O discurso de Robinson Cavalcanti: Uma contribuição ao debate sobre protestantismo e política no Brasil das décadas de 1970 a 1990

Abstract

The dissertation proposes an analysis of the contribution of Robinson Cavalcanti to the debate between Protestantism and politics between the 1970s and 1990s. He, a Northeasterner raised in the Catholic family in the interior of Alagoas in the 1950s, converts to Protestantism at fifteen years of age at a Protestant college, and afterwards he lived in Recife, where he made a university career in political science and religious career for 12 years in Lutheranism and for over 30 years as Anglican, becoming bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Recife. His keen writing relating evangelicals and politics and evangelicals and culture, theology, creeds and confessions in movements, churches and representative organizations of evangelicals through Brazil, Latin America and the world, allowed him to be engaged in both missionary organizations, as well as in university and party politics. The goal is to understand how the influence of Robinson Cavalcanti's thought on contemporary Protestantism has taken place and how he has become one of the actors who contributed to the development of a leftist evangelical thinking in the country. In this way, the relationship between Protestantism and the State since its arrival and establishment in the nineteenth century, the change to the republic and the period of search for unity of meaning from Protestantism to the civil-military coup of 1964, is first presented. In chapter two one enters the work written by Robinson during the decades of 1980 on and an analysis is made of his discourse on Protestantism and society: tradition, regionality, the Reformation as a mediation between the Catholicism he practiced with the help of the Jesuits and how his religious commitment was given to international bodies of evangelicalism. Next, to approuch the discourse of Robinson Cavalcanti his religious engagement, party politics and his main militancy in the 1980s and 1990s - the political action of evangelicals in Brazil post-Military Regime. The research takes as main written sources its 156 articles in the journal Ultimato, between 1980 and 2012, as well as the books, articles in theological bulletins and authors of the growing historiography of Protestantism in Brazil.