who leads the fight for human rights and a pastor of a neo-Pentecostal church who leads her church from the fight against racism, against gender violence and in favor of homeless people. With the presentation of these cases, it is concluded that the role played by the evangelical churches in conducting conduct from different types of governmentality cannot be thought from a pure determinism, since struggles and resistance always exist in confrontation with the power practices.