RELIGIÃO E VIDA PÚBLICA – UMA PROPOSTA DE RAZÃO PÚBLICA E ECUMÊNICA PARA O ESTADO BRASILEIRO

Abstract

An analysis of the relation between religion and public life in the Western world and in Brazil, as well as a proposal for a public and ecumenical reason for the Brazilian public sphere. The first part addresses a brief historical analysis of religion in Western public life, from the dawn of humanity, passing through the theocratic societies of antiquity, the secularization of public life promoted by the Greeks, by the creation of medieval Christendom until the secularization brought about by modernity beginning with the Renaissance, through the Protestant Reformation up to the Enlightenment, the theological liberalism and the fundamentalist reaction. The values of modernity, such as religious freedom, tolerance, a secular state, scientificism, rationalism, secularization and worldliness unquestionably marked Western societies. In the second part we address the role of religion in Brazilian public life, from the colonial period, showing the role of Roman Catholicism in the formation of Brazilian culture, and the repression that existed towards Afro-Brazilian religions, to the New Christians and indigenous creeds. In this section we approach the dawn of religious freedom in our country, with the tolerance of the Queen of England`s Anglican subjects and passing through the Constitutions of our nation's history we will have a panoramic view of how our secularism was built. In the last part, we show how developing a thought of a public reason in our public life, and will see the contributions of ecumenical ethics in Brazilian public life. We conclude by making an adaptation to the proposal of building an global ecumenical ethic of the Swiss theologian Hans Kung to the Brazilian reality with the coalition between religious and secularists as the most viable proposition to our context, since neither the religious followers were able to deploy a republic theocratic in our country, nor the secularists managed to eliminate religion from the public sphere.