Brazilian Pews Become Trenches in Fight Against Quarantine

Crux ^ | 3/31/20 | Diane Jeantet

[marshmallow]

RIO DE JANEIRO - Like every Sunday, Brazilian Pastor Silas Malafaia took the stage of his Pentecostal temple in a middle-class Rio de Janeiro neighborhood. But this week, he wore a T-shirt instead of a blazer and, behind the three cameras broadcasting to his legion of YouTube followers, were thousands of empty seats.

Brazil’s churches have landed on the front lines of a battle between state governors, who have introduced quarantine measures designed to contain spread of the new coronavirus, and President Jair Bolsonaro, who is actively undermining them and says a broad lockdown will ultimately destroy Brazil’s economy.

Brazil’s politically powerful evangelicals helped bring the far-right president to power in the 2018 election and Bolsonaro is letting them know they aren’t forgotten, political analysts said. The most influential pastors are backing the president’s radical coronavirus stance while begrudgingly respecting governors’ orders, and either canceling services or moving them online. There are signs some churches are disobeying.

“I’m asking, which is worse: coronavirus or social chaos?” Malafaia, one of Brazil’s most prominent pastors who leads the Assembly of God Victory in Christ Church, told The Associated Press. “I can guarantee you that social convulsion is worse.”

It mirrors the argument of Bolsonaro, who has urged governors to abandon lockdown and likened COVID-19 to a “little flu” that mainly threatens the elderly and those with preexisting health problems. On Sunday, he hit the streets wearing no gloves or mask and joined multiple gatherings, in defiance of recommendations from his own health ministry.

Bolsonaro, a conservative Catholic who married an evangelical in a service Malafaia administered, has zeroed in on the need to reopen the churches. “God is Brazilian,” he told people on Sunday, O Globo newspaper reported.