I do not know how many of you are familiar with the yearly March for Jesus rallies that are held on to the streets of São Paulo.
They have been going on now for over 20 years and have historically drawn upwards of a million people who gather together to sing and worship, to hear speakers, and to pray for God’s restoration of their nation. It is comprised primarily of Brazil’s growing evangelical population, from virtually all of Brazil’s 27 states. But THIS year, the annual gathering saw upwards of over 3 million people take to the streets in the name of Christ, and that is because the highlight of this gathering just a few days back was an address by their very own president, Jair Boslonaro, who has been dubbed the Tropical Trump.
He is Brazil’s very first nationalist, populist, and traditionalist president who won in a landslide back in October of last year. In fact, Jair Bolsonaro participated in the march last year, but as a candidate, and he promised to return the following year and worship with the people as their president which, of course, he has done.
The Governor and Mayor of Sao Paulo were there as well, along with Bolsonaro, so an incredibly special event of the Christian and traditionalist renewal of Brazil to be sure. But it is also a powerfully symbolic event for the rise of what scholars are calling the Global Christian Right or the Global Religious Right. A number of scholars have taken note that a thoroughly nationalist populist Christianity is indeed on the rise all over Western civilization, and is actually poised to change the international political order for generations to come.
What is happening in Brazil is not an isolated event, but can be seen in its own unique instantiations throughout the Western world. In Poland and in Hungary, the and in the resurgence of the Orthodox Church in Russia and the Republic of Georgia and Moldova and Bulgaria, as well as the resurgent pro-life movement throughout Europe.
For example, Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister of Italy, has recently said that he would “exert all the power possible” to “defend the natural family founded on the union between a man and a woman.” This is coming from the deputy prime minister of Italy and he is saying that this is because without a thoroughly pro-life national policy, Italy will not exist in a matter of decades, they will have simply ceased to exist due to the civilizational suicide of a globalist-inspired reproduction implosion. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has declared a new era of what he calls Christian Democracy in Hungary.
Poland has formally recognized Jesus Christ as Lord and King over their nation in a ceremony which included their president Andre Duda. And of course, President Trump has consistently defended the family, church, and nation as central to his America First nationalist platform. And so, when it comes to the latest landslide election in favor of an overtly Christian nationalist populist in Brazil, analysts are noting that we are seeing similar trends operative here. Bolsonaro won overwhelming support among both Evangelicals and conservative Catholics, and THAT support, particularly among Evangelicals was very significant for his electoral success, and this is largely because of the growth of the evangelical religious right within Brazil over the last few decades.
Scholars are taking notice of a trend that is developed over the last few years in Brazil where evangelical, rightwing candidates, otherwise considered totally outside of Brazil’s Catholic political mainstream, have begun to win elections with rather frequent regularity. We saw this in particular with the recent election of one of the darlings of Brazil’s growing Religious Right, the evangelical bishop Marcel Crivella, who was elected as mayor of Rio de Janeiro.
And in many ways this victory was just par for the course in the rise of religious conservatism that is been going on throughout the nation for more than a decade, and this rise has been accompanied by the collapse of leftwing Marxist politics that dominated Brazil for the last several decades, ultimately leading to this massive landslide victory for Jair Bolsonaro. Evangelicals in general have been growing by leaps and bounds in Brazil.
In 1970, evangelicals were no more than about 5 percent of the Brazilian population, today they number anywhere from 25 to perhaps 30 percent of the population. It is nothing short of absolutely massive growth in an extremely short period of time, AND that massive growth has the potential of translating into a comparably massive political force comprised of over 40 million people, which of course we get a glimpse of with the yearly March for Jesus rallies in São Paulo.
Now, our globalist secular elites really do not know what to say in the face of this; most look at this as nothing more than the deliberate trampling of democracy and the rights of minorities, and the assault on women’s rights and the arbitrary enforcement of moral laws shoved down the throats of the lgbtq community. They literally cannot seem to see beyond these myopic secularized standards of evaluation. What leftwing globalists simply fail to understand are the myriad of thoroughly legitimate and understandable reasons why Christian nationalist populists throughout the world have concluded that globalists represent nothing more than liberal totalitarians.
The Brazilian political philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, who many say is the intellectual guru of Jair Bolsonaro, makes the sustained argument that liberal globalists are simply modern Marxists. In other words, they are simply the modern manifestation of the very same Marxist forces that were behind the rise of the Soviet Union. They share the same basic worldview of the most radical leftist Bolshevik, the nationalist populist right, the growing nationalist populist traditionalist right, increasingly recognize the FUNDAMENTAL incompatibility between liberal globalized Marxist standards on the one hand and the traditional values of national, cultural, and religious identity on the other.
The absolutizing of the sovereign individual represented politically by globalist anti-cultural identities of grievance politics. It is increasingly recognized that this liberal totalitarianism is completely incompatible with a conservative traditionalist vision of life. Just think of it this way: If one worldview CELEBRATES, if that worldview CELEBRATEs what another worldview calls a SIN, a heinous sin, obviously these two worldviews are incompatible.
And, of course, rather than discussing this incompatibility and perhaps trying to work it out democratically and civilly, liberal globalists, largely through their weaponizing of labels such as racist and homophobe and bigots, liberal globalists declare liberal leftwing values as non-negotiable; and in so doing, they proclaim the virtues of democracy all the while declaring elections that they lose invalid, like we have seen with Brexit and the Trump election; they claim that they support the rights of minorities yet they have completely ignored the plight of Middle Eastern Christians who were being slaughtered at the hands of ISIS; They lecture us about inclusion and then exclude anyone or any belief they consider to be offensive and hateful. Liberalism IS totalitarian in its practice, whether liberals like it or not.
Liberalism lives, breathes, and has its being as fully IL-liberal, and Christian nationalist populists are but one of a number of population groups rising up and saying, “No more! We do not want anything to do with your version of dictatorial authoritarianism.”
The contempt that the world’s secular elite has for traditional moral values seems to have blinded them to the fact that, for tens of millions of citizens worldwide, nation, tradition, and religion really do matter. An increasingly overwhelming number of people are realizing that culture, custom, tradition, and religion, church family, and community, are mediating institutions that are central to what it means to be human and to our human flourishing.
The rise of the Christian Right throughout the world is thus bearing extraordinary political fruit in the rise of nationalists, populists, and traditionalists and their increasing electoral victories. And if the overtly Christian presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is any indicator, a renewed Christian civilization is literally right around the corner.