Secularism at the Intersection of Race and Religion: Afro-Brazilian Religions and the Prosecution of Religious Intolerance in 21stCentury Brazil

Recent anthropological scholarship on secularism has demonstrated that the secular regulation and management of religion tends to be intertwined with concerns over national identity and minority-majority religious relationships. However, less attention has been directed at how secular governance intersects and co-articulates with other modes of governing difference. This project, by contrast, takes such interchanges as its primary object of study. In particular, it investigates the ways in which the wide-spread adoption of “multicultural legal instruments” aimed at countering religious and ethnic inequalities has influenced efforts to prosecute acts of religious intolerance against Afro-Brazilian religions in Brazil. Over the past three decades, the nation has experienced an exponential rise in evangelical Christian attacks against Afro-Brazilian religions. Influenced by black movement ideologies and a legal climate increasingly sympathetic to combating racial discrimination, religious activists have argued that these attacks should be prosecuted as examples of “religious racism.” These arguments have only been further bolstered by the addition of religious discrimination to the legislation on racial discrimination (Law 7716) in 1997. The ethnographic focus of this study is on efforts to prosecute evangelical Christian attacks against Afro-Brazilian religions that emerge from this confluence of black movement-influenced religious activism and multicultural legal agendas. Through a methodology that combines long-term participant observation in legal clinics, the public attorney’s office, and courts in Rio de Janeiro, with qualitative interviews and the compiling of an archive of court documents and media coverage on cases involving evangelical Christian attacks against Afro-Brazilian religious temples and practitioners, the study seeks to describe and theorize the various ways in which efforts to prosecute religious intolerance in a race-based frame bring together but also reconfigure secular and multicultural legal principles. This analysis provides the basis for the study’s development of a broader retheorization of secularism that is sensitive to and accounts for the intersectional construction of religion and race as objects of governance and law.