“And You Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Set You Free”: Friends and Enemies in Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s Biblical Discourse

We examine the quotations in the political discourse of former Brazilian PresidentJair Messias Bolsonaro Jair Messias BolsonaroBolsonaro, Jair. Investigating all 611 speeches delivered by President Bolsonaro during his four-year term, we discover that biblical religious quotations are present in almost two-thirds (65%). The remaining part encompasses a diverse array of topics, some relatively insignificant, often used as rhetorical devicesRhetorical devices. Thus, we adopted a mixed-methods approach, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to analyze the role of biblical quotationsBiblical quotations in the political discourse surrounding the foreign policy of President Bolsonaro. Supported by the Critical Discourse AnalysisCritical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework, we argue that religious quotations not only bolster his narrative externally but also resonate profoundly with his national support base (Evangelical-Catholic), promoting a binary worldview. This biblical perspective employed by President Bolsonaro created a feedback loop between the internal and external dimensions of his policy by externalizing domestic friends and enemies. Thus, political conflict was reduced to a metaphysical battle between the same actors: the good (conservative Christian-Jews, represented externally by the U.S. and Israel, and domestically by Bolsonaro’s government) versus the evil (the left/globalists, represented externally by Venezuela and Cuba, and domestically by the Brazilian left).