Paper short abstract:

I will discuss how the raise of the extreme right in Brazil led to a focus on discourses on “crisis” in one of the most influential churches in the country’s public sphere, the UCKG, which became one of the main actors spreading the fear of a world on collapse and offering answers to ‘polycrisis’.

Paper long abstract:

For Henig and Knight (2023), the term polycrisis ‘thinks’ a landscape of knotted events, while anthropologists zoom in on specific intersections to see how these phenomena appear in ethnographic situations. Here, my intention is to discuss how the raise of the extreme right in Brazil impacted Christian churches, and specifically one of the most influential in the country’s public sphere: the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). This Church’s importance in Brazilian society is connected with its participation in politics and media, and over the years it has shifted from being allied to the left-wing Workers Party toward support of Bolsonarismo. While much has been written about the electoral support Evangelical and Pentecostal Churches have given to right-wing governments, my intention is not to discuss how this support enabled government wins, but rather to trace the effect of this support on the Church. Focusing on the changes I could observe in my fieldwork with the UCKG, I will discuss what they meant at an institutional level—changes in their news vehicles, slogans used to describe their candidates for Congress, positions regarding public policies - and how these adaptations were perceived by their followers. The UCKG do not give long explanations to these ‘reforms’, focusing instead on the crisis. This approach simultaneously feeds the vision of a society on the edge of collapse while legitimizing themselves as having the answers to the ‘polycrisis’.