Conservative Wave, Religion and the Secular State in Post-impeachment Brazil

This article analyses the sociocultural and political transformations experienced during the process of Brazilian democratisation since the 1980s, in relation to a concomitant evangelical-Pentecostal political emergence. The proposed analysis situates the process of religious change amid the multidimensionality and contingency of demands for expanding democratisation, resulting in a reconfiguration of the political and cultural markers that defined the secular state in the Brazilian case. An effort is also made to understand this case in the light of similar (and increasingly disseminative) processes in Latin America and the North Atlantic part of the Northern Hemisphere. Different configurations of Brazilian Pentecostalism as public religion and its profound implications for the disputes for the secularity of the state in a pluralist key are highlighted. The approach is based on a critical dialogue with the contributions of William Connolly's pluralist theory and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theory of political discourse and a series of Brazilian and Latin American academic interlocutors. The argument benefits from research carried out especially in the last seven years in Brazil, alongside comparative work carried out in Brazil, Argentina, the UK, and literature on other Latin American cases. The guiding threads of the analysis are the experience of evangelical minoritisation in national politics and the recent attempt by Pentecostals and conservative evangelicals to hegemonise society.