Evangelização e sociedade: a fé em busca de cidadania

Abstract

Pentecostalism is a form of contemporary ecclesiastical organization. Its history and development are inextricably linked to the poorest segments of the Brazilian population. As a religious phenomenon, it is a sector that is increasingly impacting various areas of society. It is part of a religious sector that is growing the most, being the second largest religious group in the country, behind the Catholic Church, but with the potential to surpass it in a few decades. This growth corresponds to many variables, but there is one that is considered, in this research, especially important: evangelization as a producer of mutual recognition. This postulated thesis is based on the perception that evangelization has a civilizing equivalence for the formation of the dignity of the human person, whose formulation was established in the second half of the 20th century, as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, rectified through the consideration that evangelization constitutes the struggle for mutual recognition, whose practices of measuring self-esteem and self-realization allow individuals to know that they are mutually recognized and thus their action is both recognizing and recognized, generating activities of affirmative spirituality of mutually valued intersubjectivities. According to this perspective, the activity of mutual recognition, organized through practices of valuing the subjectivity of the evangelized person, has implications for a faith that becomes citizenship with consequences for contemporary society. The analysis seeks to raise the potential of a citizen faith formed under the spectrum of the communication of the Gospel, as well as the limitations imposed by a world that is increasingly plural and restrictive to the communication of exclusivist religious ideas. It is based on the perspective that evangelization, even though it is an ecumenical practice, was arranged according to Pentecostalism – in flagrant antagonism with an idea of popular Catholic culture – and sought to foster resistance over the years to an idea of the world that historically produced segregation and did little to encourage the emergence of an individuality capable of producing its own merit. Therefore, evangelization within the scope of Pentecostalism has promoted the inclusion of millions of individuals into citizenship through their struggle for recognition based on spiritual practices that imprint a self-valuing intersubjectivity on their way of looking at existence.