Vozes em conflito: a refração do cristianismo na esfera acadêmica à luz do círculo de Bakhtin

Abstract

This study investigates the refraction of the Christian worldview within the Brazilian academic environment, analyzing how university discourse, in its pursuit of neutrality and plurality, may construct Christianity as either the “villain” or the “victim” of religious intolerance. Based on a historical contextualization that traces the relationship between faith and knowledge from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages through the processes of secularization and the Enlightenment, the research explores the discursive role reversal that positions Christianity both as a target of criticism and as a victim of manifestations of religious intolerance. The central research problem examines how the academic environment, despite advocating religious plurality, constructs Christianity as either the “villain” or the “victim” of intolerance, and how this ideological refraction can be interpreted through the perspective of Dialogic Discourse Analysis (DDA). The general objective is to analyze how academic discourse refracts Christianity from this perspective, in light of the concept of ideological refraction developed by the Bakhtin Circle, identifying the effects of this representation on the perception of the Christian faith. The specific objectives are to present key concepts of Dialogic Discourse Analysis, contextualize the secularization processes that influence the representation of Christianity in academia, and identify discourses that contribute to this construction, examining their impacts on students and educators. The study adopts a qualitative and interpretative approach, grounded in Bakhtin’s dialogic theory of language and supported by contributions from Sobral (2016), Fiorin (2016), Faraco (2009), Ciarallo (2023), and Brait (2005). The corpus consists of comments posted on a TikTok video by Sávio de Melo, in which users report experiences related to the expression of Christian faith in the university context. The results indicate that processes of ideological refraction may foster simplified representations of Christianity, contributing to its stigmatization in certain contexts. It is concluded that such representation constitutes a complex discursive phenomenon, produced through the interaction of different social voices and evaluative positions.