Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Magali do Nascimento Cunha 152 3. because of the frequent rejection of the country’s non-Christian cultural manifestations (the result of the same action by missionaries); 4. for isolation of social demands (resulting from the spiritualization of issues of individual and social existence), including political participation. As previously described in this work, changes in the evangelical culture, in the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, caused changes in this situation. One of them is identified in the erasure of the maxim: “the believer is not from this world, so one does not engage in politics.” This change occurred especially after the 1986 Con - stituent Congress when the first evangelical group was formed. From there, one can say that the isolation posture of this seg- ment concerning political participation – until then interpreted as something “from the world,” identified with earthly passions – started to live with other ideals, regarding participation and visibility in public life, which can be summarized in the formu- lation “brother votes in brother.” After many ups and downs, resulting from cases of corruption and cronyism, the evangeli- cal bench consolidated itself as a force, which resulted in the creation of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front (FPE) in 2003. Until 2010 these parliamentarians were not identified as con - servatives from a socio-political and economic point of view. Their victories consisted of barring the advance of projects considered offensive to religious, sexual morality – decriminal- ization of abortion, and gay marriage especially. Their projects rarely interfered with the social order; they were converted into “squares of the Bible,” with the creation of holidays to compete with Catholics’, and benefits for temples. The parties profile to which most of these politicians affiliated reflected this, as well as recurrent cases of cronyism. In research 3 on socio-political and cultural dynamics emphasized in the narratives of the main news and religious media about the participation of evangelicals in the electoral process, we can identify an increase in the power of the segment 3 According to research developed for post-doctoral internship that resulted in the work CUNHA, 2017a.