Lula’s Government Just Ruled Bible Cartoons Unfit for Children Under 12

BRASILIA — Brazil’s Ministry of Justice has taken the “free for all ages” rating away from a block of Bible cartoons that has run on Sunday mornings for 23 years, and recommended it be shown only after 8 p.m. The decision came in Portaria No. 2,272, dated Oct. 28 and published in the Diário Oficial da União, Brazil’s federal register, on Oct. 29. The ministry’s grounds, in its own words: the program contains “criminal acts, licit drugs, violence and stigma or prejudice.”

The same federal government that certified these cartoons as fit for every child in the country now rates them unfit for an 11-year-old before 8 p.m. The cartoons did not change. Nobody in Brasília has named the episode, the scene or the line that did.

The program is “Record Kids: Desenhos Bíblicos,” on the air since 2003 and broadcast Sundays from 9 to 10:30 a.m. by Record, Brazil’s second-largest television network. The animation is American: it comes from the catalogue of Richard Rich, the Walt Disney Productions director who left the studio in 1986 and spent two decades making “Animated Stories from the Bible” and “Animated Stories from the New Testament,” series that circulated for years through American churches and Sunday schools. The order was signed by Eduardo de Araújo Nepomuceno, the ministry’s coordinator-general of content rating policy.

What Brazil’s rating system is, and why it is not the American one

An American reader will picture a ratings board: private, industry-funded, the way the Motion Picture Association rates films. Brazil works the other way around. Ratings there, called classificação indicativa and run under a framework known as Classind, are issued by the federal executive branch. An office inside the Ministry of Justice reads the content, applies a government manual — fourth edition, 2021 — and assigns one of six bands: free, 10, 12, 14, 16 or 18. Each band carries a recommended broadcast hour, and 12 puts a program at 8 p.m. or later. The reviewer, the manual and the rating all belong to the government.

Two details decide how this week’s order should be read. The manual the ministry applied already permits “moderate or insinuated consumption of licit drugs” — alcohol and tobacco — in material rated free, so wine in a Bible story is not a borderline case under the government’s own written standard. And the hour is a recommendation, not a command: deciding ADI 2404 on Aug. 31, 2016, with Justice Dias Toffoli as rapporteur, the Supreme Federal Court struck the phrase “at an hour other than the one authorized” from Article 254 of Brazil’s child protection statute and held that the rating is pedagogical, addressed to parents rather than to broadcasters. Record can keep the program at 9 a.m. and break no law. The ministry’s instrument here is not a fine. It is the label.

Why it matters

Brazil is the largest Christian country in the Western Hemisphere after the United States, and its evangelical population — between a quarter and a third of Brazilians, depending on the survey — is the bloc that has most consistently voted against the ruling Workers’ Party, in a cycle where the party elected no federal deputies at all in seven states. Record belongs to Edir Macedo, founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. The ministry that signed the order answers to a government whose 2022 victory remains disputed by millions of Brazilians who allege electronic ballot fraud. When an executive branch in that position reaches into Sunday morning children’s programming on that network, nobody in Brazil reads it as a technical review.

For Washington, the method is the part worth studying. Nothing was banned, no broadcaster was fined, no court was involved. A coordinator re-read 23-year-old material, found four descriptors in it, and moved the program eleven hours down the schedule with a document that takes up one line of the federal register. That is the shape state pressure takes once the blunt instruments are off the table: administrative, procedural, deniable, and effective exactly where advertisers and programming directors make decisions.

The reaction, and the record

Federal Deputy Marcio Marinho, of the Republicanos party in Bahia, called the decision unwarranted and an attack on Christian subject matter. “Stories that teach faith and values to children deserve respect, not persecution,” he said, announcing a formal request for information to the ministry and demanding the rating be reviewed. Deputy Capitão Alden, of the Liberal Party in the same state, pressed for the parameters behind the decision. Neither request has been answered, and the ministry has said nothing beyond the text of the order.

What is documented: the order exists, is dated Oct. 28, was published Oct. 29, carries Nepomuceno’s signature, moves the program from free to 12, and names those four descriptors as its grounds. What is allegation is the motive — that the religious content, and not the criteria in the manual, drove the result. That is the charge Marinho and his colleagues are making, and the ministry has not released the technical analysis that would settle it either way. The evidence sits with the office that issued the rating, and publishing it is voluntary.

One rating on one children’s program is a small thing, which is precisely why it belongs on the record. Brazil’s institutions have spent four years demonstrating how much can be done to political opponents through ordinary procedure — a law applied at one speed for critics and another for allies, judges who socialize with the senators meant to hold them accountable, orders that land within hours of an inconvenient electoral result. That machinery has now reached the Sunday morning cartoon. The question Brasília has not answered — which scene in a 23-year-old Bible cartoon stopped being fit for a Brazilian child in October 2026 — is the one that tells you whether this was a rating or a warning.

Sources: Portaria No. 2,272 of Oct. 28, 2026, published in the Diário Oficial da União on Oct. 29, 2026; Classind practical guide for audiovisual content, 4th edition (2021), Ministry of Justice and Public Security; Supreme Federal Court, ADI 2404, decided Aug. 31, 2016; public statements by Federal Deputies Marcio Marinho (Republicanos-BA) and Capitão Alden (PL-BA). The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story.

Featured image: Palácio da Justiça, Brasília by Webysther Nunes, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.