‘For the Lord, for Justice, for an End to Sexist Behavior’

Vitoria thought it was strange when her church’s youth-group leader asked her if he could come to her house to talk about upcoming plans for the group. Vitoria, 18 at the time, had been active in First Baptist Church of Rio Doce in Olinda, Brazil. Recently, though, she had been attending youth services at a friend’s nearby church.

The youth-group leader arrived at Vitoria’s home and asked to use the bathroom. When he came out, she said, he held out his cell phone to show her something. “When he came in and was going to show me the plans, he reached around my back and tried to unclasp my bra,” Vitoria said.

Vitoria asked him what he was doing. Then, she said, he dragged her into her bedroom and raped her.

“Here in Brazil, the movement has gone in the opposite direction”

While Brazil’s Carnival celebrations are famous for their libidinous nature, less well known are the expectations that women in the country “stay in their place.” Pressure on women to dress modestly and comply with traditional gender roles has ratcheted up as conservative evangelical churches have drawn millions of new members, growing from less than 10 percent of the population in 1970 to 27 percent now.

“Brazilian culture is asymmetrical when it comes to gender,” said Robson Souza of the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation in Recife, one of the largest cities in northeastern Brazil. “The Brazilian evangelical ethos adapts itself to Brazil’s reality in terms of double standards of morality and positioning women in a certain place,” said Souza, who conducts research on evangelical women in Brazil.

This was not always the case. When the country emerged from more than two decades of dictatorship in the mid-1980s, Souza said, Protestant churches accepted women’s leadership. While mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. and Europe have become more open to women being ordained and leading congregations, according to Souza, “Here in Brazil, the movement has gone in the opposite direction.”

However, Souza said, this retreat doesn’t only affect women. “From a religious perspective, this more conservative, asymmetrical, unequal Brazilian ethos ends up accompanying not just gender, but also racial and ethnic relations and other spaces.”

Fabio Py, a researcher at the State University of Northern Rio de Janeiro, says this intolerance is being translated into a larger socio-political framework he calls “Christo-fascism.” The concept of Christo-fascism was developed by German theologian Dorothee Sölle to explain why Germany’s churches supported the rise of the Nazi regime. “They take on positions against minorities, and they have a plan aimed at taking power, total power,” Py said. “To this end, in the name of Christ, they endorse virulent practices against other social actors.” He describes the trend as one that has developed over time through the efforts of evangelicals and Catholics in favor of “traditional family values.” But he underlines that it is the action of the government against certain groups that characterizes Christo-fascism. “Now this is happening in Brazil,” he said in a phone interview.

Py has studied how internet memes offer one vehicle for spreading a Christo-fascist vision. For example, one meme that appeared in the run-up to Brazil’s 2018 election was a photo of then-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro in his hospital bed after being stabbed. In a clear allusion to Christ’s martyrdom, the meme’s caption read: “He bled for us. Can he count on your repayment on October 7?” Bolsonaro won the presidency in October 2018.

Brazilian women, and others, worry what will happen to their rights now that Bolsonaro occupies the highest office in the land. With his denigration of LGBTQ people, Afro-Brazilians, Indigenous people, and women, Bolsonaro’s rhetoric contributed, according to Py, to dozens of attacks by his supporters in the weeks surrounding the elections.

#Metoo, #Churchtoo

After the attack by the youth-group leader, Vitoria told her best friend. A week later, she also told her mother.

Vitoria says her mother spoke with the pastor of the youth leader’s church shortly after learning about the alleged rape. Vitoria and the pastor, Josemar Gonçalves, 54, have different accounts of what happened next. Gonçalves says he removed the accused assailant from his church duties immediately. Vitoria says he didn’t. “After various other sisters [in the church] came together and, so to speak, put his back against the wall, telling him that he had to do this—that was when he decided to remove [the alleged assailant].”

Two other young women came forward to report assaults by the same man. Henriqueta de Beli, the prosecutor handling Vitoria’s case, said that Gonçalves had tried to resolve the other cases without involving authorities. Gonçalves denied knowledge of these reports. The accused’s attorney declined to comment on the case.

Not long after the case became public, Vitoria stopped attending the church. “I had to stop going because some people believed that I was who should be expelled from the church,” she said. She described church members leaving local shops when she walked in and supporters of the alleged assailant glaring at her. Shortly after the assault, Vitoria went to the church, only to have the youth-group leader walk in and sit facing her. Vitoria said he glared at her in a threatening posture.

“I'm a Christian feminist, and I believe in the Bible”

Conservative Christians have become a powerful cultural force in Brazil. The trend is visible in everything from the box-office success of a biopic about one of Brazil´s most powerful evangelical preachers, Edir Macedo, to the rise of shops that offer “modest” women’s clothing such as knee-length skirts and high-necked shirts.

Many Brazilians attribute attitudes demanding women's modesty and chastity to Protestant churches, commonly called “evangelical” in Brazil. In reality, the idea of women as chattel permeates society. Valéria Vilhena, co-founder of Evangelicals for Gender Equality, conducted her master’s research on domestic violence among Protestant households. She said that the patriarchal system “organizes society, while religious discourse makes [that system] ‘sacred.’” The result, she said, is a self-reinforcing mechanism of female subordination.

Vozes Marias (Mary’s Voices) is one of several feminist Christian groups in Brazil organizing as a counterpoint to the wave of conservatism washing over the country.

“I was always certain that Christ was the savior,” said Erica Farias, a Vozes Marias member, “and I still am.” Farias left her congregation after seeing how women and girls in her church who got pregnant were ostracized while their male partners continued as if nothing had happened. These experiences led her to Vozes Marias, which questions the social norms behind such hypocrisy and offers support to the women affected.

“This system really is oppressive,” Farias said. “It damages women’s spiritual subjectivity, the subjectivity of her femininity. ... There are many church systems that have destroyed women alive.”

When Vozes Marias offers a feminist interpretation of the Bible, Farias said, it’s an interpretation that most people didn’t know existed and can be a way to maintain faith in Christ. “I believe that we are revolutionary, in the sense that when I say that I’m a Christian feminist, and I believe in the Bible, [they say] What? How can you do that?”

Helivete Ribeiro is a Baptist minister in a mixed-income community near the historic center of Olinda. One of the founding members of Vozes Marias, Ribeiro brings her experience as a theologian to the group, which works to support women experiencing violence. Women contact the group through an informal network, although Vozes Marias also conducts workshops in churches and elsewhere on domestic violence and other issues.

“We’re often seen in a bad light because we show up as women who support other women, and we say that we are evangelical feminists,” Ribeiro said, “and that ends up scaring the leadership a bit.” Nonetheless the group has made progress. “We aren’t able to harvest the fruits immediately, but we know that we have a lot of friends.”

Crossing the Rubicon

When Vitoria’s father learned about the rape three months after the fact, he took Vitoria, his only child, to the police to report it. Although a handful of women from the congregation stood with her, she said filing the report was like crossing the Rubicon. Sometime after filing the police report, Vitoria connected with Vozes Marias. Their first meeting was in a member’s nearby home.

Members of Vozes Marias were present for the initial hearing when the accused brought a team of 10 attorneys, each of whom would have been able to interrogate Vitoria. Prosecutor de Beli petitioned the judge to adjourn the session, and Vitoria later gave her deposition in a more private setting.

Although Vozes Marias works in the background to avoid exposing vulnerable women to more violence from abusive partners, the group used a different strategy with Vitoria. As Vitoria and de Beli contended with the accused’s attorneys inside the courtroom, Vozes Marias convened dozens of women to protest outside the courthouse. Playing drums, the women chanted slogans such as “For the Lord, for justice, for an end to sexist behavior.” Local TV and newspapers reported on the protest.

For Vitoria, Vozes Marias’ support buoyed her spirits at a critical juncture. “It’s like a race, and if I tripped, they were there cheering for me, like a team,” she said.

“Does provocative clothing contribute to rape?”

On a clear Sunday morning, Nadiedja Souza conducts a workshop in a Baptist church in a middle-class neighborhood in Recife. Pivoting fans perch near the top of tall, vertical beams along both sides of the church, tempering the heavy, tropical heat.

Souza represents the Baptist Convention of Pernambuco, and for 10 years she has led similar workshops in congregations around the state to raise awareness of rape culture. During the heart of the workshop, Nadiedja Souza breaks the congregation into small groups. Each group has a question to discuss, such as: Does a woman in provocative clothing contribute to her rape? Is the Maria da Penha law (Brazil’s domestic violence legislation) aimed at punishing men? What role should the church play, if any, in eliminating gender-based violence?

According to data from Pernambuco’s secretary of social defense, in 2018 women filed more than 39,000 reports of domestic violence and more than 300 women were murdered. The agency says less than a third of these were femicides—that is, murders committed because of the victim´s gender. Gender-justice advocates, however, question the criteria used to classify the killings.

After Nadiedja Souza’s workshop, it’s clear that while some find the content illuminating, others walk out with less than a change of heart. Gilson Tenorio is one of the latter. Tenorio, in his mid-40s, is pastor of the church that hosted the workshop. As the church’s band practices in the sanctuary, we sit in his office and discuss violence against women.

“Feminism, just like machismo, is an attempt to show that there is a competition between men and women, and that one is better than the other,” he said. “We live in a society in which men have always been in charge, and now feminism wants women to be in charge.” I suggest that feminism is actually about women being able to live their lives as they desire and to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as men, but Tenorio insists that “feminism, like machismo, are sins against God.”

When I ask his thoughts on Vitoria’s case, he says that while the case is still being decided by the justice system, the accused raped her to “correct” her homosexuality. Vitoria is not gay. Vitoria recalls that her attacker said “that [the rape] was to see if I liked boys or girls.”

Living the legacy of slavery

Race and class exacerbate the challenges facing women in the struggle for equality in Brazil, which imported 5 million slaves, more than any other country in the world. Recife, which grew on the profits from surrounding sugar plantations, is a living testament to that era.

Black workers continue to toil under the tropical sun on sugar cane plantations that hug the Recife metropolitan area. The city also embodies colonialism’s economic inequality as a small white elite continues to dominate the majority-black city.

For Lillian Conceição da Silva, a Recife native and Anglican minister, churches perpetuate these racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Da Silva, who is black, holds a doctorate in theology. Her doctoral thesis focused on church-based efforts to address violence against black women.

“There is an ongoing attempt, which is centuries old, to hypersexualize black women’s bodies and to render them banal,” da Silva said. “Anyone can touch [those bodies]; anyone can appropriate [them], and, certainly, that helps to understand how violence against black women is normalized. It’s no coincidence that black women are the main victims of femicide in Brazil.”

Vitoria identifies as Afro-Brazilian. So do Nadiedja Souza, Erica Farias, and Helivete Ribeiro. Murders of women increased more than 30 percent between 2007 and 2017, according to the 2019 Atlas of Violence, published by Brazil’s Economic Statistics Agency and the Brazilian Forum on Public Security. There is a striking disparity between the murder rate of black women, which rose by 29.9 percent during this period, and that of women who are not black, which increased by less than 2 percent.

Breaking the silence

Vitoria says the rape transformed her. “It opened my eyes,” she explained. “If I had known of another case before this happened, I wouldn’t have believed it. I realized that I had to talk about this so that what happened to me wouldn’t happen to other people.” The experience also changed the way she looked at her church. “This happens to other women, but they are often silenced so that someone with power in the church isn’t hurt.”

Between 2014 and 2018, government spending on policies to prevent violence against women and promote women’s autonomy was slashed by 62 percent, from more than $40 million to less than $15 million, according to Brazil’s Institute of Socio-Economic Studies.

The women of Vozes Marias worry how women will be further affected by the reactionary agenda of President Bolsonaro. In spite of this, Vitoria has a trajectory mapped out for herself.

“In five years, I see myself helping other people,” she said. “I see myself having graduated from college. I want to help society, especially women victims of violence. And I don’t want to live here anymore. Not because here isn’t good for me, but because this situation feels like something that’s going to mark it forever.”