Man of god as to age and the race: a discourse analysis panoram to a religious publishing article

Abstract

Religion has been teaching people throghout history various ways of how to behave. Taking this into consideration, this paper carries the challenge to analyze a religious article written by the Bishop Edir Macedo entitled “Homem de Deus quanto à idade e à raça” published in the behavior section of the Church’s website. In this sense, some ideas of Macedo’s article will be explored in this paper as being the ideal behavior that a “man of God” should adopt when choosing a wife. To do so, we will take into category of analysis two elements listed in Macedo’s own text: age and race. The purpose of this study was to question the role of a religious institution regarding differences historically perpetuated between men and women and between whites and blacks, in order to verify how this inequality is maintained and naturalized by discourse. To perform the analysis, the theories of Discourse Analysis of the French line were taken into account including the notions of ideology and discursive memory, from Michel Pêcheux (1997). Besides, the contributions of the Sociology of the Fields were considered, mainly the concepts of symbolic violence and habitus, developed by Pierre Bourdieu (2003). From the brief analysis carried out in this paper, it was possible to make considerations about a Church’s role as an Ideological Apparatus of the State, as postulated by Louis Althusser (1996).