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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography in a Baptist soup kitchen in Curitiba, Brazil, (2022–2024), this paper examines how conservative faith-based actors combine care and evangelization to negotiate belonging, otherness and political subjectivities in polarized and precarious times.

Paper long abstract

Soup kitchens are often considered short-term solutions to failing welfare states. In Brazil, this view was reinforced during and after Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency (2018–2022), which many saw as a period of diminished welfare. However, the Brazilian welfare state has long been shaped, supplemented, and contested by social movements, religious organizations, and humanitarian actors. During the Covid-19 pandemic, soup kitchens gained renewed visibility and were reframed as part of the welfare system under center-left President Lula da Silva. This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted from 2022 to 2024 at a Baptist-run soup kitchen in Curitiba, Brazil, during and after the presidential elections. At Sopa Solidária, volunteers served soup to residents of Curitiba’s impoverished city center and a nearby favela. Despite the fact that soup kitchens were publicly embraced as part of Lula's welfare policy, support for the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro was widely expressed among the volunteers. Unlike in European contexts, where migrants are often the primary "others" in ethnonationalist welfare narratives, in southern Brazil, otherness is articulated along moral, religious, racial, class, and regional lines. Volunteers oscillated between perceiving recipients as "criminals," "addicts," or "possessed by the devil" and as "spiritual brothers and sisters" or "potential believers." Recipients were constructed as moral outsiders, yet they were also seen as individuals who can be transformed through religious conversion and incorporated into the community. Faith-based actors provided social protection outside the state by creating moral hierarchies, political subjectivities, and a sense of belonging in contexts of precarity and political polarization.