Retratos da fé: uma análise da experiência de evangélicos pentecostais no curso superior de história.

Abstract

The present work analyzes the experience of Pentecostal evangelicals who, after entering university, deal with the challenge of reconciling the religious experience of the temple with the life and knowledge of the academy. In the last two decades, Brazil has been experiencing a rapid process of massification of access to higher education, which has made the university public increasingly more diversified, and that some classes of people, previously unable to enter higher education, realize the dream of the university. Among those classes that were benefited by the popularization of higher education, there are many adherents of Pentecostalism, which, comparing IBGE data, in the years 2000 and 2010, was the religious group that grew most at university, although it is still a composite group, mostly by people of lower classes. Since Pentecostalism is characterized by the emphasis on asceticism, mysticism and proselytism, and that some of its members generate dispositions related to these Pentecostal characteristics, in the present research we analyze how the dispositional patrimony of the Pentecostals is affected by their entrance in the higher course of history, since the university, in general, has been marked over the centuries by a continuous process of secularization, culminating in its complete emancipation from religion in the nineteenth century. Therefore, the aim is to analyze the experience of people whose consciences have not been so affected by secularization but who live in a highly secularized space, that is, many evangelical university students, who participate in church services at weekends and are exhorted by their leaders to live a constant experience of faith, but during the week, at the university, they listen of their teachers a scientific discourse that, sometimes, is opposed to religious proposal. Using the theoretical-methodological contributions of sociology to the individual scale (especially the "plural man" model, developed by Bernard Lahire), we focused on the eventual conflict of dispositions incorporated in the religious socialization of the temple with the possible dispositions generated in the academic context, and as Pentecostal students relate them (transferring or dichotomizing them) in their social experience in the two contexts. Regarding the level of individual analysis, the methodological procedure used consisted of biographical interviews, which were worked and analyzed under analytical procedures that culminated in the elaboration of six "sociological portraits", whose focus was in the moment of "biographical rupture" that marks the entrance of the believer in the university.