ABSTRACT
This article analyzes, from the perspective of anthropology of law and symbolic anthropology, the legal and social rituals of evangelical politics in order to halt progress in the construction of a lay state. A comparative perspective between Mexico and Brazil is proposed from two major conjunctures that in each country unleashed a moral panic, associated with the dangers and threats that neoconservative groups built around the "gender ideology". For the Mexican case, the starting point is represented by President Enrique Peña Nieto's initiative to constitutionally recognize same-sex marriage, and for the Brazilian case, the coming to the presidency of Michel Temer with their respective alliances with the evangelical parliamentarians.
KEY WORDS:
laicity; secularization; neoconservatism; "gender ideology"; evangelical politics