THALES DE AZEVEDO AND THE BRAZILIAN CIVIL RELIGION

Abstract

This work offers a brief overview of the intellectual trajectory of Thales de Azevedo, who was a pioneer in investigating the relationship between religion and politics without prioritizing any of these two themes over the other - after all, between religion and politics there is a zone of indistinction. This work also aims to contextualize Azevedo's enterprise, which, in its own way, follows in the footsteps of a long intellectual tradition with which it dialogues, a tradition that includes authors such as Ernst Kantorowicz. It is a relevant and necessary undertaking today, given the contemporary interpretive challenges. The present work points out how, according to this author, positivism in Brazil emerged competing with Catholicism as a formulator of a spirituality, with a mystique that is the product of the synthesis between devotional Catholicism and the religion of humanity by Augusto Comte. Thus, from Azevedo's approach, we intend to shed light on the theme of Brazilian civil religion, which allows us to see a certain continuity between the Estado Novo, the military regime and Jair Bolsonaro’s administration.