Fenômenos comunicacionais e de sociabilidade no contexto da pandemia de covid-19 entre evangélicos do distrito de Murinin, Benevides/PA

Abstract

This dissertation examines the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on religious practices, forms of sociability, and experiences of faith among evangelicals in the district of Murinin, in Benevides, within the metropolitan region of Belém, Pará, Brazil. The study investigates how the health crisis reshaped interactions, community ties, and the circulation of faith within the local evangelical field, considering both the pandemic period and the post-pandemic context. Murinin is approached as a socially produced territory marked by memory, territoriality, religiosity, and struggles over meaning, in which evangelical presence has historically been consolidated through churches, local narratives, and community practices. Methodologically, this is a qualitative, ethnographically oriented study based on participant observation, in-depth interviews, open-ended listening, territorial mapping of churches, and analysis of the narratives of interlocutors. The empirical field focuses primarily on the Assembleia de Deus in Paraíso do Murinin and the Primeira Igreja Batista in Murinin, as well as other denominations present in the district. During the pandemic, churches relied on digital media, messaging apps, and online streaming to maintain worship services, pastoral care, and religious bonds, while also facing tensions related to church closures, vaccination, collective care, and the debate over religious essentiality. The findings indicate that, in the post-pandemic period, religious practices did not simply return to a previous normality, but were reorganized in a hybrid mode, marked by the reaffirmation of bodily presence, the centrality of the church building, and the memory of absence. The study also identifies a reconfiguration of belonging, relations among evangelicals, and the use of media, now deployed in a more selective and critical way. It concludes that the pandemic intensified the mediatization of evangelical religiosity and highlighted the centrality of technical, bodily, and territorial mediations in the constitution of faith experiences in Murinin.