Has a documentary put its finger on one of the most disturbing phenomena of our time better than this? Few, if any, have. Petra Costa identifies how the Brazilian right-wing dictator-to-be Jair Bolsonaro drew an enormous amount of his power from the massively growing evangelical movement in Brazil. Right-wing politics and evangelism make frequent bedfellows. Intolerance, black and white thinking, a powerful desire to wipe the slate clean of opponents and sinners all unite them. And evangelicals are ready to follow a great leader, Jesus in spirit, tyrants in practice, unquestioningly.
Bolsonaro presided over the second worst death toll from Covid in the world. Why? On the advice of Silas Malafaia—an extremist and charismatic televangelist with his own private jet and a huge following—he prayed and urged everyone else to pray as well. It didn’t work. Costa shows an enormous plot of barren land now filling with graves as but one of many powerful images she marshals. Her images are extraordinary throughout from gargantuan mobs filling the streets of São Paulo to the sight of Bolsonaro reciting words about God’s plan for Brazil as Malafaia looks on approvingly at his puppet to close ups of Bosch paintings that depict the scourge to come. This film may haunt you for some time to come.
But never mind the deaths and betrayals. Policies and plans were secondary to power and profit. And the Apocalypse. As Costa makes clear, evangelicals revised a traditional notion of the end times as a time of glory and reunion with Christ into a cataclysmic spectacle accompanied by death and disaster, as the Book of Revelations tells it. It was no longer a reward for the faithful in the afterlife but the onset of a truly Christian nation here on earth. The more death and disaster increased, the sooner the Apocalypse would arrive. No wonder praying in the time of Covid was favored over masks or vaccines.
Bolsonaro finally lost a close election to former President Lula de Silva, finally released from jail on spurious charges of corruption. Bolsonaro’s followers believed the will of God has been thwarted and staged their own January 6 rebellion following Bolsonaro’s defeat in 2022 when they stormed the seats of power in Brasilia to wreak havoc on Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural vision of a city of truth and justice for all.
Most chilling is how the film foretells many of Trump’s most baffling decisions. His attacks on and contempt or disregard for FEMA, USAID, AIDS research, basic vaccines, access to covid vaccine, Medicaid, weather forecasting, research on climate change, fossil fuel pollution, diplomacy, basic science and medical research, among others—most of which heavily affect his own red-state base—make more sense if we realize they all may help hasten the Apocalyptic end times. Trump would never say as much, as he does not have a Malafaia-like Rasputin or Antichrist whispering in his ear, but his kowtowing to fundamentalist extremism is well-known. Bolsonaro and Trump are two malevolent peas in the same pod and we have clearly not seen the last of them.