Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Magali do Nascimento Cunha 158 Digital media make it possible for anyone who expresses a faith, whether formally linked to a Christian institution or not, to ex- press their ideas, reflections, and opinions freely. In this sense, it took control of the contents of the faith (doctrines, symbols, rituals, dogmas) from the hands of the leaders. A person who has a simple digital space, be it a blog or a social media account, which involves a very low cost of access and production, has a broad openness for free expression, which was not always possi- ble face-to-face in the religious spaces. This process of the pres- ence of religion in the digital universe gives rise to new religious authorities: the evangelical celebrities (media ministers and gospel singers) and the bloggers and gospel YouTubers. These new authorities become a reference for many evangelicals as to what to think and how to act (KARHAWI, 2017). Venício Lima instigates an understanding of this phe- nomenon when he draws attention to the important role that the media play in socio-political dynamics: the long-term power they have in the construction of reality through the represen- tation they do of the different aspects of human life and, par- ticularly politicians and politics. “It is through the media – in its centrality – that politics is constructed symbolically, acquires meaning” (LIMA, 2009, p. 21). Thus, it can be said that the rela - tionship between evangelicals and politics at present in Brazil is marked by the process of social mediatization. Not failing in taking into account the positive and nega- tive arguments regarding the place of the internet in promoting political participation in democratic societies (GOMES, 2005), it is necessary to recognize that the occupation of this space en- abled some progress in the limited political visibility of these minority evangelical groups, with effects on traditional media, which instigates the analysis. It is an “arena of visibility” that forms the “sphere of public visibility” (GOMES, 2014) of evan- gelicals in Brazil. In this sense, as indicated in all the elements described in the previous items of this study, evangelicals place themselves in the arena as an organically articulated block. They are no lon- ger “the believers” or the closed groups of yore. Social separation, “from the world,” is no longer an evangelical value of the funda- mentalist-Puritan tradition: today they are a group that develops