Interdiscursividade político-religiosa: bolsonarismo e evangelicalismo no Brasil

Abstract

This research investigates the intersection between religious and political discourses in contemporary Brazil, focusing on the discursive practices of former president Jair Bolsonaro during his term in office (2019Ð2022). The study identifies a growing process of interdiscursivity (Fairclough, 1989, 2001, 2003) between religious discourse and the far-right political discourse, a phenomenon that contributes to the naturalization of conservative ideologies and to the legitimation of authoritarian stances in the public sphere. This process takes place in the context of the significant growth of evangelical groups (Spyer, 2020; Vital, 2015; Johnson, 2017; Feltran, 2011, 2018) and their increasing institutional insertion into Brazilian politics. The central objective is to understand how elements of religious discourse are appropriated and re-signified within BolsonaroÕs political discourse, operating as rhetorical and symbolic devices that sustain a conservative project of power. To this end, the study articulates Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1989, 2001, 2003) with contributions from Pierre BourdieuÕs field theory (1998, 2003) and Max WeberÕs (2004) concepts on Protestant ethics, from which the notion of a zone of rescaling of symbolic

capitals is formulated. The research also engages with Patrick CharaudeauÕs theory of far- right populist discourse (2009, 2016), essential for understanding the polarizing, moralizing,

and exclusionary nature of these discourses. The corpus consists of 28 speeches delivered by Bolsonaro at evangelical events. The social analysis presents the historical relationship of evangelicals with the political field and, in the contemporary context, examines both the diversity of the evangelical phenomenon in its connections with current politics and BolsonaroÕs articulation with religious leaders. The linguistic analysis, in turn, mobilizes categories such as thematic recurrence, syntactic structure, vocabulary, verbs and verbal modalizations, pronouns and agencies, metaphors, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and the blending of genres and styles. The analyses show that the investigated speeches are structured as social practices in which Jair Bolsonaro, positioned as a privileged spokesperson of the Christian right, mobilizes religious resources for the construction of his political identity and position of power. The results indicate that politico-religious interdiscursivity is manifested through resemanticized linguistic categories, the blending of genres, and a polarizing style anchored in religious dualism, shaping a repertoire that puts the political order of discourse under tension.