Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Religions in the media polis: mediatization, Protestants and politics in Brazil 151 ality’ – how the social bond is changing for young people, how relationships between parents and children, and between couples are changing. [...] And, finally, the new ‘rituals’ that happen in con - nection to the new industrial formats made pos- sible by ‘technicality’. Somehow, at that moment I accept that the place from which I was looking changes. [...] It was necessary to assume not the priority of the media, but that ‘the communicative is becoming a protagonist in a much stronger way’ (2009, p. 151-152). Concerning the mediatization of religions, Fausto Neto asserts these “new rituals” while recognizing that, in the context to which Martín-Barbero refers as new interactions via “techni- cality,” there is a “construction and publicization of new forms of religiosities” (2002, p. 152). For the researcher, these new forms constitute the dynamic in which religious groups “subordinate” their practices and actions to the production processes “that are taken as loans to the sphere of the media field.” We identified, therefore, that new communicational flows – the circulation of meanings and values across porous religious boundaries – start to give new meaning to the experi- ences, practices, and the doctrines rooted in Brazilian evangeli- cal religious traditions, as we will discuss next. III – New meanings Regardless of the peculiarities of the distinct groups that form the evangelical segment, Brazilian evangelicals were classically identified, in studies of religion, according to Magali Cunha (2007): 1. for a predominant fundamentalist (literalist) read- ing of the Christian sacred text, the Bible; 2. the emphasis on personal piety in the pursuit of soul salvation (influence of Puritanism and the pi - etism of the missionary pioneers who came from the southern United States in the 19th century to Brazil);