Curtindo a presença de Deus: religião, lazer e consumo entre crentes e canções

Abstract

Every day, brazilians from various regions express their faith with the same songs. They are people who recognize themselves as believers and are publicly recognized as evangelicals, although affiliated with different churches. And they are songs generally recognized as gospel and scattered by CDs and DVDs, radio and TV shows, videos online, shows and cults, in churches or in the homes of believers, combining religion, leisure and consumption. This thesis is an interpretation of the circumstances in which this happens, written with the intention of contributing so much to Religious Studies or Religiology, when researching as songs become religion, as with Anthropology, when asking what it means to be a believer in Brazil. I faced these questions with multisituated ethnography in two stages. First by following people – the believers –, then by following things – the songs –, but focusing on those recognized by them as “praise and worship”. In the first stage, I took a church as a reference and, from it, I followed some young people through different spaces, including snack bars, small trips, shows and various events. In the second, I used some autobiographical accounts of composers recognized as “true worshipers” as a kind of map of the spaces around which the songs circulate, in which I could make inroads into participant observation, which included firms, shops, shows, rehearsals, cults, and a boarding “school of worship”. From these experiences and the theoretical appeal to the difference between faith and tradition of Wilfred Cantwell Smith combined with approaches typical of the so-called Material Religion, it was possible to realize that songs become religion escaping the immediate control of the properly religious institutions. Understanding that faith is something that goes beyond what happens in churches, just as leisure is not just about what happens in freetime and consumption does not depend exclusively on shopping – their modern institutional forms –, I saw that the institutions of leisure and consumption do expressions of faith circulate beyond of the churches, generating two versions of the same religion. Parallel to the world of denominations, in which each one systematizes in its own way a store of expressions of faith, arives the evangelical circuit, in which the stocks are dispersed by other institutional spaces, entering into liquidation. A multiverse with not always peaceful connections between these two worlds. Anyone who wants to understand what it means to be a believer in Brazil needs to take them into account. It is in them that the experience that the worshipers so long for, “to come into the presence of God”, gains the connotations of religion, leisure and consumption, making worship both “lifestyle” and “musical style”. In addition, Brazilians who are in the lower strata have found in her a resource in the battle for a better life. They hold a positive expectation in the face of routine suffering, singing in the midst of pain. Enjoying the presence of God.