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Making religion in public: religious staging and public influence

Abstract

This article analyses the problem of the recent reconfiguration of Brazilian secularism, taking into account the expansion of the activism of several religious agencies in the most varied national public arenas. We observed three empirical cases involving religious agents – the Solomon’s Temple Inauguration ceremony, the media’s repercussion of a transgender pastor and two controversies in the Federal Supreme Court – analyzing the different dynamics of production of visibility that results in a new understanding of what it is to “do religion” in public. In this sense, it was observed how to make the experience public sacralizes (moralises) the private problems and it has been found that the effectiveness of contemporary religious language cames much more from the quality and plasticity of its scenarios in the different arenas than of the imposition of a religion’s message.

Keywords:
religion, secularism, publicity; public arenas

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