More than two years after mobs attacked the capital to protest election results, Brazil’s Supreme Court accepted charges last week against seven individuals accused of plotting a coup to overthrow President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who’s commonly known as “Lula.”
In all, 21 people face charges, including military commanders, former ministers, police, and Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, whom investigators have identified as the leader and main beneficiary if the coup had succeeded.
The alleged plot included plans to assassinate then-president-elect Lula, Vice President–elect Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes. If found guilty, Bolsonaro could spend more than 30 years in prison.
So far, the legal proceedings have had little effect on Bolsonaro’s popularity among evangelicals: 44 percent continue to define themselves as “bolsonarists,” compared to about a third of the country overall.
“This almost-messianic shielding of a political figure borders on what theology defines as idolatry,” said theologian Gutierres Fernandes Siqueira, author of Igreja polarizada (Polarized Church).
Many evangelical leaders stop short of declaring Bolsonaro as anointed by God but still see his leadership as good for the church and want him back in power. The court’s verdict, expected by the end of the year, could set the tone for Brazilian politics ahead of the 2026 general elections.
A previous ruling had already rendered Bolsonaro ineligible for public office for eight years, barring him from running next year. But his supporters in Congress have introduced bills to grant amnesty to demonstrators, specifically those charged with crimes related to the attempted coup.
Back on January 8, 2023, Clayton Nunes was one of thousands of Brazilians who broke into the Praça dos Três Poderes—Plaza of Three Powers—to challenge alleged election fraud after Bolsonaro’s reelection defeat. The crowds smashed glass doors and windows, ransacked offices, destroyed artwork, and flooded halls with fire hoses, causing an estimated $4.3 million in damage.
When police began deploying tear gas, Nunes sought shelter inside the Senate. There, he found fellow evangelicals. “I saw people praying and singing the national anthem,” he said. “I ended up joining them.”
In 2018, Bolsonaro won 55 percent of the country’s votes for president, with a backing of 69 percent among evangelicals. The next race, in 2022, Bolsonaro gained 63 percent of the evangelical vote but lost to left-wing Lula.
Authorities detained at least four pastors the day of the January 2023 coup and arrested additional church leaders and a Christian singer after further investigations. Most evangelicals claimed that they were there to pray and intercede for their country and that the violence had been carried out by infiltrators.
Nunes pleaded guilty to five charges, including attempted coup and destruction of public property. Last year, a judge ruled the 41-year-old barber from Brasília would spend the next 16 years and six months in prison.
Brazil’s capital attack parallels a similar response by President Donald Trump’s supporters in the US on January 6, 2021. Each riot took place to defend a politician who refused to accept election results, and each drew support from extreme elements of Christian nationalist movements.
Raimundo Barreto, a professor of world Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, sees both sets of supporters as motivated by different versions of dominion theology. Some of the Brazilians he interviewed following the 2023 insurrection were striving to gain authority over areas of society they saw as controlled by territorial demons and to redeem what they perceived as a corrupted moral order.
While US Christian nationalism imagines the restoration of the country’s Christian identity, the Brazilian version emphasizes redemption of what some Christian Brazilians see as a “cursed and corrupt nation, estranged from God both spiritually and morally,” Barreto said. “For those who hold this view, the nation’s redemption requires breaking those curses through submission to the lordship of Jesus,” not only spiritually but also politically.
Because of these larger narratives, Trump and Bolsonaro have a level of invincibility among their evangelical bases, even when institutions attempt to hold them accountable.
In response to the growth of Bolsonarism in the churches, a small minority of young people in Brazil began to leave, Barreto said, “because they can’t reconcile their reading of the Bible and their faith with the behavior of those who reject democratic processes, science, and the exercise of secular justice.”
The Brazilian public sees Bolsonaro’s sustained popularity in the wake of controversy, including the coup charges, and blames him for manipulating evangelicals, said anthropologist Juliano Spyer, author of two books on evangelicalism’s growth in Brazil.
“But I’ve been hearing something different from some pastors,” Spyer said. “They acknowledge he’s controversial but believe he’s championing the right causes.”
Similar to some supporters of Trump, the leaders equate Bolsonaro with “the biblical figure of King Cyrus of Persia—who wasn’t part of Israel’s people but was used by God to protect them,” said Barreto.
When he speaks with Christian leaders, Barreto frequently asks them whether Bolsonaro is anointed by God. “Many reply, ‘No, but he is someone who protects the values of the church,’ usually defining those values in a narrow way, mostly focusing on a particular view of family and sexual morality.”
