The appointment of Jorge Messias, Attorney General of the Federation, and his final approval by the Federal Senate to fill the vacancy in the STF (Federal Supreme Court) with the departure of Minister Luis Roberto Barroso, will be the strongest blow to the alliance that Bolsonarianism has signed with evangelicals since the 2018 elections.
Bolsonaristas repeat all the time that it is not possible “to be a Christian and a leftist.” The talk is nonsense, but until then “there is nothing new under the sun,” as the wise Solomon wrote. Without this nonsense, Bolsonarianism would not exist.
Whether by strategy or luck, President Lula has struck, through the nomination of Jorge Messias, the missing blow to break the link in the dialectical chain that linked the last evangelicals to Bolsonarianism.
Minister Andre Mendonça, the “terrible evangelist” appointed by former President Jair Bolsonaro, fully understood the meaning of Jorge Messias’ appointment to the STF. It is no coincidence that Mendonça immediately announced his support for President Lula’s candidacy.
Bolsonaro has a knack for distorting everything he touches. It was so with the army, so it was with the evangelical faith. When Bolsonaro stated, in the context of the appointment of Andre Mendonça, that he would appoint a “terribly evangelical” minister to the STF, he put the minister’s faith choice at the forefront of the debate, a very private issue, when the debate should have been about his legal eligibility for the position.
Mendonça was stamped as the “Evangelical Minister” of the STF. But since his inauguration in December 2021, his work as minister has not been mixed with his religious choice. One should not expect anything different from him or any other minister. But Bolsonaro made many people think it would be different.
Jorge Mesías is a traditional Baptist evangelical. Andre Mendonça is a traditional evangelical Presbyterian. The first is left-wing and the second is right-wing. They are both evangelical and traditional when it comes to practicing the faith.
From the examples above, it is clear that religion is an intimate choice of life orientation that transcends politics, and can even be expressed with political ideologies on the left or right. Therefore, to say, as Bolsonarians do, that being leftist is incompatible with Christianity constitutes a disrespect for the essence of faith.
An example is worth a thousand words. Jorge Messias has been a member since 2016 of the Christian Baptist Church of Brasilia. Sergio Carraza, the church’s pastor, was Damaris Alves’s executive secretary in the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights, during the government of Jair Bolsonaro.
In an interview with MP Ottoni de Paola (PL/RJ) about his coexistence with Jorge Messias, Carraza declared that “politics in the Church takes a backseat, where Christ comes first.”
The idea of perfect alignment between a person’s ideological choices and his or her religious practices makes no sense. For example, Jorge Messias, according to the priest, carries out activities ranging from welcoming visitors at the door of the temple to monitoring the church accounts. There are reasons in religion that the political mind is ignorant of, as Pascal put it.
The final approval of Jorge Messias will be positive for both religion and the STF. From the point of view of religion, it has been proven that faith should not be subject to politics, as Bolsonarianism preaches. For the STF, the message will be clear: ministers’ religious belief, or lack thereof, has no bearing on the legal work they deliver for the Republic. This does not mean that the Special Security Force does not have problems in its work and even in the behavior of its ministers, but these are certainly not issues of a religious nature.