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Religious Intolerance and the Semiotics of Secular Indeterminacy in Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2025

Elina Inkeri Hartikainen Open the ORCID record for Elina Inkeri Hartikainen [Opens in a new window]
Elina Inkeri Hartikainen*
Affiliation:
University of Oslo, Norway
*
Email: elina.hartikainen@sai.uio.no
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Abstract

The functioning of the liberal order relies on the semiotic indeterminacy of its key concepts—they need to be broad enough to encompass multiple, and at times conflicting articulations—but the denotational open-endedness of these concepts also renders them particularly useful for efforts to unsettle liberal political projects. In Brazil, state institutions’ secularist commitments to retaining “religion” and its derivates as denotationally indeterminant both constrain efforts to combat Evangelical Christian “religious intolerance” against African origin religious traditions and enable Evangelical Christian graftings of the discourse of “religious intolerance” onto claims that frame the efforts to curb their attacks on religious and sexual minorities as a form of religious persecution. These effects are, however, rendered invisible by the state emphasis on the denotational open-endedness of “religious intolerance,” which obscures the different forms of enregisterment that organize the entextualization of the term in religious activist and government spaces in Brazil.

Keywords

Brazilliberalismreligious politicssecularismsemiotic indeterminacy
Type
Article
Information
Signs and Society , First View , pp. 1 - 24
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

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