The Banality of Selective Death

Evangelical Political Theology, Support for Israel, and the Hierarchy of Mourning

Abstract

This article investigates the moral asymmetry present in segments of Brazilian evangelicalism regarding deaths in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Drawing on public materials related to a lecture by Major Rafael Rozenszajn, presented as a “spokesman for the Israeli Army” in an activity of the Homens Invencíveis group held in a space associated with Igreja Renascer em Cristo, it analyzes how religious discourse, military authority, and evangelical support for Israel may produce selective framings of the conflict. The methodology combines critical discourse analysis, critical biblical hermeneutics, and interdisciplinary literature review. The article mobilizes Geertz and Eliade to understand death as a symbolic-religious phenomenon, and Butler, Mbembe, Said, Arendt, and Milgram to discuss mourning, necropolitics, orientalism, obedience, and the suspension of moral judgment, while also turning to the ethics of Jesus and Palestinian Christian tradition as a theological counterpoint. It concludes that selective death is not sustained merely by geopolitical preferences, but by religious framings that unequally distribute compassion, mourning, and moral dignity.