Secularização e mercado religioso: um estudo do culto umbandista-kardecista reikiano na região de Poços de Caldas

Abstract

Verifica-se no Brasil, por meio de mudanças desencadeadas por processos históricos e sociais, muitos deles de caráter secular, o surgimento de movimentos religiosos híbridos e plurais num amplo e vasto circuito esotérico. Imerso nesse continuum cultural contemporâneo, insere-se um culto mediúnico de umbandakardecista e práticas reikianas denominado Grupo Espírita Estrela Guia, localizado no município de Poços de Caldas, interior de Minas Gerais, objeto de estudo da presente pesquisa. A representação das inter-relações entre o Kardecismo, a Umbanda e o Reiki pode ser pensada como um fenômeno de transição sincrética e configuração híbrida, suscitando duas hipóteses possíveis: primeiramente a compreensão do grupo enquanto fruto da secularização e parte integrante do mercado religioso brasileiro e num segundo momento a verificação de que seus predicados não são suficientes para inseri-lo na esfera pública, caminho seguido pela maioria das manifestações religiões modernas no país. Logo, dentro da metodologia de estudo de caso e dos procedimentos hipotético-dedutivos, foram analisadas as práticas e crenças do Grupo Espírita Estrela Guia em suas configurações discursivas, doutrinárias e ritualísticas. Constatou-se que esse culto mediúnico é um fenômeno religioso fruto do mercado religioso brasileiro que por sua vez é fruto do pluralismo religioso, característica primeira do processo de secularização da sociedade brasileira. Para entender o processo da secularização no Brasil, a constituição do pluralismo religioso de caráter secular, do mercado religioso e do hibridismo cultural, utilizou-se como fundamentação teórica, entre outros autores, Peter Berger, Antônio Flávio Pierucci, Paula Montero e Jürgen Habermas. Por fim, a pesquisa buscou uma nova hipótese de categorização dos movimentos religiosos na esfera pública com o intuito de compreender a grande densidade existencial e os processos regulares de absorção, reconfiguração e adequação espacial empreendidos nessas modalidades religiosas.

The nineteenth century was the period that inaugurated Brazil's entry into the so-called political modernity, a phenomenon represented by the configuration of a new political order of Western societies, composed of the modern National State and political democracy, which reconfigured the relations between Church and State. The Brazilian Catholic clergy was deeply involved in the debates regarding the transformations of the period, articulating religion and politics in the modeling of new projects of national type, acting through institutional and non-institutional ways, as was the case of the periodical press, which was highlighted as a field of discursive and symbolic disputes, since it was the main vehicle for forming a public opinion in the period. The present research aims at analyzing the discourse given by the ultramontane newspaper O Apóstolo on the theme of Religious Freedom in Brazil, during the years 1866 to 1891. Specifically, it aims to understand how the newspaper reflected three important conjunctures of that period in the course of which the relations between the Catholic Church and the Brazilian State were deeply affected. They are: the conjuncture of the repercussion in Brazil of the publication of the Encyclical Quanta Cura and the annex Syllabus by Pope Pius IX in 1864 - which listed the so-called "modern errors"; the Religious Question, between the years of 1872 and 1875, which configured an intense conflict between Church and Imperial State in relation to the problem represented by the Freemasonry; and the conjuncture marked by the Proclamation of the Republic and the first official measures that established the normative conditions of religious freedom in Brazil, represented by the Decree of January 1, 1890 and by the 1891 Constitution, which promulgated freedom of worship, the end of the patronage and the institutional separation between church and state. The analysis incorporates the theoretical contributions of Pierre Bourdieu, concerning the emphasis on the symbolic disputes that cross the discursive practices of O Apóstolo. However, considering that in the analyzed period, Church and State did not constitute institutional individuals - given the long duration of the patronage - we will reject the concept of "religious field", preferring the concept of "public controversy" used by Paula Montero, with the purpose of understanding how the ultramontane social visibility is derived from the discursive practice of the newspaper. Therefore, the intention is to determine the treatment that the newspaper gave to this period of intense conflict between Church and State, seeking to acknowledge to what extent this treatment points to the formulation of a project of modernity and secularization, which had at its core the theme of Religious Freedom.