The Pretended Neutrality of Public Secularism Tested

An Analysis of the “Abuse of Religious Power” Thesis from Dooyeweerd and Finnis

Abstract

In the context of the recent debates in the Brazilian Supreme Court on the thesis of the abuse of religious power, this paper addresses the following questions: to what extent should the social capital of religious ministers be able to interfere in the conduct of the electoral process? What is the content of religious discourse? Was this type of discourse propagated only by confessional and religious institutions? To resolve these issues, the article starts from a broad bibliographic review of works by the main exponents of two schools of thought: the neoclassical tradition of natural law by John Finnis and the reformational tradition in Herman Dooyeweerd. The hypothesis of the sociological and moral (in)consistency of the thesis of the abuse of religious power is verified, its relevance in a society of multiple metanarrative discourses with a religious (even if civil) background.