SACRASEC Workshop: Religious discrimination in urban Brazil: representations and everyday realities

The ERC Consolidator project “Sacralizing Security” (SACRASEC), in collaboration with the Open Cities Platform, brings you a workshop on religious discrimination in urban Brazil. This workshop addresses current manifestations of religious discrimination and attempts to unravel some of the dynamics that cause it. 

For decades, Brazil was considered one of the most Catholic countries in the world. During its republican and dictatorial periods, Roman Catholicism was closely connected to national projects, and after the re-democratization in the 1980s, Roman catholic symbols and rites continued to mark much of public life. In the 1980s, Born-again Christian movements started to grow explosively in Brazil and during the past decades, such evangelical movements have become part of the political landscape of the country. Many evangelical groups in Brazil implicitly and explicitly criticize the connections between nationalist expressions and Roman Catholicism and they also regularly portray Afro-Brazilian religions as spiritually malevolent – or plainly demonic. In the past years urban gangs who claim to be evangelical have attacked Afro-Brazilian religious temples and have pushed questions concerning the freedom of religious worship to the forefront.

Program

• 09:30 Walk-in and coffee/tea
• 09:45 Welcome by Martijn Oosterbaan (Utrecht University)
• 10:00 Leonardo Vasconcelos de Castro Moreira (KU Leuven) – “The Serial Killer’s Religion: Religious Racism in Brazil”
• 10:30 Wania Mesquita (Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense) – “Religion, Conflict and Violence: Pentecostalism and Afro-Brazilian Religions in Northern Rio de Janeiro”
• 11:00 Break
• 11:15 Jolien van Veen (Utrecht University) – “Pentecostalism, Crime and the making of the Israel Complex”
• 11:45 Discussion
• 12:30 Lunch