.- Among the most viewed series on Netflix Since its debut in Argentina two weeks ago, “El Reino” has infuriated evangelical leaders in Brazil and sparked a debate about the links between religion and politics. They also set out to differentiate the Argentine reality from the Brazilian one.
In the first season, the plot is based on the assassination, during the campaign, of a presidential candidate, who was stabbed to death. After the crime, an evangelical pastor (played by Diego Peretti), from the fictitious Church of the Kingdom of Light, leaves the vice-champion and takes charge of the electoral race.
For Brazilians it will be impossible not to relate to the attack suffered by the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. But there are more similarities, with the interference of intelligence services in power, corruption, the complicity of the Judiciary with the powerful and the neglect of whistleblowers with few resources.
stab the candidate
The script is by the filmmaker Marcelo Piñeyro (“Kamchatka”), who also directs, and the writer Claudia Piñeiro, who guarantee that the series is fiction.
“When we wrote it, we thought it was a dystopian story, we felt closer to the ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ series than to ‘House of Cards,'” Piñeyro told OUOL . “But the newspapers brought news all the time from different parts of the world that had to do with what we had written, so we said: if we don’t hurry, we will end up making a documentary.”
According to him, the idea of stabbing the candidate was on paper before the attack on Bolsonaro and the project was presented to Netflix also before the Brazilian elections.
“When we were writing, I went to Sao Paulo and, in a conversation with friends, I learned about Bolsonaro for the first time. In the conversation—and I don’t want to disrespect anyone—he seemed like a colorful character in Brazilian politics, totally marginal. Four or five months later, he became president,” he says.
ACIERA reaction
Delayed by the pandemic, the recent launch generated immediate reactions in Argentina. The harshest of these was a statement from the Christian Alliance of Evangelical Churches of Argentina (Aciera), which brings together some 15,000 churches, criticizing the screenwriter, a well-known writer translated in Brazil, and who campaigned for the legalization of abortion in the country. .
The text accuses Piñeiro of trying to “create in the popular imagination the perception” that evangelical leaders “only have ambitions for power or money” and of trying to label them as “‘followers of Bolsonaro’, ‘right-wing reactionaries’ and agents of the wrong”.
The text was received by the artistic and political community as an attack on the scriptwriter and an attempt at indirect censorship. With the broad repudiation and messages of solidarity with her, the pronouncement ended up being taken off the air. But the controversy continued.
“We are not Bolsonaro and we do not want to be,” said Christian Hooft, Aciera’s vice president of institutional relations, after the negative repercussions.
“There are no evangelicals here in Argentina who look like Bolsonaro,” Cynthia Hotton, an evangelical who is running for congressional elections this year, said on a television program.
Argentina does not have a Bolsonaro
A OUOLHooft repeated that “the Argentine Evangelical Church is not the Brazilian one.” “Argentina doesn’t have a Bolsonaro and we don’t even want to have one, at least in Aciera’s opinion. We are not in this line of a church linked to political partisanship, ”he said, pointing out that there is a“ misperception ”about the danger of an evangelical advance and that the series“ is a fiction, but it still has a message ”.
The pastor cites the broad participation of evangelicals in the marches against the legalization of abortion, but says that “it is very simplistic to say that, because they are against the law, evangelicals are right or ultra-right.”
“They are also against human rights abuses, immigrant rights and environmental degradation, which is a more left-wing agenda. There are evangelical Peronists and anti-Peronists, Kirchnerists and anti-Kirchnerists, ”he explains.
Hotton, for his part, spoke as a future candidate, saying that evangelicals did not feel represented by politics and therefore were not restricted to temples. He tried to dissociate himself from Bolsonaro, but he has already said that he wants a religious bench in the Argentine Congress, as is the case in Brazil.
evangelical power
For the theologian and communicator Claudia Florentin, the association with Brazil was quick because the country is seen as the best example of evangelical support for a ruler, “not only those of a neo-Pentecostal character, but also of more historical Protestant churches.” , as it happened with some employees that Bolsonaro appointed, who were from Presbyterian churches, ”he says, also citing the presence of Pastor Damares Alves in charge of a ministry.
Florentin, who is a feminist and has been a pastor for 12 years, says that there are some Argentine provinces with a strong evangelical presence, but that there is little concrete data to say that there is influence at the national level.
“There are places where they have employees, there are legislators and legislators who are having an impact, although there is no evangelical bloc,” he explains.
legalization of abortion
“I think there is not a big impact on politics and that this is more what the evangelical churches wanted to happen. That is why it is constantly said that ‘we are 15% of the population’. If you have to say this all the time, I think you want to signal that you have potential,” she says. However, he points out that there was a lot of evangelical and Catholic pressure on legislators to stop the legalization of abortion.
Regarding the church portrayed in the series, she says that she expected to find something closer to what she knows, but that she saw “a salad of religious manifestations that has nothing to do with being evangelical” that she knows. “But then I accepted the fact that it’s a fiction,” she says.
“Today here in Argentina there are some characters who are like that, who seem to be creating a comic show, and we should not underestimate them because they grow on the basis of a speech that is very full of sowing hatred, resentment, fear and above all taking everything to the emotional terrain, because they talk not only about the worst of human beings, but also about other things, but mainly trying to remove any possibility of rationality from a debate ”, said Marcelo Piñeyro, director of “El Reino”.
Director Piñeyro adds that the series proposes a reflection beyond the evangelical churches, addressing the supranational mechanisms behind an attempt at conservative restoration, to increasingly preserve the concentration of political and economic power.
“The series tries to reflect on what is happening in the world, and each country has its characteristics. It’s not a series against Bolsonaro, I don’t live in Brazil, I don’t think about him every day and Argentina has a lot of problems. The series is having an impact in Europe, Korea, Turkey, because it marks contemporary directions with which people begin to reflect according to their reality. Saying that the series talks about Brazil is a way of changing the focus”, concludes Piñeyro.
you might be interested
Christian singer and her son are stabbed to death in their home
Church expels pastor Carlos Rivas for his controversial preaching
Israeli study: Natural immunity to COVID-19 is superior to vaccination
Pastora warns that Dancing Cactus is “hell’s trap”
Singer insults evangelicals for criticizing her after leaving Christian music
Posted by: – We appreciate your loyalty to our means of communication. We invite you to subscribe to the newsletter and activate the notifications section on the front page of our website.
Post Visitors:Four. Five