Sociologists and Believers: Alliances and Protectorates in Brazil

In Brazil, probably more so than in other countries, sociologists often hold the Comtean opinion that Sociology stands to religion as the positive stands to the theological stage. As secularization and disenchantment advance in the country and religion decays, in a supposedly unilinear process of undetermined duration, sociologists and anthropologists take up upon themselves the task of managing the remnants of religion, according to the parameters of modernity. Due to their lack of an elaborate theology concerning sin and guilt, the Afrobrazilian religion has become the object of explicit and enthusiastic approval from leading names in social science departments all over the country. On the other hand, scholars of international reputation (Brazilian and at times foreign) have contributed to give the cults a systematic theology supposedly based on originally tribal African memory. This has been called the “holy alliance” of social scientists and cultists, the former often imposing on the latter a kind and subtle theoretical protectorate. Such alliances also exist, in greater or lesser degree, with the Catholic Church (especially with the sectors linked to the theology of liberation) and with the historical Protestant churches. Highly emblematic of this tendency are the graduate programs in “sciences of religion” that have sprouted all over the country and Facebook like sites through which social scientists (who often claim to be believers)   and believers (who are at times social scientists) engage in dialogue. Contrariwise, there is in the country a process of open, so far only verbal, warfare between social scientists (again of the highest reputation) and the Pentecostal churches, viewed by many members of the scientific community as authoritarian and intolerant of all forms of individual diversity.