The holy spirit and the “King at the End of the World”: Transmission of charisma and escatological iconography in Bolsonaro’s government

Abstract

The election of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil was supported, among other alliances, by three noticeable religious leaders of Brazilian Christianity: Pastor Silas Malafaia, of the Assembly of God, Bishop Edir Macedo, of the Universal Church, and the Monsignor Jonas Abib, of the Canção Nova Community (CN). After the election, Bolsonaro made public appearances in order to thanks his religious supporters, having attended events at the Assembly of God and at Chácara Santa Cruz, headquarters of the CN in Vale do Paraíba Paulista, and more recently at the Temple of Solomon, of the IURD. The visit to Canção Nova was marked by a ritual described by the media as “prayer”, but which corresponds to the complex ritual of “laying on of hands”, which includes, in addition to prayers, the transference of the Holy Spirit, a spiritual entity that makes part of the process of constituting the charismatic person (Bonfim, 2012). The objective of the article is to combine the ontological and ritual aspect of contemporary pneumatic communication of Canção Nova within the relations between the religious and the politician mobilized with the ascension of a right-wing government in Brazil.