“I have learned that the state should not have religion, it should not have a church, it should guarantee the functioning of the church,” said the presidential candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT) in the second largest elective college in that state.

Before more than eight thousand gospels, according to its organizers, he stressed that his will was to make an open event, for the large population, but today the act was “closed for the pastors who wanted to demonstrate that God is peace.”

I can tell you, he pointed out, that “a normal human being lies, but it is unacceptable for a pastor to speak for God and lie. No one should use God’s name in vain,” he said.

Journalistic media assure that the evangelical vote is one of the strongest redoubts of the far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro in the October 2 election, in which he will try to be re-elected, and Lula tries to show closeness to the religious.

Without going into conservative issues, the former worker leader tried to deny the fake news (false news) related to religion, such as the rumor about the closure of churches.

In a climate of worship, the stage of the event included, even, an evangelical reading and a representative went up to the pulpit and read a biblical passage.

The official website of the PT assures that in the period in which the political organization governed Brazil, between 2003 and 2016, the number of evangelicals in the country grew 129 percent, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and the Institute Datafolha.

In 2003, in the first year of Lula’s administration, there were about 26.2 million evangelicals in Brazil, reports the IBGE.

Such growth continued in the following calendars and, in 2016, the year of the judicial parliamentary coup that removed the then president Dilma Rousseff, the evangelical population was made up of about 60 million people, Datafolha indicates, quoted by the PT.

The site details that, in December 2003, Lula sanctioned the law that allowed religious sanctuaries and associations to have legal personality, so that they would no longer be classified as simple class entities, such as soccer clubs and other non-religious organizations.

Thus, each church came to have the prerogative to formulate its own statute. In September 2009, the then president signed the law that created the National Day of the March for Jesus, and in September 2010 the one that instituted November 30 as National Evangelical Day.

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