Deus, o diabo e a televisão: mídia moderna de massa e pentecostalismo em uma comunidade evangélica da Ilha Grande

Abstract

This thesis main concern is with the entanglement of television and Pentecostal Christianity in Provetá, an evangelical community in Ilha Grande, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The evangelical epithet of the aforementioned community is due to the remarkable presence of the Assembly of God in the village since the 1930 s. My main purpose in this thesis is to understand how the technology of television has been culturally incorporated in the village of Provetá. It will be argued that, in its moment of arrival, television as a technology was symbolically framed by religious leaderships as an exclusive device of satanic agency, an exclusive medium of the Devil. Nonetheless, through its progressive insertion in the village, the symbolic character of television appeared to have radically shifted: from a technology of the Devil, television is currently framed as an ambivalent portal through which the spiritual battle between God and Devil takes place. Instead of being condemned per se as a technology, television is an ambivalent object whose consumption urges caution and a proper use i.e., a given knowledge of how to use it. This knowledge, it is argued, is knowledge of the Bible. Through that knowledge an ethics of watching television appeared to have been yielded: what is ethically commendable or condemnable to be watched. My argument is that a concern with the status of reality of television contents constantly underpinned the moral evaluation of them, of whether they were considered good or bad . Through an understanding of reality centered in the Bible, a fundamental distinction unfolded between television contents regarded as factual , or belonging to the realm of real happenings , and others identified as forged , constructed , or inauthentic. Whereas the consumption of realistic television contents was thought to be harmless and even instructive for a Christian, the latter was considered morally innapropriate, and dangerous. The fictional genre of narrative was by and large conceptualized as a lie : an intentional construction of a given subject, driven towards purposes of seduction and delusion from the real world; the author of such constructions, I was told, is the Devil. A focal point of this thesis is to understand through which cultural dynamics the agencies of God and of Devil were identified in television: what kinds of television contents, aesthetics, images and narrative styles were addressed as utterances of God s or the Devil s agency. Departing from such identification of the television news as a rather positive space of potential learning of what is happening in the world for a Christian, and of fiction as dangerous lies , as the Devil s strategy of seduction par excellance, I undertake an analysis of reception of two television programs in more depth: Rede Globo de Televisão s telenovelas and the Jornal Nacional. The main argument to be developed throughout the thesis is that the experience of watching television in Provetá is symbolically and sensorially underpinned by a Pentecostal aesthetics: a given grammar of sensing the objects of experience in relation to the Biblical truth. Television consumption, in this sense, was being mediated by a religious medium, the Bible promoting, in turn, a remediation of the Biblical truth. In this circular dynamics between feeling and believing, images are sensually experienced through the prism of the Biblical truth, and those sensations, conversely, objectify the religious truth in the subject s body. Through such dialetics of feeling and believing, the sensual experience of watching television is underpinned by a Pentecostal understanding of reality, and this understanding is authenticated by what is felt.