Religião, política e controvérsias: o caso do Círio de Nazaré nas eleições de 2022

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between religion and politics in contemporary Brazil through an analysis of the controversies sparked by then-President Jair Bolsonaro's participation in the Círio de Nazaré festival in Belém do Pará in October 2022, at the height of the election campaign. The episode is understood as a nexus of controversy in which historical, theological, political, economic, and identity-related threads intersect. The overall objective is to critically examine the use of this religious festival in the 2022 electoral context. To this end, three specific objectives are articulated: to reflect theoretically on the concepts of historical and cultural process, controversy, and religious and public spaces; to understand the historical and cultural process of the Círio from its emergence in the eighteenth century to its political use in 2022; and to analyze the political-religious controversies that emerged during the festival in 2022. The theoretical framework draws on the notions of historical and cultural process developed by Marshall Sahlins and John B. Thompson, the approaches to controversy proposed by Bruno Latour, Pierre Bourdieu, Francis Chateauraynaud, and Paula Montero, and the debate on religious and public spaces based on Jürgen Habermas and the Brazilian authors Patrícia Birman, Emerson Giumbelli, Paula Montero, and Ari Pedro Oro. Methodologically, this study is grounded in the qualitative paradigm, adopts an instrumental case study design, and is based on document analysis of news reports, official statements, social media posts, and audiovisual records. The central hypothesis is that the Círio functions as a dense symbolic form whose analysis makes it possible to observe broader transformations in the relationship between religion and the public sphere in Brazil, where state secularism does not imply absolute separation, but rather a complex interplay of arrangements and everyday negotiations. It is concluded that the 2022 Círio episode constituted a limit event in which the boundaries between religion and politics proved porous and contested, revealing internal fissures within Catholicism, competition among religious groups, and the agency of the faithful as collective actors capable of reacting to attempts to impose a political framing on their ritual.