Politics and Semantics of Exclusion: Highlights on the Relationship between Religion and Public Life in Brazil

Abstract Based on Jan Assmann’s comprehension of the relationship between exclusion and monotheism, the text seeks to investigate the ambiguous presence of Christianity in the Brazilian context. Considering the intersection of history and language, it evaluates aspects of Ultramontanism in the nineteenth century and what Rubem Alves called the Right-Doctrine Protestantism in the twentieth century as examples of an exclusionary semantics that operates at institutional, normative, and discursive levels. United by an intransigent defence of an orthodox view of Christianity, these perspectives, with broad public repercussions, tend to counter pluralism and to neglect otherness.