"Perhaps the most influential American televangelists in Brazil have been Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson and Rex Humbard." (56)
Swaggart the most significant due to the local support he received from the Assemblies of God (56)
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difficulty for local evangelicals to get resources available for the use of TV media (57) Fanini as one of the pioneers in this sense, relationship with then president Figueredo getting him the concession of the Channel 13 in Rio de Janiero for fifteen years from 1983, but unable to muster resources to support this so that: "Fanini's ambitious project stalleD Some years later, beset with debts, he sold his 75% share of Radiodifusao Eheneser Ltd to Edir Macedo, founder and bishop of the Universal Church of the Reign of God (IURD)." (57)
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"Edir Macedo understood early on that Evangelicals would not become major players in Brazilian television until they achieved the financial freedom to be able to make major investments in technology and television licenses. A former member of The New Life Church and a former employee of Rio de Janeiro's state lottery, Macedo began in 1977 to mount his own religious enterprise. " (57)
IURD: (1) purchase of Record for $45 million in 1989 and the headquarters and production equipment of TVJovem Pan for $15 million. (58)
"Macedo's religious empire includes more than four thousand temples, usually installed in former supermarkets or cinemas, located in large and medium-sized cities throughout the country; he has not been successful in establishing himself in smaller towns. Also included are television and radio stations outside Brazil, the Folha Universal newspaper with a weekly circulation of over 1.5 million, a modern printing plant, a small bank, a tourism business and even a furniture factory that produces benches for his churches." (58)
" The services are punctuated by vignettes and jingles that emphasise miracles and attaining concrete results. This message offers solutions to a middle class going through difficult times as well as to the urban poor in search of social ascent." (58)
Since 2002, IURD's programming has included rites and imagery taken from Afro-Brazilian religions, especially Umbanda. Macedo frequently stages hybrid exorcisms in which white-robed pastors speak of 'the Father of Lights'. (58)
" The screen shows pictures of waterfalls and crashing surf, places intimately tied to African religious traditions. Such discourse provides both explicit and subliminal associations to Afro-Brazilian worship." (58)
"The IURD appropriates and markets a wide variety of religious symbols including holy water, salt, anointing oil, bread and wine, sacred stones, blessed flowers and sacred robes. In addition to borrowing from Afro-Brazilian religious discourse, IURD spectacles incorporate elements of Brazilian Catholicism, Protestantism, and Kardecist Spiritism. These relics are transformed by the touch of the IURD's 'consecrated men of God' into 'blessed means of salvation and healing' and bring 'the heavenly future' to the 'blessed present' while inviting viewers to come to the 'addresses of happiness'. "(58)
"Key to the IURD's success has been the creation of a highly centralised network of temples, essentially religious franchises, capable of generating a large and reliable flow of cash. Effective resource management has given Macedo the freedom to be able to finance any acquisition or transaction at any time by always having at his disposal at least $5 million in cash." (59)
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"After splitting with Macedo in 1980, his brother-in-law, R.R. Soares, created the first IURD clone, the International Church of God's Grace (IIGD)." (59)
"Soares decided on a two-track strategy, negotiating a volume discount for primetime access with Rede Bandeirantes while simultaneously pursuing financial resources to be able to buy his own television channel." (59)
Brief reference to the Hernandes and Renascer em Cristo
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tension between the complexity of religious phenomena and the simplified message demanded by television media "Thus, the earliest producers of evangelistic messages for the electronic media came to conceive of religious conversion in simplified, individualistic terms as demanded by the principles of marketing (Smith, 1990: 296). The great innovation of the Neo-Pentecostal media preachers has been to simplify the message even further, eliminating doctrine and reducing the message to a commercial transaction of symbolic goods." (61)
"Confronted with disenchantment, it is not surprising that the televised events and speech found in Latin Americas electronic church, can re-enchant the world and are increasingly popular." (61)
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"The electronic media provide a venue for the approximation between Temple and Marketplace." (62)
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"A new generation of religious entrepreneurs has understood how to tap into the collective spiritual resources of the region, package them in drama, and cloak them in authority and mystery Then they offer them to a populace often wrestling for survival, mired in permanent crisis and
hungry for meaning, hope and a sense of transcendence." (62)
"Today it is common to find people in both Brazil and urban Latin America who simultaneously consume televised religious spectacles offered by the megachurches, use amulets or crystals derived from New Age spirituality, seek alternative healing from traditional healers, and consult with Spiritists for orientation in cases of personal crisis. Meanwhile, the traditional churches are losing their historic monopoly on dispensing sacraments, especially as these systems for marketing new spiritualities and mediated symbolic spaces become broadly available. Simultaneously, the power of the traditional churches to stigmatise 'unorthodox' religious belief and practice has been weakened." (62)
