Alves writes on philosophy of religion, here more specifically on the philosophy of Protestantism. His book also addresses a classic problem of the sociology of religion, namely that of the relation between religious ideology and the all-inclusive cultural processes and institutions of modern society. He looks at the conservative trends of Protestantism in contemporary Brazil and rightly maintains that they are not a consequence of the authoritarian regime initiated by the 1964 military coup. Those conservative trends rather preceded (and were reinforced by) political authoritarianism, due to the church’s own internal dynamics.
What then are these internal trends of Brazilian Protestantism? Alves says that the main current of contemporary Catholicism (even before Vatican II) has emphasized a quest for unity (rather then a quest for truth), and has thus opened a space for pluralism and internal development within the ecclesiastical institution. On the contrary, Protestantism has centered on the quest for truth, in the process adopting a rigid, neoorthodox, centralized outlook which led to the expulsion of those members with a more liberal or “deviant” political orientation.
The main thrust of this book is not limited to the Brazilian situation for it raises again the problem of the relationship between the external political influence of Protestantism (usually considered by the literature as favorable to liberal democracy) and the church’s internal discipline and value orientation. Alves’ book suggests this relationship to be one of inversion, for “internalized repression” would normally allow for external liberalism in the absence of political coercion in the overall society. This thesis could probably be traced back to the classic works of Weber and Marx about the role of Protestantism in the developed Western polities.
But, if this relationship is operative in the liberal-democratic polities of the developed countries, what would be the case in political cultures under authoritarian regimes? For Alves, apparently there is not an inverse relationship in the latter cases, but only one of reinforcement. In these cases, the latent repressive tendencies of Protestantism would be openly displayed, both in ecclesiastical centralized discipline and in its ideological relations with the polity.
However, both cultural and structural processes should also be seen by social scientists in a historical perspective, emphasizing the conditions and circumstances of their common existence. Thus, even if Protestant conservative trends were previous to, and reinforced by, recent political authoritarianism in Brazilian politics, one should nevertheless account for the environmental conditions that made both phenomena possible and necessary. And the aim would not necessarily be that of arriving at any causal explanation, but rather that of explaining the historical setting which allows a giving relationship between culture and society to take place.
Alves is thus right in reminding us not to expect a sociopolitical analysis from this book on the philosophy of religion. His work is in this regard particularly stimulating, for it follows up and develops a line of theoretical analysis of Protestant religion which has had worldwide significance beyond national boundaries.
