Evangelicals and the Creationist God: An Examination of Brazilian Creationism as an Educational and Political Problem

Creationism is not only a pseudoscience present in Brazil but also a political problem. In reality, creationism as a pseudoscience and as a political issue are entangled in this Latin American country. Thus, this article has a double objective: to show how Brazilian creationism arises as a danger to both education/science and democracy in Brazil, and to discuss how its epistemological misconceptions and its dependence on Evidentialism portray a divinity that stands in contrast with the Christian understanding of the Trinitarian God. The first section will address how creationism is present in the Brazilian political arena, with special attention to its presence during Jair Bolsonaro’s government and how it constitutes an ongoing danger to Brazil’s education system and democracy due to the rapid growth of the number of Evangelicals in the country and of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front of the National Congress. The second will discuss examples of creationist arguments presented by the two major proponents of the movement in Brazil, the Presbyterians Adauto Lourenço and Marcos Eberlin, that show their standard procedure in dealing with scientific data and drawing religious conclusions from it. The third will analyze how Creationism relies on Evidentialism and portrays a divinity which diverges from the Trinitarian Christian God. I argue that creationism is not based on or an expression of a Christian understanding of the relationship between God, creation, and creatures, but is instead based on epistemological misconceptions, manipulation of data, and religious conclusions drawn from it.