ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the political career of Brazilian politician Marina Silva, as a case study of Catholic and Pentecostal approaches to environmental advocacy in Brazil. A poor rubber-tapper’s daughter raised in the progressive wing of the Catholic Church, by the late 1990s she had become a Pentecostal. Silva rose to become Brazil’s minister for the environment in the mid-2000s and is the most high-profile example of the coupling of Pentecostal religiosity with progressive political militancy. Having built her political career on environmental issues, the failure of Silva’s 2014 presidential bid appeared to result from her positions on gender and sexuality. Part of the “deconstruction” she was subject to in the election campaign involved the use of code phrases calling her religiosity into suspicion or insinuating her political dependence on radical Evangelical preachers, despite the lack of evidence for this over her thirty-year career in politics.