Conservative evangelicals use social media to sway Brazil election

Pastor Silas Malafaia frequently peppers his social media monologues about religious devotion with viral posts on hot-button political issues — including intense criticism of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

“How can a sensible person support Lula’s government? Lula, out! This is an embarrassment!” Malafaia, a 65-year-old pastor from Rio de Janeiro, said in a video posted last month. His accusations intensified a few weeks later: “Lula is a monster for saying a baby born from rape is a monster!”

As a wave of evangelical conservatism surges across Brazil, a cohort of popular evangelical YouTubers — including Malafaia — are voicing an anti-leftist sentiment through their online platforms. Their supporters have garnered significant political clout, pushing Lula to engage with their bloc ahead of October’s municipal elections.

Evangelical social media creators who critique the current administration have “a greater capacity to mobilize people” compared to other high-profile content creators who support Lula, Marco Antonio Carvalho Teixeira, a political scientist from Fundação Getulio Vargas, a think tank focused on social sciences and public administration, told Rest of World .

Malafaia, specifically, knows “how to exploit the tendency towards polarization that is so strong in the age of social media,” Anna Virginia Balloussier, a Brazilian reporter covering religion in the country , told Rest of World.

According to the last census that collected data on religion, evangelicalism in Brazil grew 61% between 2000 and 2010, becoming the fastest-growing religious group in an otherwise largely Catholic country. In 2019, 17 evangelical churches opened each day in Brazil on average, according to a report from the Center for Metropolitan Studies of the University of São Paulo.

The popularity of evangelicalism has permeated social media in Brazil. One study conducted by influencer agency Influency.me for the Brazilian news site Metrópoles found that eight of the country’s top 10 Christian influencers on Instagram were evangelicals.

Nearly 60% of Brazilian evangelicals disapprove of Lula’s performance, according to a May 2024 poll from Genial/Quaest , a collaboration between two polling companies. Some of their criticism revolves around progressive policies espoused by Lula’s administration, including those related to gender diversity and reproductive rights .

Evangelicalism has become “a kind of informal welfare state,” Juliano Spyer, an anthropologist and partner at Nosotros, a consultancy firm specializing in religion and conservatism, told Rest of World . Evangelical churches, which tend to be less hierarchical than Catholic ones, are often more nimble and thus more present in people’s lives. Members of these churches often help each other find jobs and organize crowdfunding to support the community’s most vulnerable members, Spyer said.

The eight most popular evangelical creators in Brazil have amassed more than 60 million followers between them, according to Radar Evangélico, a 2023 investigation carried out by Nosotros. A quarter of these creators’ posts are political in nature, concluded the report, which analyzed 44 evangelical influencers with at least 2 million followers on Instagram.

Technology has been key to the growing influence of evangelical churches. These groups are “integrated in the online world, with many WhatsApp groups, in a network with a huge communication capacity,” said Spyer.

This robust social media engagement is solidified during weekly meetings at church. When evangelicals meet, they comment on the content they see online, said Malafaia, who has more than 10 million followers on social media. He said that nothing is stronger than in-person communication.

The evangelical online ecosystem is made up largely of clerics, gospel singers, wealth creation and motivational coaches , and citizen accounts with small to midsize followings who have an interest in prominent evangelicals. Together, they wield a certain “evangelical soft power,” Spyer said.

17 The average number of evangelical churches that opened each day in Brazil in 2019.

For many evangelical creators, assuming a political stance is a moral obligation. Influencers need “to take political positions in the evangelical world in order to have credibility,” said Malafaia.

During the 2022 general election, there was a nearly 4% increase in political candidates who used Christian references in their names, compared to the previous four years, according to a local news report that analyzed data from the country’s top electoral court. The report did not specify whether these candidates were affiliated with evangelical churches.

Lula — who has frequently advocated for the separation of church and state during his 20-year-long political career — recently increased the use of religious expressions during public appearances, according to Balloussier. At an event in April, he said “God” and “miracle” 27 times, or more than once per minute, she said.

“ Faith in Brazil ” is a communications campaign intended to highlight the positive changes that Lula’s government has brought to people across the political and religious spectrum — and is his attempt to win evangelicals over, said Teixeira. “By opening up a dialogue with evangelicals, the government hopes not only to build bridges but also to influence this group on other issues that, in one way or another, are not part of their universe today,” he said.

Lula’s press office did not respond to questions from Rest of World .

During a closed-door meeting with ministers in March, Lula reportedly said that Malafaia’s God and the God of one of his own evangelical ministers, Jorge Messias, “are not the same.” The president also blamed evangelicals for the wave of fake news engulfing his government, reports said.

In public, however, Lula continues to appease this religious bloc. In May, he asked Messias to attend the “Marcha para Jesus,” — an annual Christian demonstration that attracts thousands of devotees in São Paulo — and read a letter penned by him. In it, the president said he celebrated the “extraordinary dimension” of the event and its ability to “bring together believers from different Christian churches in Brazil.” ▰

Matheus Andrade is an independent Brazilian journalist based in Medellín.

Daniela Dib is a Rest of World reporter based in Mexico City.