“Ele foi contado entre os fora da lei”: o papel da religião na criminalização e na legitimidade dos movimentos sociais

Abstract

This work analyzes the use of religion in the process of criminalization of the social movements, specially which are made by people and marginalized and impoverished groups or the ones which act in defending the rights of these same groups. It also analyzes the role of religion as an instrument of legitimation of the fights of these groups and movements. The first part (philosophical reasoning) approaches the use of the religious language in the criminalization of the social fights according to the categories of philosophy and sociology. It is showed the summary of some theories in which the religion configures as suprastructural ideology and the experiences of the use of religious speech as resistant language, specially in the Latin America. It is taken as background, the analysis made by Henrique Dussel about Hegel, Fuerbach, Marx, Rosa de Luxemburgo and Gramci’s thought concerning religion as the concept and about capitalism as a religious system. The second part (biblical reasoning) presents the study of biblical texts extracted from the gospel of Luke which show the rise of tyrants leaders to the "benefactors" categories and concurrently, the condemnation of religious defenders leaders of justice as "wrongdoers" or "outlaw". The biblical texts are read having as background the confrontation made by the Christian communities to the religion of the Roman Empire, that deified the Caesars and presented them like benefactors of people, while condemned the movements of contestation like wrongdoers. This part concludes with a summary how the term Lucifer, originally attributed to Jesus in the process of criminalization of its project, became the expression of evil. The third and final part provides a current example of the use of religion as a tool for social movements of resistance. It is showed the history of the Movement of Peasant Women - MMC. In times of growth of fundamentalism, the work wants to be a tool to confront the hegemonic discourse of criminalization of popular fights.