Religious intolerance, epistemic racism and the marks of cultural, intellectual and social oppression

Abstract

This article aims to delineate the peculiar contours of religious conflicts in contemporary Brazil, based on theoretical reflection on the sociological literature concerning national religious intolerance. The reflections point to an understanding that this phenomenon has a genealogy anchored in ideological formulations of colonial origin built to subordinate or extinguish the experiences, histories, resources and cultural products of colonized/enslaved peoples marked by mental and cultural inferiority based on racial differences artificially created. His current drawings respond to the colonial legacy of epistemic racism, intertwined with the dispute for the religious market and the peculiar characteristics of national religiosity credulous of magical-religious solutions to its daily problems, superimposed on the tendency of Brazilian society to use violence to solve conflict problems. The thesis of this theoretical article sustains that contemporary Brazilian religious intolerance is articulated by these four aspects of synergy and performance that feed each other.