A Chronicle of Convenient Christendom

There are days in Brasil when the morning headlines feel like parables rewritten by the wrong disciples — stories where virtue is loudly proclaimed and quietly abandoned, where the name of Christ is invoked like a campaign slogan, and where the gospel is wielded not as a moral compass but as a cudgel. One might call it hypocrisy, but even that word seems too gentle for the scale of the dissonance.

Some days the sun seems almost accusatory, illuminating everything with an honesty no one asked for. On such a day, I sat with Dilexi te on Love for the Poor open on my lap, as if it were a lantern in the middle of a fog that our politics insist on thickening. Pope Leo XIV writes as one who has walked among the poor, not above them. He speaks of structural sin, of systems that grind the faces of the vulnerable until they forget they were ever children of god.

Brasil’s contemporary right wing—whether dressed in the corporate suits of the União Brasil, the punitive rhetoric of PL, or the nostalgia-soaked moralism of Republicanos — moves through public life like a procession of pharisees convinced they alone possess divine authority. Yet their actions betray them at every turn.

They demand obedience to scripture while ignoring its first lesson: compassion.

They praise the sanctity of life while defending policies that routinely abandon living, breathing human beings.

They speak of family while endorsing economic structures that grind families into precarity.

It is a theatre of selective morality — one in which Jesus is constantly quoted, yet rarely followed.

The Poverty of Mercy

Consider the passionate speeches about protecting the poor delivered by politicians who vote consistently against welfare expansion, against food assistance, against housing programmes, and in favour of regressive tax structures that place the heaviest burdens precisely on those Christ identified as his own. If Christ is the shepherd, the brasilian right often behaves like hired hands who, seeing the wolf of poverty approach, simply shut the door and retreat into gated communities.

The PL’s relentless push for austerity, presented as fiscal responsibility, reads more like an extended footnote to the biblical story of the rich young ruler — except in this version, the ruler not only refuses to give up his wealth but also demands that the poor surrender theirs as well.

The Cult of Vengeance

Christianity teaches forgiveness, mercy, the dignity of every human soul. Yet one finds among the right a fixationv — bordering on obsession — with punitive policing, harsher sentencing, and a fantasy of righteous violence. As if Christ, confronted with the adulterous woman, would have ordered the first stone to be thrown with military precision and broadcast on national television.

The law-and-order rhetoric of parties like Republicanos and figures aligned with the evangelical bloc is not a defence of justice but a performance of power. It sanctifies brutality, canonises the police bullet, and declares entire communities unworthy of redemption. When the children of favelas are treated as collateral damage, and when politicians respond with statistical shrugs, one sees not christianity but its grotesque inversion.

Mammon’s Most Faithful Servants

The gospel could not be clearer: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.”
Yet in the brasilian right, Mammon appears not only served but enthroned.

The alliance between right-wing parties and extractive industries — agribusiness, mining conglomerates, and deforestation giants — would make even the golden calf blush. Environmental destruction is justified with a theological flair: god, they say, “gave us the land to use,” conveniently forgetting that he did not instruct humankind to pillage it to exhaustion.

The ruralista bloc prays loudly on sunday only to vote on monday for everything that accelerates environmental collapse and undermines indigenous survival. They claim stewardship; they practise exploitation.

The Gospel According to the Market

Jesus expelled the money-changers from the temple; the brasilian right invites them back with tax incentives.
The neoliberal creed — repeated like a litany by sectors of Novo, União Brasil, and the corporate wing of the right — declares that the market will heal all wounds. But the market has never healed a wound; it merely calculates its profitability.

And still they insist that privatisation is salvation, deregulation is redemption, and austerity is good news for the poor — though only the poor are ever asked to sacrifice.

If Christ multiplied bread and fish, the modern right atomises it, repackages it through private intermediaries, and sells it back with high interest.

A Christ Retrofitted for Power

Perhaps the most audacious act is the political renovation of Jesus himself.
The carpenter of Nazareth, who walked among the marginalised, is repurposed as a nationalist icon; the pacifist prophet becomes a mascot for gun culture; the agitator against empire is recast as a defender of authoritarian strongmen.

It is a theological manoeuvre so cynical it borders on artistry.

The bolsonarista wing in particular has perfected this tactic: turning faith into branding, liturgy into propaganda, pastors into political technicians. In their hands, christianity becomes less a spiritual tradition and more a marketing franchise — its product line including outrage, fear, and the constant promise of moral superiority.

The Chronicle’s Closing Note

One need not be christian to recognise the tragedy. It is literary, almost Shakespearean: a cast of characters convinced they are protagonists of a divine narrative, failing to notice that they are the antagonists in their own story.

They speak of Christ with patriotic fervour, but when confronted with his actual teachings, they behave like officials inspecting forged documents. This Christ is inconvenient, they seem to say. Let us remodel him.

And so they do.

They craft a Christ who hates precisely the people the historical Jesus embraced.
A Christ who blesses militias, applauds evictions, and nods approvingly at environmental plunder.
A Christ who resembles not the saviour of the gospels but the leaders who invoke his name.

It is not merely hypocrisy.
It is heresy disguised as patriotism.
A chronicle of moral dissonance so loud it drowns out the very Gospel they claim to protect.

And the irony is almost biblical:
in trying to claim Christ for themselves, they have wandered farther from him than they dare admit.

The bible warns that we will know a tree by its fruits.
The fruits of compassion, dignity, and solidarity are more abundant among those who seek to lift the poor, rather than blame them.

Perhaps, one day, under a gentler sun, the two rivers — faith and politics — may finally merge. But only if we acknowledge the distance between Christ’s words and the policies of those who most claim to speak in his name.