Spirit & Power Ep 5: "The Twin Insurrections:" The Charismatic Right in the US and Brazil
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In this episode of Spirit & Power: “The Twin Insurrections’” Dr. Leah Payne speaks with Dr. João Chaves, an Assistant Professor of the History of Religion in the Américas and Co-Director of the Baptist Scholars International Roundtable (BSIR) at Baylor University.
His research focuses on the history of religion in the Américas, the influence of U.S. Protestantism in Latin America, and the development of Latin American/Latinx religious networks in the United States. Along with numerous books, Dr. Chaves has written about the history of Christianity in Latin America for news outlets such as the Washington Post and The Christian Century.
Resources & Links:
The shared religious roots of twin insurrections in the U.S. and Brazil by João B. Chaves and Raimundo Barreto
Christian nationalism is thriving in Bolsonaro’s Brazil by João B. Chaves and Raimundo Barreto
Christian nationalism is growing among US Hispanics. Scholars explain why. by Aleja Hertzler-McCain
Brazil’s Changing Religious Landscape, The Pew Forum
How Charismatic and Pentecostal Conservatives are Shaping the American Right Wing of Today, PRRI, by Leah Payne
Books by João Chaves
Migrational Religion: Context and Creativity in the Latinx Diaspora
The Global Mission of the Jim Crow South: Southern
Baptist Missionaries and the Shaping of Latin American Evangelicalism.
Remembering Antônia Teixeira: A Story of Missions, Violence, and Institutional Hypocrisy with Dr. Mikeal Parsons
Baptists and the Kingdom of God: Global Perspectives with Dr. T. Laine Scales
For more analysis of transnational music and media networks:
God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music by Leah Payne, or join her at Candler School of Theology’s Summer Institute, May 21-23, which will explore the theme “Songs of the Spirit: Music and the Making of Global Pentecostalism.”
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy The 2024 elections are upon us, y'all.
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We're going to talk about what happened and prepare for what's next.
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Tickets are available now, and you can find everything in the show notes.
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On January 8 of 2023, two years and two days after the January 6 insurrection attempt in the United States, an eerily similar scenario played out in Brazil.
The United States of America.
Former President Jair Bolsonaro's supporters overwhelmed Brazil's presidential palace, Congress, and Supreme Court.
And protesters prayed, waved flags, sang worship songs, and there was even a shofarist declaring spiritual war.
On March 4th of 2023, conservative leaders and activists gathered at the National Harbor in Maryland for the Conservative Political Action Conference to hear Jair Bolsonaro weigh in on the state of the global conservative movement.
When we speak of conservatism, what we fight for are basic things.
Family.
We don't want gender ideology. .
We want children growing, looking up to their fathers, boys and girls looking up to their mothers.
From the January 6th insurrection in the United States to the storming of Brazil's Congress in January of 2023, far-right populist movements Many with charismatic and Pentecostal roots are increasingly blurring the lines between politics and faith.
These groups are connected not only by shared ideologies, but also by global networks that influence elections and public opinion across borders.
With less than two weeks before the American presidential election, the question becomes, How will these transnational movements impact democracy, political discourse, and the role of religion in public life?
This week on Spirit and Power, The Twin Insurrections.
We examine the rise of charismatic authoritarianism in Brazil as well as the United States.
I'm Leah Payne, a historian and expert in Pentecostal and charismatic movements in the United States and beyond.
Welcome to Spirit and Power, a limited series podcast where we do deep dives into how charismatic and Pentecostal movements are shaping the American political and social landscape.
Today, my guest and I explore how charismatic networks are shaping political activism in Brazil and the United States.
I'm João Chávez.
I am Assistant Professor of the History of Religion in the Americas at Baylor University.
João Chávez is also co-director of the Baptist Scholars International Roundtable at Baylor and has written about the history of Christianity in Latin America for periodicals and magazines, including the Washington Post and the Christian Century.
I wonder if you could start by talking a little bit about the recent research you've done, the transnational research, into how charismatic and Pentecostal communities are thinking about themselves as political actors.
I'm now working with a colleague, Raimundo Barreto, on a book project about What people are calling Christian nationalism, right?
That's an all-white Christian nationalism.
It's a term that might not be applicable in the same exact way when you look at transnational or global interactions, but I think it's still generally applicable.
And we're doing work that we are looking at particular Pentecostal groups that have Significant power in Brazil.
Particularly, one group that we have had access and had conversations with is the Ministerio Internacional da Restauração, which is a group that has been connected to the New Apostolic Reformation and with the G12 and other transnational groups.
It's been an interesting research.
Both Raimundo and I were born under the Brazilian dictatorship in a time where Protestants in general and Pentecostals were not very large.
And then now it's almost surreal to see how much they grew and how much they have in Brazil influenced other places also.
It's a movement that is transnational and that is very much involved in politics, as you mentioned.
As I've told you, I was raised in the Foursquare Church, and most people in the United States don't know that Foursquare is huge in other countries, especially in Brazil, but not only Brazil.
And I wonder if you could talk about the shift that you observed from the kind of Christianities that were involved in public life in Brazil pre the ascent of Pentecostalism, and then how Pentecostalism has shaped The political landscape of Brazil.
Is that too general of a question?
No, I think that we can start there and see where it goes.
As a matter of fact, about your Foursquare comment, according to the last census numbers, if I'm not mistaken, I don't think I am.
There are nearly 2 million.
Is it a little bit more, a little bit less than 2 million?
The Foursquare is a very large denomination in Brazil.
Of course, the giant is The Assemblies of God of Brazil with, according to, again, numbers that we don't have the 2020 census numbers yet.
It's probably larger than it now, but around 12, 13 million.
You have a large number of people there.
But yeah, so in terms of Pentecostal growth, Pentecostals were not necessarily Noticed in Brazilian public imagination in terms of religion, all the way up to the 70s and 80s, the numbers that Brazil had for Catholics were upwards of 90%.
But when in the process of redemocratization of the country, In the second half of the 1980s, when the first legislature in Brazil, there were many Pentecostals who were elected, and then people started paying more attention to that.
That trend just continued to grow.
It's a parallel trend with a growing interest in politics and in elected officials, and also in numbers of Pentecostals in the country in general.
So just to give a snapshot of how things look, Today, the evangelical caucus in the Brazilian legislature is dominated by Pentecost.
You saw Jair Bolsonaro, former president, who was baptized in the Jordan River by a Pentecostal pastor.
Silas Malafaia was perhaps an Assemblies of God pastor, perhaps the one who was with him the most, very visible.
One of the largest TV stations in Brazil is owned by a Pentecostal denomination.
And the music industry.
You wrote your book on contemporary Christian music and also mentioned Brazil there.
It is a very lucrative and powerful industry in Brazil, too.
The reason for that growth is complex and progressive, but in terms of cumulative.
But it involves rapid urbanization.
Of the country involves the agility with which Pentecostal leadership can be formed, the use of mass media communications in ways that were ahead of the curve compared to other groups.
And so those are some of the reasons why Pentecostalism has grown so much.
And again, with the numeric growth came political power also, as we see the numbers of elected officials that are Pentecostals, who are Pentecostals, continue to grow.
And in a general setting in which the number of Catholics continue to diminish.
So even Catholic politicians and folks involved in political initiatives are now very aware that cannot very successfully move their projects forward.
Without intentional coalitions with Pentecostals.
And you see those coalitions happening in Brazil today very clearly.
Again, Bolsonaro might be an individual who highlights that, given that he is Roman Catholic, but was strategically baptized by a Pentecostal and went to many Pentecostal churches.
So then he catered to both groups, groups that are, again, involved in many coalitions in the country today.
Catholic-costal.
Can we call him a Catholic-costal?
Of course, there's the charismatic movement.
Pentacatholic?
Yeah.
You know, that can be talked about.
Yeah, but Paul Preston called him the first pan-Christian president of Brazil.
The first president where different people, both in the Catholic camp, the Protestant camps of different iterations, can identify him as he's our own.
He certainly did that, and there was some strategy behind it.
One article that you co-authored about what you characterized as the twin insurrections, so uprisings in protest of Donald Trump losing the election in the United States, and then a couple of years later in Brazil, you highlighted the continuities behind the religious communities that were an engine of Of those movements.
And I wondered, earlier you brought up the New Apostolic Reformation.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the ties between Charismatics and Pentecostals in Brazil and the United States.
Which kinds of Pentecostals and Charismatics are partnering with one another?
How do those partnerships work?
Yeah, that's a large question.
I'll try to tackle it and we'll see where it goes.
But first, I want to make a distinction that I think is important, which is between very visible Pentecostal leaders who claim to have their constituencies under control, And the different reasons why people in the pews might be making those decisions.
Those are not one-to-one necessarily.
But certainly it is true that worship services and media platforms of Pentecostal groups in Brazil have been marshaled to organize people for protests, including what became what we call the twin insurrection in Brazil.
There are different pathways That make those alignments possible.
One of them, again, in terms of the likeness of the Bolsonaro government and the Trump government, who could mention Steve Bannon.
I've met so many people through my life who said, man, if I was in the revolution, I would be with Washington and Trenton, right?
Or I would be in the Civil War.
Well, you know, this is for your time in history.
Bannon has been influential in supporting conservative political figures, like former President Jair Bolsonaro, aligning with Pentecostal and charismatic leaders to advance a Christian nationalist agenda.
Steve Bannon was also very involved in Brazil, who had many hopes for the Brazilian Bolsonaro dynasty.
Bolsonaro also have sons who are elected officials.
As a matter of fact, one of his sons was the chairman of the Latin American chapter of the movement, which Bannon leads.
Really?
Yeah.
So you see those similar strategies, doubting that the vote was right, so that the electoral process is fair.
That was part of what was happening in our insurrection on January 8th.
And certainly, there are pastors who organized caravans to go to Brasilia.
When people who filmed the groups that were already inside these buildings, some of them were singing worship songs, speaking in tongues, talking about how that act of vandalism was actually an expression of their vision for a Christian Brazil.
Indeed, Bolsonaro has worked hard to develop a close relationship with transnational charismatic ministries.
For example, he attended the Send Brazil in 2020, a revival meeting born out of transnational charismatic groups in the U.S., including Youth with a Mission, aka YWAM, Christ for the Nations, and Trump enthusiast Lou Engels' The Call.
The audience sang international praise anthem, Waymaker.
The audience sang international praise and praise.
And when Bolsonaro appeared before them, he brought the house down.
In January of 2023, protesters brought that same end times energy and apocalypticism with them.
All of those things happened there.
The few distinctions, however, from the U.S. From the U.S. insurrection is that the Brazilian one happened when the new president had already been installed.
That is an important point.
There's actually indicators that the military and the police were not necessarily against, at least not all in those groups were against the insurrection.
And the fact that Brazil is Hasn't been a democracy for a long time, since 1985.
And there's still some forces within it that could really make that a military coup that was successful.
Some speculate that if Trump had been re-elected, Bolsonaro would still be in power, given the potential for American support.
Of course, there is a deep history of U.S. support for military interventions in Latin America.
And I say this just to highlight the danger to the Brazilian democracy in those acts hit home in stronger ways than in the U.S., although I can see those themes overlapping both contexts.
In the Brazilian context, there is a real possibility that could have been a successful coup Against the elected Workers' Party government.
Thankfully that did not happen, but if a few other pieces had been a part of that, it could really have been the case of a successful coup in that day.
One thing that you've highlighted in your research that I don't think has gotten enough attention is the relationships between particular churches and networks of churches in Brazil and the United States.
I think a lot of people don't know that there are outposts of American churches in Brazil and Brazilian churches in America.
Can you speak to the closeness of those relationships or how those, you know, maybe the history or how those churches relate to each other and how they, if you have any thoughts on like how that works politically between the two countries?
Yeah, so there are a few things they want to talk about.
So you mentioned the New Apostolic Reformation, right?
So that is a network that involves leaders, but not necessarily their denominations or their churches, right?
So you have those kinds of networks in which leaders might operate and strengthen each other, but without necessarily investing all the resources and visibility of their particular denominations and communities into it, right?
So there is a looseness in some of these networks.
In some of these networks.
There are also Brazilian denominations who are in the United States and in other countries.
One example is the charismatic church, the Baptist Church of Lagoinha.
They have many branches in the U.S. today.
Lagoinha Church is a key player in transnational charismatic Christianity, in part because of its very famous worship band, Gianchillo Trono, Before the Throne, whose lead singer, Ana Paula Valadeu, is a proud alumna of Christ for the Nations, a charismatic Bible college located in Dallas, Texas.
Think the Hillsong of Brazil.
Like a lot of right-wing charismatics, she has a penchant for songs about her homeland and its special place in God's plan.
Brazil, in your land there is a people.
Brazil, a people who love you, who exclaims to God and believe in the promises.
He will be restored to our land.
"Brazil, on your soil, there is a people," she sings.
Brazil, a people who love you, who cry out to God and believe in the promises.
These churches and the media networks that they platform have been instrumental in providing support for Bolsonaro.
As a matter of fact, Bolsonaro left Brazil after he lost the election and before the new president was inaugurated.
He went to Orlando, Florida, and he visited the Lagoinha church many times.
The Lagoinha church, the Brazilian branch, had supported him very visibly during that time.
time.
So you have those networks with churches also.
And then other ways in which you have these connections are leaders from Brazilian denominational leaders, Pentecostal and otherwise, who come to study in the United States too.
While I was doing research for my book on the history of contemporary Christian music, God Gave Rock and Roll to You, While I was doing research for my book on the history of contemporary Christian music, God Gave Rock and Roll to You, I found a truly dizzying network of charismatic worship leaders and pastors from around the world who have been trained at Rhema Bible College in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Christ for the Nations I found a truly dizzying network of charismatic worship leaders and pastors from around the world who have been trained at Rhema Bible College in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, Christ for the Nations in Dallas, Texas, as well as at International House of Prayer,
Part of the affinities apparent in these two twin insurrections are due to the decades-long relationships among their alumni and the communities they represent.
Of course, there are missionary connections, and depending on which denominations, those can be stronger connections.
But also, there are south-to-south connections.
So not all of these connections pass through the United States, but often they go in different directions.
One example is the role that Israel has in the imagination of some of these communities.
And then they go on yearly caravans.
And one Pentecostal pastor had been the ambassador to Israel, a bishop from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.
You can see very much that as a large theme that also unites some of these communities.
I'll give you one.
So one example is this apostle that we interviewed, my collaborator and I, in Salvador.
who mentioned meetings with the Castellanos, the G12 movement, John Hagee is a prominent American pastor, televangelist, and founder of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, known for his strong support of Israel and his leadership in the Christians United for Israel organization.
He's also been a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, often praising his policies on Israel and religious freedom, aligning his ministry with Trump's political agenda.
All Israel will be saved.
Say that with me.
All Israel will be saved.
That means God is not through with the Jewish people.
And when Jesus comes back to earth, how's he coming back?
He's coming back as the Lion of the tribe of Judah.
Judah is the word from which we get the Jewish people.
He's coming back as a Jewish rabbi.
And they left because Castellanos wanted that to become a denomination, wanted everybody to go under his authority, and people like Hege did not want to be a part of that, but it was part of that network.
And there's just one example that you see this cross-pollination that happens sometimes From Global South to Global South communities, sometimes from Global North to Global South, sometimes from South to North.
It is really a multi-directional set of networks that continue to be connecting and thinking about these projects together.
The Americans from the New Apostolic Reformation we interviewed, and they preach in each other churches.
Those communities continue to strengthen.
At the same time, they have a level of independence also.
They align together to move some projects forward.
But that does not mean that they act in unison in terms of their own denominational interests.
These are complex groups in many different ways.
Stay with us for more analysis of conservative charismatic activism in Brazil and the United States.
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Chavez, I wonder if you could speak to...
I was struck when you were talking about figures like John Hagee and Lagoinha.
I always mispronounce that.
But I was wondering if you...
These people have massive audiences.
They're not hiding any of these connections.
And yet, observers of religion and public life often overlook these communities.
Maybe the moment we're living in right now is an exception to that.
Maybe scholars of religion and public life in Brazil have been on this from the get-go.
But I know in the US, people are very much playing catch-up, even though none of these groups have been hiding their connections with each other, right?
Or their political aspirations.
So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about why these groups have gotten missed so many times.
Yeah, that's interesting.
In Brazil, I think that what we're seeing Is scholars who did not pay a lot of attention to these groups now must.
And they were often not trained as scholars of religion, but they're in political science or in sociology or in history, which in Brazil are historically very secular disciplines, now have to understand these groups and sometimes they stumble to do it.
And folks who are scholars of religion who have been paying attention to these groups for a while, Are called to try to nuance some of those.
Some of the points that some journalists who have paid a lot of attention to these groups, social scientists and other scholars, now have to look at this.
It is in your face.
And you can escape it, right?
So you see that one thing that people do not know very well and are now trying to uncover, that's part of my work too, are the streams of funding that keep some of these groups going.
Who are funding these projects and these events?
It's not all church contributions.
There's more investment there.
But that is attention being paid there very much.
Again, part of it is a function of numbers, right?
There are 30 million Pentecostals in Brazil.
That's a lot of people.
And they own TV channels, like large TV channels.
You can see gospel singers in the most watched shows in the country who are Pentecostal.
It's really fascinating.
I was showing a colleague or a common friend in Brazil, how we are in the middle of a square, for example.
With the old-fashioned square that has a Catholic church right in the center.
We're getting some food, some street vendors, and the music playing is Pentecostal worship.
So then we get an Uber, and I'll point out, listen, this is a Pentecostal song.
And I often ask, I try to be sad about asking about the person's trajectory, and often these people are not even Pentecostal, but they are listening to Pentecostal music, right?
Hey!
Tu s o remdio Promessas de cura para os povos da terra Palavras de vida para esta nao
So you see the insertion in culture also in Brazil, in ways that in some places it became cool to be Pentecostal, As a matter of fact, Pentecostalism in Brazil is often understood as progressing in three ways.
We have classic Pentecostalism in the very beginning with the migrants and missionaries and all that, and the more indigenous Pentecostalism in Brazil, and neo-Pentecostalism, the three waves that Paul Freston popularized and designed.
But then folks are now talking about a fourth wave, where people who are culturally Pentecostal, but are not necessarily connected to Pentecostal churches, but not because they left.
It's not like an ex-evangelical kind of thing.
But that's what they are.
They consume the culture, they consume the songs, and the spirituality without having been connected to a church, too.
So you can see that developing there.
I want to ask what you think about this, because I've long thought about this in relationship to Catholicism.
That there's, on the surface, these movements are very distinct and maybe even opposed to one another.
But I think there are some affinities there.
And when you said cultural Pentecostals, it really reminded me about how people talk about Catholicism, like that it's an aesthetic, that it's a set of, that it can be.
And it's much more than that in many ways as well.
But I wonder if there's something about the culture of Pentecostalism that is a worthy competitor of Catholic cultural Catholicism.
I don't know.
It is interesting you say that because, of course, I grew up with Brazil and Brazil is both today.
This is the peculiarity of Brazil in some ways.
It is the country with the largest number of Catholics in the world and it is the country with the largest number of Pentecostals in the world at the same time.
But I grew up Of course, predominantly Catholic setting, when being non-practicing Catholic was just normal, was a way of identifying themselves, naming yourself in the streets, right?
So I am a non-practicing Catholic, meaning I accept all that stuff, right?
And there's some cultural aspects.
You go to these houses and you see the crosses, you see the saints, and you see all of that.
But I don't go to church.
That's not what I do.
That's basically what that means.
And again, you use that with Pentecostalism today.
And your question is so interesting.
Is Pentecostalism a worthy competitor?
It's interesting because what we see, though, is, especially via charismatic streams of Roman Catholicism in Brazil, it is the Catholics that are imitating Some of the strategies or some of the dispositions that Pentecostals have displayed for such a long time as partially a strategy of competition, right?
It's certainly different because in some ways, once Catholics incorporate that element, there are other elements that they have, more ritualistic, that Pentecostals don't necessarily share.
But it is interesting to see that they are incorporating a lot of the singing of the songs, even some sayings that historically are traditionally Pentecostal, that people in general are talking.
So there is a lot happening there.
And I think that Even understanding this cultural Pentecostalism might come from a context that has seen cultural Catholics for so long.
I wonder how this trend will continue and if that particular way of understanding a subset of Pentecostals who might be of people that might have some affinity to Pentecostalism without going to Pentecostal churches.
How does that develop?
But it seems to me like a very plausible proposition that you have this fourth wave of Pentecostalism.
There are people who are Pentecostal without having been or wanting to go necessarily to a Pentecostal church, and they overlap with the nuns, right?
Because if by nuns you mean people without religious affiliation, it can mean different things, right?
But that doesn't mean a person without some kind of religiosity and spirituality.
It can mean that.
It's interesting looking at and tracking how this will continue to develop because there is another growing sector in Brazilian society is the nuns too, just like the US in some way.
I'm super fascinated by how charismatics interact with that category, by the way, because of the fact that they can operate and thrive outside of institutions.
So sometimes I wonder if what's getting counted as one could also be, in another measure, counted as another.
That's right.
You don't need a church.
You could just have a TikTok account, to your point about media.
There's a lot of coverage right now about grassroots, charismatic political organizing on the far right in the United States.
And the new apostolic reformation is getting a lot of press, but it's not the only network activating for Donald J. Trump.
I wonder, are there comparable movements or organizations we should attend to in Brazil?
What will you be watching for in the future?
No, certainly there have been historically those movements.
I always wonder how grassroots they really are, right?
But there are some movements that are certainly organized.
As a matter of fact, if you look at the history of charismatic Catholicism in Brazil, it grew in some interesting ways.
Often as one of the strategies of resistance against liberation theology.
So it has had this contentious kind of history of development in Brazil since the middle of the 20th century, or the second half anyway, where it was propped up as this alternative that wanted to resist, together with the dictatorship that also wanted to resist.
The more progressive leanings associated with liberation theology.
And we have a lot of groups involved in Brazil.
We just interviewed a progressive priest in Brazil who is working with homeless people in São Paulo, and he's very much attuned.
The thing with Roman Catholicism is that it is a transnational institution by default in some ways, right?
So some of those connections happen in more organic ways, but also in structural ways.
And he was talking about Opus Dei and other groups that continue to invest in countries like Brazil and others.
So I think there is lots of connection there.
I know less about those.
I have paid attention less to the charismatic edge of this.
But I do know that they are working to establish their vision for the future of Brazil too.
And in this often uneasy but nevertheless strategic conversation with Pentecostals also.
But Joao was quick to note that not all charismatics in Brazil can be categorized as far right.
In the same way that these groups have been energized lately, there are groups of resistance also, both within Pentecostal churches and denominations, and also Catholic and otherwise.
Similarly as There seems to be this energy around the far.
That energy also has influence groups that are progressive to coalesce and to catalyze and to organize also.
So I think it's important to mention that those are complex identifications, right?
So we don't want people to equate Pentecostal or Catholic or Protestant in general with necessarily right or far.
There's lots of complexities.
And there's lots of resistance also.
We, for example, are going to interview for the project that I'm working with my collaborator Raimundo Barreto, a church that is pastored by a Pentecostal church, pastored by people who identify as part of the LGBTQ community, right?
So we went To a church, a Pentecostal church, that a friend of ours, pastor there, that welcomes openly people from different sexual orientations, gender orientations, and that are working also to counteract this far discourse that comes from other religious corners of Brazil.
These voices of resistance are significant, but they don't always benefit from the well-established media networks that conservatives enjoy.
The question is, can these churches resist, or can the people who go to these churches resist the strategies that use social media in very intentional ways to garner popular support for projects that Claim to be primarily against things that Christians should be against, right?
So I asked one of the preeminent scholars of religion in Brazil, who is actually a scholar in the area of communication, can the pastor of a progressive church effectively marshal their members towards a progressive vision of Brazil when they are being bombarded by these different medias from the far right?
And her answer was, unfortunately, I don't think so.
You have that complexity happening also, because even if movements that are resisting or trying to resist can do only so much if they're trying to play catch-up to come back to something.
You mentioned catch-up to a narrative of fake news that's being disseminated strategically through social media in different ways.
I appreciate your point.
In my mind, the ascent of Charismatics and Pentecostals and the religious right just shows the ascent of Charismatics and Pentecostals generally.
So they are actually politically pretty diverse, and they're racially and ethnically diverse.
And the fact that there are At least in the United States, they're predominantly white charismatics and Pentecostals on the far right.
Just shows you that it's not Jerry Falwell anymore.
It's Lance Wallnau.
And that lets you know that functionally many congregations that are mega churchy type congregations are functionally charismatic, even if they might not, the people might not self-identify as such.
So I really appreciate you bringing up the fact that there are dissenting voices, that there's not only one way of looking at it, but also The mass media, it's hard to get around the facility that those groups have and just the intuition.
They understand how to use that stuff.
Enculturated.
Yeah.
That's right.
And again, part of the problem is that in some ways, the left has been trying to...
Once you invest your resources trying to correct a narrative that has been put out, you're already behind.
You're not setting the narrative, but then you're trying to maybe correct a narrative that has been put out.
So it is really a big problem setting up a narrative that then Put progressives who want to offer alternative visions for these countries in catch-up mode, and that's where they mostly stay, rather than setting a narrative themselves.
Can I ask you, because this episode will air, let's see here, probably two weeks before the American presidential election, what will you be watching for as a scholar who observes these transnational political and social and religious networks?
I am hopeful but not optimistic.
I would like to look at the exit polls, but I do not expect Necessarily many surprises.
I hope I am wrong, but it seems that I would expect predominantly white evangelicals to vote for Trump.
I would watch to see how the Latino vote shifts, but apparently that's a population that continues to increasingly vote for the Republican Party too, so we'll look to see how that happens.
But those are the numbers that I think that I'll be looking for mostly, kind of demographic numbers and religious affiliation numbers and the combination of those to see who How the vote went.
But I am not sure it will be radically different than we'll see before.
If you want more insights from Dr.
Joao Chavez, you can find links to a scholarship in today's notes.
You can find me at drleahpain.com and on most social media platforms at Dr.
Lea Paine.
Thanks for listening.
Spirit and Power is a limited series podcast from me, Dr.
Leah Payne, with research from Carrie Gaspert.
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