Social identity, television media and historical-cultural construction of collective memory: the case of a socioreligious movement in Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to analyze why Brazilian Baptists, to preserve their social identity, tend to forget the fact that received, through its most outstanding leadership, the granting of a television channel in early 1980’s. In this case, since it is a process of organized forgetting, the theoretical framework involved in the research was the social memory studies, with data collected through interviews and research of documentary sources. This procedure allowed to establish that in order to reaffirm a social identity based on biblical doctrines, Baptists tended to build a collective memory, the past three decades, both from the oblivion of connections with the military dictatorship, as from forgetting of moral faults mentioned in media scandals.

Keywords
social identity; collective memory; media; baptists; dictatorship