Reactions to the Pandemic in Latin America and Brazil: Are Religions Essential Services?
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Reactions to the Pandemic in Latin America and Brazil: Are Religions Essential Services? Olívia Bandeira 1
& Brenda
Carranza 2
Received: 28 July 2020 / Accepted: 7 September 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract In Brazil, the Covid-19 pandemic is triggering tensions in health management that provoke, among others, a political crisis led by the federal government, characterized by negationist postures regarding the seriousness of the disease and lack of focus on public health policies. There is also an information crisis enabled by the political strategy of dissemination of disinformation that disqualifies scientific parameters and the role of the press. In this context, churches and Christian religious leaders who have risen to power in recent years play a fundamental role, which allows them to be analyzed from their performance as a public religion. By decreeing the closure of religious temples, as a preventive measure for the advance of the disease, evangelicalpentecostal churches insert into the public debate the defense of the essentiality of religious service as a fundamental dimension for society, conferring support and legitimacy to the action of the government. In this sense, this paper argues that the Brazilian scenario, when compared to other Latin American countries, is an outlier. Based on ethnographic research within online media and the religious media circuit, this paper maintains that, nationally, religion takes the lead in the political and information crisis. At the same time, this study affirms that, approaching other countries of the region, the churches reinvented mediatized religious practices, deriving from the social distancing and isolation, and offered new meanings and religious moralities around the health crisis.
* Olívia Bandeira [email protected] Brenda Carranza [email protected]
1
Department of Research and Training of Intervozes - Brazil Social Communication Collective (Intervozes - Coletivo Brasil de Comunicação Social), researcher at Laboratory of Anthropology of Religion - LAR/UNICAMP; researcher at Research Group on Religion, Gender, and Politics GREPO/PUC-SP, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
2
Department of Social Anthropology of the State University of Campinas - IFCH/UNICAMP Coordinator of the Laboratory of Anthropology of Religion LAR/UNICAMP, Campinas, São Paul, Brazil
International Journal of Latin American Religions
Keywords Covid-19 . Essential service . Evangelicals . Religious mediatization .
Public religion
Introduction Declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 13, 2020, Covid-19 had its first case confirmed in Brazil 16 days earlier. Almost 5 months later, on July 20, official figures show more than 80,000 deaths and a further 2.1 million people infected, with a rate of 38 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants.1 This makes the country the second in absolute number of cases in the world, behind the USA alone, which has a death rate of 43 deaths/100,000 inhabitants. In Latin America, only Chile and Peru have higher mortal
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