An analysis of Pastor Silas Malafaia's “Why should you vote for Bolsonaro?” advice on Youtube: production and reception of discourses on social networks, from a semiolinguistic perspective

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger project that aims to study the articulation between the domains of religious and political discursive practice, made effective through new digital communication technologies. This article aims to analyze the situation of communication, both from the point of view of the production body and the instance of reception, of a counseling promoted by Pastor Silas Malafaia, on his Youtube channel, inciting Internet users to vote for the  candidate for presidency of the Republic Jair Bolsonaro. For this, we start with a study of the enunciative scheme and the argumentative organization of the focused discourse, including a reflection on the discursive identity constructed by the enunciator, and then analyze its repercussion among the internet users. We seek to approach the production and reception of discourse within the scope of Patrick Charaudeau's Semiolinguistic Theory of Discourse (2001, 2006, 2008, 2010). The study found that the pastor reconciled, in his speech, components of discursive religious and political formations, using linguistic categories, ordered according to the purpose of incitement, and materialized by procedures related to the argumentative organization of discourse. It was also verified that the reactions of the internauts, revealed by the published comments, reveal dissonant voices, which characterize the platform as a space of controversy. All this contributes to the construction of the social capital of the enunciator and, consequently, of the candidate that he tries to promote.