As Portugal goes to the polls this Sunday, a transatlantic group of Christian leaders has come together to campaign for the National Democratic Alternative (ADN).
Founded in 2014, the small party has never held a seat within the Assembleia da República, Portugal’s parliament, and has drawn national attention for downplaying COVID-19 and blaming the US for the war in Ukraine. But its pro-life, religious liberty, and anti-drug legalization stances have drawn significant evangelical support, much of it coming from Brazilian immigrants and nationals who’re desirous to bring their political playbook against their former colonizer.
“I need to call on all evangelical leaders in Portugal, in addition to all Christians, to support and vote for the ADN within the elections on March 10,” said Brazilian representative and Pentecostal pastor Marco Feliciano in a YouTube video by ADN adherents several weeks ago. “It’s time for individuals who love the Holy Bible to arise and to make a call for a greater country, a rustic that protects and promotes Jewish-Christian values.”
Feliciano is one among quite a few Brazilian lawmakers who’ve made their evangelical identity integral to their politics. The founding father of Catedral do Avivamento, a neo-charismatic church loosely affiliated with the Assemblies of God, he makes up one among 204 deputies (out of the 513 within the lower house of the Brazilian parliament) within the evangelical caucus Evangelical Parliamentary Front.
This coalition supports keeping abortion and medicines illegal and backs other issues which can be essential to the evangelical public. Not all within the group profess the evangelical faith; about half are there to signal these stances to their constituents. Though the bloc has been criticized for giving unconditional support to former president Jair Bolsonaro and doesn’t have unanimous support even amongst evangelicals, its members largely proceed to win their elections and pick up recent supporters.
“On the topics which can be more precious to Christians, our group has done a really precise job,” Feliciano told CT in a written statement. This success has encouraged many to set their sights on places where the diaspora may need political influence.
Under a 1971 agreement, Brazilian and Portuguese immigrants to either country can receive nearly all the same political rights as nationals, including voting in national elections. In particular, many evangelicals in each countries now want to start out their very own evangelical parliamentary coalition. For them, step one is voting for the ADN.
Valdinei Ferreira, sociologist and professor on the College of Theology of the Independent Presbyterian Church of São Paulo, sees this phenomenon as a “natural development” of the Brazilian presence in Portugal.
“Brazil has created its own infrastructure of evangelical institutions. As a result, if you have got an intense presence of Brazilians, it’s natural that they may try to breed their systems,” he says. “This political ramification finally ends up being a side effect.”
A scholar of the transnationalization of Brazilian churches, Ferreira observes that “this conversion of spiritual identity right into a political identity is comparatively recent within the Brazilian context.”
“One of the primary evangelical deputies elected in Brazil was Lauro Monteiro da Cruz within the Nineteen Fifties,” Ferreira recalls. “He was elected based on his profession as a health care provider. His religious identity was not taken as something that may gain advantage his credentials. Today, nonetheless, people present themselves as ‘evangelicals,’ and that’s enough to run within the elections.”
As Brazilians move abroad, they take these practices with them. “This model of the evangelical bloc makes alliances with other faces of political conservatism, which has turn out to be a transnational issue,” says Ferreira.
One percent
Portuguese generally hold parliamentary elections every 4 years, but this 12 months’s snap elections follow the abrupt departure of Prime Minister António Costa, who resigned over corruption allegations against two of his ministers.
If the ADN receives 1 percent of the vote, it is going to probably be represented by a member of parliament (MP) for the primary time. In the 2022 parliamentary election, the party garnered 10,911 votes, or 0.2 percent of the country’s total voters. (The party would have needed 70,000 votes to earn a representative then.)
This 12 months a rather different scenario could also be shaping up. A voter panel conducted by CNN Portugal suggested that the ADN would earn 1 percent of the vote, a swing possibly explained by the efforts of nearly two dozen local pastors, all either Brazilian or with close connections to Brazil.
Paulo Nunes, who pastors Assembleia de Deus Missão Lusitana, coordinates the group. Born in Torres Novas, a town 70 miles north of Lisbon, he moved back to Portugal in 2021 after 30 years in Switzerland.
Nunes became a Christian in Zurich and began attending a Portuguese-speaking Assembly of God church, which was led by Brazilians and affiliated with one among the major branches of the Assemblies of God in Brazil, the Ministério Belém (based in São Paulo). He became ordained in 1996.
Nunes admits that, until recently, he knew little or no about Portuguese politics.
“I used to be aware of and in contact with Brazilian politics. I heard about what was happening in Portugal, but I used to be more informed concerning the Brazilian reality,” he says. “Brazilians have the determination to fight for his or her principles, for what they consider in.”
But other Portuguese evangelicals don’t find this model of political engagement as compelling.
On February 20, the Aliança Evangélica Portuguesa (AEP) issued a statement advising Christians to exercise their right to vote but in addition warning them to avoid turning churches right into a stage for electoral campaigns.
“Genuine participation shouldn’t be used to control religious and spiritual communities and organizations,” the evangelical group stated, “nor should the pulpit be utilized to rally support for the particular political agendas of a celebration.”
The AEP sent one other document to member churches, addressing a video that brought up the alliance within the context of a gathering between religious leaders and officials of the ADN.
“On this matter, I have to make clear that, having been invited to attend the aforementioned event as president of the AEP, my absence was not as a result of any unavailability or scheduling conflict,” wrote Timóteo Cavaco, “but slightly to the clear and resolute conviction and understanding that the AEP can’t be related to this motion or another of a political-party nature.”
Cavaco was approached by CT to comment on each documents, but he declined and stated that the organization would only address the problem after the March 10 vote.
But Nunes—who’s on the ADN’s party list and may turn out to be an MP if the group achieves a spot in parliament—says that the vote of Brazilian evangelical immigrants can assist change the country for good.
“The evangelical parliamentary bloc will likely be a driving force,” he says.
Feliciano sent a written statement to CT saying that he recorded the video to handle issues akin to religious freedom, the decriminalization of medicine, and abortion. “In the absence of legislators that act as opposition to those matters, they’ve been approved in disregard of what the conservative a part of society thinks. Portugal needs conservative representatives within the legislature.”
Egypt and the people of Israel?
Demographic changes may ultimately limit the AEP’s influence on Portugal’s evangelical church. According to Portugal’s 2021 census, there are 187,000 evangelicals within the country, or 2.1 percent of the population above 15 years old (the overall population is 10.3 million). This is greater than twice as much as 2011, when the evangelical population was 75,000, or 0.8 percent of the population.
This growth is basically attributed to immigration—a report from last 12 months reveals that there are 781,000 foreigners living in Portugal, a contingent that has been steadily increasing over the past seven years. Of these, nearly 30 percent are Brazilians. To put it one other way, nearly 4 in 10 Brazilians living within the country at the moment are evangelicals.
In a predominantly Catholic country, nonetheless, the very presence of foreigners in evangelical churches could appear suspicious. In recent years, there have been scandals involving church leaders in illegal adoptions of babies and immigration issues.
Antonio Rodolpho moved to Portugal from Brazil as a missionary nearly 30 years ago. He has held workshops in several churches across the country to assist leaders take care of an increasingly multicultural environment, including Brazilians in addition to residents from Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa (Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique).
“Some churches were about to die but were revived with the arrival of immigrants,” he said.
But sometimes it doesn’t go so easily. Rodolpho compares the connection of Brazilian churchgoers and their Portuguese counterparts to Egypt and the rapidly growing people of Israel in Exodus 1—the community grew so quickly that their hosts began to fret there is perhaps a takeover of power.
“When there are one or two Brazilian families, it’s beautiful, exotic,” he said. “When this group grows, nonetheless, then comes the fear—what in the event that they take over the church?”
This isn’t a priority for a lot of church leaders. Joel Resende, a Portuguese pastor within the Wesleyan Methodist Church at Gafanha de Nazaré, a fishing community 160 miles north of Lisbon, says that in his community, there’s a mean attendance of 100 people per service—40 Portuguese, 30 Brazilians, and 30 Bissau-Guineans. It’s higher this manner, he says, “than to have a Portuguese-only church with barely 40 people.”
For now, even with the support of Brazilian immigrants, the probabilities of an evangelical bloc taking hold of the Portuguese political space are very slim. However, professor Ferreira warns that the mobilization factor inside churches could give greater weight to the evangelical vote.
Since voting isn’t mandatory in Portugal, a surge of support called for by religious leaders may lead to higher voter turnout and favor a gaggle presenting itself as an outsider in politics.
“Even in the event that they are usually not numerically strong, they’ll still cause a number of fuss.”
