Notes on evangelical Christianity, violent sociability, and Rio de Janeiro's urban periphery

Abstract

This article presents some considerations about Brazil's current social and political context by emphasizing a perspective that takes into account the importance of urban peripheries in the country's social life. I consider the presence and influence of evangelical Christianity – in demographic, cultural, and political ascension – as well as new patterns of sociability constituted and disseminated from the social dynamic that stem from the violent conflicts between police and military forces and factions of organized crime (particularly those linked with illegal drug trafficking and paramilitary militias) as indispensable explanatory vectors to understand the country's contemporary social reality. I read these vectors from the point of view of my (auto)ethnographic as a teacher in the Complexo do Chapadão, in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro.