“It’s up to you now!”

a discursive analysis of Pastor André Valadão’s sermon about the LGBTQIAPN+ community

Abstract

In one of his Sunday services at Lagoinha Baptist Church, in Orlando, Pastor André Valadão held, in 2023, a sermon entitled Conspiracy Theory, which addressed the topic of homoaffective relationships today. His statements in this sermon reverberated in various sectors of Brazilian society and many saw them as an attempt to incite hatred and violence against the LGBTQIAPN+ community. Considering the repercussions of the episode, with this article we aim to analyze the pastor's utterances during the ceremony to understand how the discursive functioning in his sayings takes place. For this, we carried out a qualitative research with an explanatory purpose, which took place via documentary analysis of a religious sermon on video. We used the principles and procedures of French Discourse Analysis, proposed by Michel Pêcheux – a discipline that considers language, Marxism and psychoanalysis –, as well as notions and characteristics of religious discourse mapped by Orlandi (2000; 2006; 2011). We identified that memory plays a crucial role in the production of discourse meanings, referring to biblical discourse to bring truth effects to statements. The mechanism of non-reversibility was also observed as a necessary pillar for the enunciating subject, through the idea of ​​transgression, to promote certain slips of meaning.