RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil's rapid religious transformation is reverberating through the country's tight presidential race, where abortion and gay marriage have emerged as hot-button issues and Pentecostal televangelists are political power brokers. During a recent service at his 6,000-seat Assemblies of God church in a gritty Rio de Janeiro neighborhood, Brazil's most influential Pentecostal pastor spent half of the service talking about the election, nudging voters to support top opposition candidate Marina Silva, who is also a member of the Assemblies of God, by far Brazil's largest Pentecostal denomination. Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who was imprisoned and tortured during Brazil's military dictatorship, rarely spoke of religion before this campaign, but she has been making the rounds of Pentecostal churches and invoking God's name of late. By contrast, the deeply religious Silva has made no campaign stops in churches and has kept Pentecostal leaders at arm's length in public, hoping to combat suspicions among non-religious voters that conservative pastors could shape the stance a Silva government would have on social issues. Silva supports Brazil's current law allowing same-sex civil unions, which gives gay partners the same rights as heterosexual couples, but stops short of supporting religious weddings for gays. "Marina is in a really nice position where she got Malafaia, the rock star pastor of the Assemblies of God, to back her, so she probably feels like a lot of her evangelical support is solidified," said Andrew Chesnut, a professor and expert on Latin American religions at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has focused on Brazil's Pentecostals.