In her book Vote of Faith: Democracy, Desire, and the Turbulent Lives of Priest Politicians published earlier this year, anthropologist Maya Mayblin explores the lives of priest-politicians in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco. In this detailed ethnography, Mayblin explores and analyzes how the mayor-priests, situated at the human and divine crossroads of desires, power, and exchanges, navigate the expectations placed on them and how, as they do so, they cross and trace the thresholds that separate and unite Catholicism and politics. A few weeks ago, she joined our new co-convener, Samuel Huard, for an interview about the book, which has been edited here for brevity.
S. H.: Maya, you just published Vote of Faith with Fordham University Press. What brought you to write a book about priest politicians?
M. M.: When I was doing my first fieldwork, I had no idea that I was going to be working with religion or politics. In fact, my first book was very much about gender and kinship. At that time, in the community where I was doing my research, there was a priest who would sometimes be referred to as padre and sometimes as prefeito, which means mayor in English. At some point I actually asked somebody: “is it padre or prefeito?”, assuming that it couldn’t be both, but it was both. This piqued my interest and it remained in the back of my mind. Some time later, when I was thinking about a postdoc project, that curiosity returned. Canon law, I had since discovered, forbids priests from holding secular civil or political office, so the padre-prefeito in question was a slightly taboo figure. In subsequent conversations with interlocutors, I learnt there were other padre–prefeitos in the region – the area was famed for them! So I figured this would be interesting to look at: the convergence of these different forms of authority.
S. H.: As you were writing your book, what audience did you have in mind? And what would you like your readers to take from that book?
M. M.: I must confess that the audience was a bit of a challenge throughout the writing process, in part because the research was conducted over a very long period of time. Including my initial PhD fieldwork, I was drawing on around 20 years of back-and-forth trips for data collection. In that time, my field of interlocutors became very diverse. So the data I was working spanned all kinds of domains. In marketing terms, the book sits more as a contribution to critical Catholic studies or the anthropology of religion. But, personally, I see it as a work that speaks as much to audiences interested in politics, kinship, gender, sexuality.
What do I hope readers take from it? Two things really: theoretical stimulation and human connection. I hope readers will connect with the central protagonists of the book, travel imaginatively alongside them and, in that process, glimpse how spirituality, desire and theopolitics combine to produce political outcomes. At the very least, a reader might take some enjoyment from the ethnography in the book, from the human connection it facilitates. Theoretically, I would hope readers are able to acquire new ideas and languages through which to think in more abstract terms about Catholicism as a political form.
One of the book’s aims is to expand our understanding of the Church as a complex political institution by paying particular ethnographic attention to priesthood as a unique phenomenon. In the anthropological canon, it is striking how little sustained ethnographic attention has been given to priests, particularly to diocesan priests. But priests articulate where the institution meets the individual faith. This historic lack of attention to priesthood poses something of an obstacle to any understanding of Catholicism as a lived religion, as priests are like hinges, crucial mediators in the Catholic body politic.
If we think about Catholicism not just as multiple forms in multiple places, but also as a singular system, overlapping with the religious idea of the “One true church”, we need to ask certain kinds of questions, we need to know more about the hinges, the translators of that system, right? Who are the key go-betweens?
S. H.: You talk about your interest in priesthood in general, and about the priest as being a hinge, a mediator. Yet, you chose to study a very particular type of priest: the mayor-priest. Why did you choose this figure in particular to study the intersection between Catholicism and politics?
M. M.: Because he is quite an unusual and unique figure, right? But he makes certain things clear. Mayor-priests in all their unusualness, in all the turbulence they generate, throw stuff that we take for granted into relief. Their lives force questions of sexuality, gender, kinship, and Catholic tradition into new configurations. What was implicit becomes suddenly explicit in the body of this category-defying figure. And I wanted the word turbulence in the book’s title because it hints at this capacity for disruption to show us things differently.
From the start I knew the mayor-priest could illuminate things theoretically, but I didn’t expect my study to take the turn it did. I thought the result would be a fairly traditional exploration of religio-political governance structures. I never imagined that a lot of the conversation would be about the sex lives of these supposedly celibate Catholic priests. In that sense, even in terms of what I imagined was going to be ‘political’, that surprised me.
S. H.: The importance of desire and sex in the figure of the priest?
M. M.: Yeah, it completely took me by surprise. I remember feeling quite perplexed about the talk that was unfolding: about sexuality, desire and the double lives of priests. I kept thinking “but I’m not here to look at this. I’m here to look at political process.” But, of course, peoples’ reflections about the complex and often unspoken aspects of clerical life were precisely that – about the intersections of power and politics.
Gender, love, sexuality were integral to that. Priests, in order to become mayors, had to be viewed as lovers. So, the mayor-priest is a ‘lover’ in multiple senses. He has to embody God’s love. He has to perform paternal love. He has to signal to society that he is also, very likely – albeit in secret – to be a good sexual lover as well. The feminist saying “the personal is political” has never been more apt. This is a context in which the private lives of priests, and their intimate access to Catholic subjects, is anything but incidental to their political engagement. It is deeply structuring of that political engagement and structures, too, how democracy is imagined in this part of the world, and how it unfolds. So, Vote of Fatih is a book about political representation, elections, and resource distribution, but it is also about how spiritual, sexual, and kinship yearnings shape all of that.
S. H.: You use the term “theopolitics” to talk about your frame of analysis in the book. Why did you choose that concept and how does it differ from “political theology,” who some people might be more familiar with?
M. M.: I use the term theopolitics because I think it captures something fundamentally different from political theology. My understanding of political theology is as formal theological texts or doctrines that consciously engage with political problems, like liberation theology. Whereas theopolitics gets at the ways that religious ideas, rooted perhaps or emergent in formal texts, come to operate in everyday life, and in diffuse and unpredictable ways.
I suppose that theopolitics for me is about the power of theology to operate at the level of lived experience. You could say it gestures towards the Foucauldian idea of ‘politics’ in that diffuse, capillary sense. It focuses attention on the way theological ideas animate our behaviour, not always consciously, through bodies, affects, and spatial arrangements rather than through conscious reflection on theological texts. And of course, I’m thinking also of the work of Napolitano and McAllister on this, and of the effort being made to reclaim or reconfigure how religion and politics can be spoken about in anthropology and I think of this as a positive move. But my engagement in this field of debate is really light touch. My book does not seek to make explicit any distinction between theopolitics and political theology, it’s hopefully just evident in the ethnography.
S. H.: It’s interesting here that you talk about Foucault and this capillary presence of power and theology and their intersections and interactions. In chapter five, you talk about faith as a substance with causative effects that mayor-priests are well placed to co-opt and redirect. How would you say that this understanding of faith changes how we can think about power and how it circulates and is co-opted?
M. M.: One of the things I’ve always found a bit frustrating about power as an analytical term in social science is its uniformity and ethnocentrism. So infrequently is power ever discussed as an emic or ethnographic category. Chapter five is actually trying to bring an emic perspective of power to bear on how causation works, so expanding our academic category. It’s doing that by giving epistemic equality to a local understanding of faith.
To put it bluntly, I think that the notion of power, at least in the Foucauldian tradition, can miss a lot. It is often assumed to be an effect of relationships and nothing more. It’s never a substance or energy, only an invisible psychological dynamic. And I think that faith also suffers from a similar framing in that we also imagine it as a sort of psychological dynamic, an interior disposition. Something very private, very individual. We rarely think of faith or power ontologically, as substances, as visceral potentia that can be felt in the body, shared around, or, literally, seen acting on the world. In the book, I’m interested in what people describe as the physicality of fé (faith), it’s energetic quality. And the way it’s being invoked as an almost mechanical theory of causation to explain the electoral process. Faith is an emic, non-academic explanation for power-relations. And it’s as good an explanatory model as Foucault offers us.
S. H.: That opens a lot of very interesting future analytical paths! In your conclusion, you talk about Agamben and his “reflections on being and praxis constituting a primordial ‘economic’ relationship between transcendence and immanence”. And you say that it affords “an interesting vision of the mayor-priest as an economy rather than a sovereign” (p. 180). Could you say a bit more about that?
M. M.: Agamben is using this notion of economy in a very particular way in The Kingdom and the Glory. I like how it points towards ‘articulation’ – as in those nodes in an overall system where different parts are connected, but not merged. Hinges that connect but keep separate. That’s essentially what an economy is – not one thing, but different moving parts that can be connected to give the impression of a whole. I like the idea that economy could help us break an academic fascination with sovereignty.
In fact, the model of the mayor-priest I initially had in mind when writing the book was that of a sovereign – in anthropological terms – a kind of “divine king” in whose body different forms of power become fused. But my data showed that the mayor-priest did not fit this model – he was something else. The mayor-priests of my study are servants of God, and servitude is their primary language for describing what and who they are. They’ve got all this patriarchal power and sacred and political authority. But the degree of authority that is accorded to them in this deeply Catholic society can be so profound that they chafe against it, even find it quite oppressive. So they lean into this idea of servitude instead, and cultivate separations between their public and private selves.
Agamben uses the idea of economy then, to get at how power is dispersed between the divine and immanent realms. And I just ended up thinking that this idea of economy worked well for the priest-politician as servant of God, as hinge or mediator in a more expansive system of moving parts: spiritual, democratic, secular, worldly. It’s not an idea that I pursue in great analytical detail throughout the book. It’s more a suggestion for future exploration, perhaps an idea somebody else will want to take up and run with.
S. H.: Well, thank you for throwing that thought in there. I might pick it up and run with it! In your book, you mention that Brazil has changed since your first ethnographic projects there. You talk briefly about the rise of evangelicalism, of Bolsonaro and of how Christianity and politics have changed in how they interact. In your own experiences and from your perspective as an international scholar of Catholicism, do you think that there is something particular about the theopolitical moment we’re witnessing at different local and global scales in the last years?
M. M.: That’s a very important and interesting question. And, in a sense, one that I don’t feel most authorized to answer given the number of specialist scholars out there doing brilliant work on contemporary conservative evangelical movements. But I would say that this global “tide” if that is what it is, is not as new as is sometimes claimed. The trend towards conservative religious reformism has been going for a while now. It does seem to have intensified more recently. What’s really interesting about the evangelical mega-church movement in Brazil is the way it translates into political power at scale. These church movements use digital media to reach people across huge distances and time zones, and they turn into massive voting groups that literally sway who becomes president. I think Brazil has a particularly interesting kind of political and religious synergy with North America. With Trump back in office, and now with the death of Pope Francis, the spectre of right-wing Catholicism is, once again, taking centre stage.
If there is something that requires more study, in my view, it is the procreative faultline that underlies this theopolitical moment. Christian politics, of all sorts, consistently returns us to the body, to questions of gender, and to the capacity of humans to procreate. The pro-life agenda should not be seen as a “single issue”, or feminist subfield, it is the defining issue for our age, because it impacts populations and, ultimately, the matter of the environment. Bringing Foucault back into the conversation, we could say that we’re in a profoundly biopolitical moment. My concern would be that we take this very seriously when looking at religious, right-wing movements, and that we understand what the theopolitics of gender, sexuality and reproduction is doing at different scales.
The Catholic Church of Brazil today is as polarized and divided as society at large. And that’s one of the interesting things about Catholicism. It’s a “broad church” as they say. That’s why it’s such a fascinating religion to study as a social scientist, politically speaking, you can find the whole world in there. But I do worry for the future. I think that some of the complex elasticity that Catholicism as an institution has been known for may be coming to an end. In Brazil, the progressive Church is shrinking rapidly, the old liberationist guard is dying off. Younger generations of Catholics with digital savvy tend to be more conservative in outlook.
It’s going to be very, very important to see what pope we’re going to get next. One of the interesting things about Pope Francis was that he was ostensibly a very progressive pope in a church that is turning, in terms of public visibility, political force, and digital presence, towards moral conservatism. The fact that the most powerful person in the hierarchy was outwardly progressive served, in a way, to counterbalance some of that. If the next pope holds right-wing views, that balance could change for good.
S. H.: Talking about Francis. What aspect of Francis’ legacy stands out the most for you? And what would you like the next pope’s priority to be?
M. M.: Well, there’s no prizes for guessing what kind of politics I’d like to see continue in the church! I’m a secular social scientist and a feminist, and I’d like a pope as close to Pope Francis as possible, perhaps even a bit more ambitious when it comes to gender reform. I find non-Catholics and non-religious people can be confused about why a pope’s death gathers such media attention.
One thing I’ve been trying to explain is that very few religious leaders can make presidents and world leaders drop everything to attend their funeral. In geopolitical terms, there’s no other figure quite like the pope. Perhaps Catholicism doesn’t have the mega-business or social media power that evangelical churches do in today’s world, but it still has a lot of “soft” power due to its age, its connection to old global elites, its embeddedness in other state institutions – from education to health. Pope Francis used this stately power, as any head of state would, to great effect, particularly on questions of migration and environment. But importantly, he had influence well beyond the Catholic fold. So we’re seeing now a huge outpouring of reflection, and also genuine mourning for him, among Catholics, but also among non-Catholics. This was the kind of pope he was.
So yes, in a world that sometimes appears, particularly from the vantage point of north and western Europe, increasingly secular, and where Catholicism can look like a footnote, Francis’ legacy stands out. For next Pope, it would be nice to continue having somebody more progressive, and from the global South. What about you? What are your views?
S. H.: I really liked Francis too. He was humble and bold and guided the church in a direction that I liked. I think that synodality is very important: this ability to talk together even though we disagree and to try to find what unites us through that. I hope that the next pope will be able to keep doing that. Francis was good at bringing people together, despite all his critics. And I agree about gender. That is maybe the one aspect in which Pope Francis didn’t go as far as I would have wanted, but he still took some steps. For example, he named a lot of women to important positions. But Francis wasn’t ready to take the ontological step of saying that women can be ordained, can receive this seal that you talk about in your book. I think that it is a step that should be taken and, in some ways, Francis did open the path for his successor to say more on that issue. We’ll see. Hopefully who comes next will keep in the same direction that Francis chose. We need that, definitely.
M. M.: What Francis did for the environment with Laudato Si’ was so important. But also fascinating politically – not only did he get Catholics thinking about environmental issues, but he also got environmentalists and secular activists to actually pay attention to the Catholic Church. People who never thought a religious institution could be their ally suddenly saw the Church in a new light. It was a powerful move. So I really hope that that legacy continues very actively with the next papacy. It’s hard to predict. We’ll have to wait and see.
S. H.: Yes, we’ll have to wait and see what the Spirit inspires the cardinals to do.
M. M.: Exactly!
S.H.: Well, Maya, thank you for all your answers and wisdom. We can find much more about the intersections of Catholicism and politics in Vote of Faith: Democracy, Desire, and the Turbulent Lives of Priest Politicians.
