Erasing Exu: The Right-Wing Crusade Against Afro-Brazilian Faith

While preaching salvation, Brazil’s far-right and its evangelical allies wage a silent but systemic war against the Afro-Brazilian spiritual traditions that have shaped the country for centuries. The Orisha were here before the Bible arrived. And they are not leaving quietly.

The New Inquisition Wears a Suit and Tie

In Brazil, where the Constitution guarantees religious freedom, a new kind of conquest is underway. Not with swords or shackles this time, but with microphones, televised sermons, and the seductive rhetoric of “moral renewal.” The targets are clear: the terreiros, the drums, the offerings at the crossroads, the deities with names like Exu and Oxum. The enemy? A spiritual tradition far older and more Brazilian than the imported faiths that now claim moral authority.

Evangelical pastors, particularly those aligned with the country’s booming Neo-Pentecostal movement, are not just spreading the gospel. They are redefining who gets to be Brazilian, and in the process, they are declaring open season on Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé, Umbanda, and Batuque—collectively referred to as the Religiões de Matrizes Africanas. It’s not a culture war. It’s a theological purge masquerading as patriotism.

This project has a name: religious racism. And it is deeply embedded in Brazil’s politics, media, and streets.

Gods Older Than the Republic

The Orisha (or Òrìṣà) are not minor deities, nor are they merely “cultural elements” to be celebrated during Carnival and erased the rest of the year. They are part of a vast and complex West African cosmology that predates colonial Brazil by millennia.

Originating among the Yoruba people in present-day Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, the Orisha are not gods in the Western sense, but divine forces—each governing specific aspects of nature, emotion, and human life:

• Exu, the trickster and guardian of the crossroads.
• Ogum, the warrior of iron and technology.
• Oxum, the spirit of rivers, fertility, and beauty.
• Iansã, who commands storms and spirits of the dead.
• Xangô, the fiery force of thunder and justice.

Through the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, these entities were brought to Brazil, hidden behind Catholic saints, and nurtured in silence and resistance. In this syncretic form, they became the foundation of Candomblé and later Umbanda—religions born in trauma, but sustained by memory, music, and ritual. The Orisha survived whips, crosses, exile, and ridicule. They are Brazilian not by invitation, but by inheritance.

From the Quilombo to the Favela

Afro-Brazilian religions have always occupied a paradoxical position in Brazilian society—deeply embedded yet violently marginal. The terreiro, a sacred space of worship, healing, and social cohesion, has long functioned as a parallel institution for Black Brazilians denied access to education, health care, and political voice.

In Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, these spaces became sanctuaries. They preserved not just faith, but language, medicine, culinary knowledge, and resistance strategies. Women—Ialorixás, or priestesses—led these communities with spiritual authority that defied the patriarchal norms of both the Church and the State.

Yet from the late 19th century onward, these religions were systematically criminalized. The Penal Code of 1890 outlawed curandeirismo and espiritismo, effectively targeting African-based faiths. Police raided terreiros, seized sacred objects, and jailed priests and priestesses. In the 20th century, anthropologists like Ruth Landes and Pierre Verger documented these traditions—but often through the exoticizing lens of the “other.”

The message was clear: Orisha could exist, but only as folklore—never as power.

Evangelicals, Populists, and the Politics of Erasure

Today, the attack takes new forms. With the rise of evangelical media empires and the political ascent of the Bancada da Bíblia (Bible Caucus), entire neighborhoods—especially in favelas and peripheral cities—are being “converted” by force or persuasion. Religious militias linked to evangelical groups now control dozens of communities, where Afro-Brazilian practices are banned, altars destroyed, and residents threatened with “exorcism” if they do not renounce their faith.

These same churches often operate in tax-free buildings, funded by donations and political patronage, while terreiros fight for survival without state recognition or basic protections. In the name of Jesus, terreiros are burned. In the name of democracy, judges stay silent.

What’s under attack is not just belief—it’s a worldview. The Orisha traditions offer a radically different cosmology: one that is pluralist, sensual, matriarchal, and rooted in the land. They do not divide the world into saved and damned. They teach balance. Reciprocity. They honor the ancestors. They sanctify the body.

This terrifies the authoritarian imagination.

The Devil at the Crossroads: Misreading Exu

No Orisha has suffered more than Exu. Demonized by missionaries and media alike, Exu has been consistently misrepresented as “the devil”—a false equivalence rooted in colonial ignorance. In Yoruba cosmology, Exu is not evil. He is the messenger, the mediator, the one who opens roads. He is language, contradiction, laughter, unpredictability—everything the populist mind cannot control.

To fear Exu is to fear ambiguity. To banish Exu is to silence dialogue. That is the goal: to silence the conversation between past and present, Africa and Brazil, body and spirit.

Memory Is Resistance

And yet the Orisha are not disappearing.

They are in the drums of Ilê Aiyê and the lyrics of Luedji Luna. In the graffiti of São Paulo’s East Side. In TikTok videos by young filhas de santo explaining rituals in fluent internet speak. In academic research that reclaims ancestral knowledge. In court rulings that finally recognize religious racism as a crime.

The Orisha are speaking louder, not softer.

What Brazil needs is not salvation from its African roots—but a reckoning with them. A country that denies the legitimacy of Candomblé and Umbanda denies its own birth story. The gods of the quilombo are not foreign—they are founders.

Final Word:

This is not just about faith. It’s about memory, dignity, and sovereignty over the body and spirit. To stand with the Orisha is not only to defend a religion—it is to defend a version of Brazil that remembers, resists, and refuses to be born again in someone else’s image.

Because a nation that burns its own gods is not cleansing itself.
It is erasing itself.