Pentecostalism and the Urban Landless Movement

Abstract

This article addresses the connection between Pentecostalism and a movement of people who had occupied urban land in an effort to gain legal residence. Based on an investigation of the “Ocupação Glória” land settlement in the city of Uberlândia, Brazil, we analyse the ways in which demands for the right to housing are associated with Pentecostal dynamics and cosmologies. We examine how Pentecostals contribute to a movement to legalize unauthorized settlements in urban space, and establish an overlapping of political struggle and spiritual battle. We also investigate how the practices of evangelical churches in the “Ocupação Glória” at times work in juxtaposition and at times in opposition to other modalities of the social movement that operate in the settlement.

‘Trusting the Lord, Conquering the Land’: Pentecostals, Landless Movement and Grassroots Politics from Dilma Rousseff to Jair Bolsonaro

“…On the one hand indeed, the predominant trend in the vast scholarly literature on Pentecostalism and politics in Brazil is to privilege the issue of regional or national leaders acting in institutionalised politics (see, for example, Mesquita and Smiderle, 2016). On the other hand, while Pentecostal citizens are said to be increasingly active in grassroots social movements, especially for housing (Swatowiski and Barbosa, 2018) or land access (Ferreira, 2013), they are given very little academic coverage. Despite classic ethnographies in the 1990s on that topic (Ireland, 1992; Burdick, 1993; Lehmann, 1996), and despite academic claims on ‘intersectional and fluid identities’ (Garmany and Pereira, 2018), it seems religion has once again become invisible in social mobilisations.…”