Amy Erica Smith’s impressive new book, Religion and Brazilian Democracy: Mobilizing the People of God, combines rich and varied data to analyze the dynamics of religion and politics in Brazil and to assess their implications for democracy in general. Clerics are central actors here, operating as entrepreneurs and vote brokers, pressing issues that will recruit and retain members while working to establish and maintain contacts with politicians and public institutions. Smith is sensitive to variation across and within religious groups and carefully matches her analysis of clerics with attention to what congregants hear and how and to what extent they respond. She concludes with reflections on representation and on the short and potential long-term impacts of clerical activism on democratic politics.
The concept of “culture wars” is prominent, highlighting clerical activism sparked by perceived threats to God’s will, which stem above all from changes in gender roles, growing tolerance of homosexuality, the advancement of a supposed “gay agenda” in schools and communities, and same-sex marriage. Although such issues are indeed visible in Brazil as elsewhere, the notion of culture wars may exaggerate the capacities and unity of the people and organizations studied here. Smith shows that Catholic clergy are more tolerant and accepting than evangelical clergy of sexual identity issues and more likely to advance others, such as ecological decay and economic and racial inequality, not to mention crime and corruption.
The emphasis on clerics as competitive entrepreneurs is consonant with much rational-choice work. Religious leaders and groups compete for members, resources, visibility, and a legitimate place in the public sphere. Context makes a difference here. In the three decades since the end of military rule in Brazil, the context for religion and politics has been utterly transformed by convergent elements that reinforce one another to elicit and encourage new generations of leaders, freed from old ties and attracted by new opportunities and the possibilities of advancement and new connections.
Smith brings together data from national surveys, local surveys of churches, focus groups, survey experiments posing scenarios for respondents, and brief but illuminating qualitative interviews. All these data are subjected to the technical apparatus of contemporary social science in convincing fashion. Substantive chapters present “scenes” that provide a vivid portrait of how the religion–politics nexus plays out day to day.
We learn how religious teachings evolve and influence the actions of clergy, as they build and consolidate churches and communities and work to mobilize voters and make political deals and connections. Issues of sexual identity resonate well with evangelicals, who stress the urgency of concerted action. The end of times is near and God’s wrath is to be feared, so it is imperative to spread the word. Not long ago it was common to see such communities as offering their members an escape from “the world” and focusing on building societies of the saved. Politics was seen as a realm of sin to be avoided in favor of working on salvation. The turn to action is widely visible in the evangelical world. But with limited exceptions, all this energy and motivation have not produced enduring evangelical political blocs, much less political parties. Politics has its own rules, and evangelical entrepreneurs often end up colonized, divided, and abandoned by potential allies. In Brazil, the weakness of political parties makes alliances volatile and at risk of betrayal, and “the evangelical style of congregation also exacerbated party fragmentation” (p. 161).
Smith tackles the difficult issue of how to identify and measure church and clerical influence on political views, voting, and ultimately support for democracy. Voters are mobilized more effectively at the local level than nationally. This makes sense given the urgent needs and practical interests of many people, but it also raises the question of whether those mobilized acquire skills and orientations that make for enduring democratic perspectives and practices. Sustaining activism can be difficult under the best of circumstances. Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said that the problem with socialism is that it leaves one with no free evenings. Multiple studies suggest that the same is true for activist religion. The meteoric growth of many new churches suggests that incoming members bring their affiliations and views with them, so it may be that the churches provide vehicles for reinforcing previously held views. Evangelical churches seem able to mobilize followers on a larger scale than do Catholics. The intense inner life of many new churches may also enhance conformity. Although Smith finds solid support for democracy in the abstract, among evangelicals she finds an above-average lack of sympathy for civil and human rights, raising disquieting questions about whether religiously driven mobilization makes for better citizens.
Concluding chapters address the “representational triangle” (clergy and congregants–politicians–social movements) and offer thoughts on the future of religion and politics. Religious activism brings forward issues, and deals are cut for support, but because clergy often are more extreme in their views than ordinary people, representation is very much about shaping, channeling, and brokering—not simple transmission. Smith states that “congregations…. often simultaneously integrate citizens into democratic politics and foster rightist conformity and intolerance. These competing stories are mutually compatible. Mobilizing the people of God has multivalent impacts in the developing world; the two partial visions present aspects of a complex reality” (p. 168). Yes, but of course, this is not only true in the “developing world”: the phenomenon is general.
Smith believes that rightist trends and the impact of “culture wars” are a threat to democracy and agrees with the widely held view that evangelical pressure helped tip the balance in favor of Jair Bolsonaro’s election as president in 2018, bringing to office “the very elites who might destroy democracy from within” (p. 174). But in the next paragraph she optimistically suggests that, by giving clerical entrepreneurs a stake in the game, religious engagement may keep them from uniting behind any particular politician. “If so, Brazil’s clergy driven culture wars could ultimately help to stabilize democracy” (p. 175).
This mixed result and mixed judgment are in large measure an artifact of sticking so closely to the data and to the questions suggested by the author’s political science agenda. More compelling answers about representation and democratic politics would require moving beyond the concerns of political science to a more structural, historical, and comparative approach. The explosive growth of new churches and the resulting rearrangement of religious demography are not unique to Brazil. These trends are visible around the world with consequences that include the kind of religious entrepreneurship on which Smith focuses. They are made possible by the advent of more open civil societies, the greater reach of mass communications, and new generations of leaders and followers who seek and make new affiliations and create new meanings. People are easier to reach today, and more entrepreneurs are trying to reach them. Why do so many find these new affiliations and meanings in religious communities and not in other kinds of groups? The answers lie partly in the mobilizing efforts of clerics, but also in the search for meaning and community that drives new members into churches that offer a supportive community with an intense emotional life. Comparative and historical evidence suggests the need for sustained attention to the inner life (beliefs, practices, and relationships) of churches and to profiles of leadership and generational change. But these are issues for other work.
The bottom line is that this deeply researched book provides readers with an unmatched array of data, a model for how to combine research on different levels, and the rewards that all this hard work brings. Smith’s focus on the clergy–congregant relationship and on clergy themselves as entrepreneurs and vote brokers is a significant advance on most rational-choice-inspired work in this field. Whether what we see in Brazil adds up to “culture wars,” and whether elements of religion and politics can determine political outcomes remain open questions, but either way Smith’s book is a must-read.
