Reactions to the Pandemic in Latin America and Brazil: Are Religions Essential Services?

In Brazil, the Covid-19 pandemic is triggering tensions in health management that provoke, among others, a political crisis led by the federal government, characterized by negationist postures regarding the seriousness of the disease and lack of focus on public health policies. There is also an information crisis enabled by the political strategy of dissemination of disinformation that disqualifies scientific parameters and the role of the press. In this context, churches and Christian religious leaders who have risen to power in recent years play a fundamental role, which allows them to be analyzed from their performance as a public religion. By decreeing the closure of religious temples, as a preventive measure for the advance of the disease, evangelical-pentecostal churches insert into the public debate the defense of the essentiality of religious service as a fundamental dimension for society, conferring support and legitimacy to the action of the government. In this sense, this paper argues that the Brazilian scenario, when compared to other Latin American countries, is an outlier. Based on ethnographic research within online media and the religious media circuit, this paper maintains that, nationally, religion takes the lead in the political and information crisis. At the same time, this study affirms that, approaching other countries of the region, the churches reinvented mediatized religious practices, deriving from the social distancing and isolation, and offered new meanings and religious moralities around the health crisis.