The Evangelical Churches in Brazil and the Environmental Crisis

Our paper presents the potential strength of the religious phenomenon to face the emergence of environmental issues in the public sphere, with particular focus on how the involvement of the evangelical churches, of the most different classifications, had been with those issues, in this typical peripherical urban neighborhood of Felipe Camarão in Natal, Northeast Brazil. The planet suffers with problems of anthropogenic origin that affect not only human beings but non-humans by the environmental crisis and the New Climate Regime. Increasingly extreme catastrophic events have occurred across the planet and those events have reached this researched neighborhood. To reflect on this problem, we resort to the theoretical contribution of Bruno Latour with the “Sociology of Associations”. The research had been carried out since 2021, with interviews, site visits and participation in activities related to the issue. We analyzed the data qualitatively and found out that, even the churches do not have any proactive collective or individual initiative on the environmental issues, they are not opposite to the New Climate Regime, and it is possible that they would become an important factor of environmental conscientization. At present, we are testing this possibility and we will bring our findings in the presentation.