Connect with us

Substacks

Latinos Are Flocking to Evangelical Christianity Marie Arana

Published

on

Samuel Rodriguez, then president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, in 2013. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

In recent years, Latino voters have confounded expectations. Long taken for granted as a solidly Democratic voting bloc, they are now shifting rightward, with one recent poll showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden among Latino voters. But voting preferences are just one area where this cohort is misunderstood. 

Another is religion. Latinos, who make up 20 percent of the U.S. population, aren’t homogeneously Catholic. As Marie Arana shows in her new book, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority, this group is increasingly driving America’s evangelical movement. Estimates show that by 2030, half of U.S. Latinos will identify as Protestant evangelicals who actually lean right—a shift that will shape voting patterns for decades to come.

Arana, the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who moved to the U.S. when she was nine, spent three years researching her book. She interviewed over 200 people, from grape-pickers to neurosurgeons to CEOs of major corporations. And while she’s not a member of an evangelical church, Arana was baptized Catholic and is now a confirmed Episcopalian. In this exclusive excerpt from LatinoLand, Arana shows why this change is happening and the new generation of Pentecostal leaders who are fueling it.

Samuel Rodriguez—or “Pastor Sam,” as he’s often called by his legions of followers—didn’t find his faith in a church. He found it in a college physics lab. 

As a student of computer engineering at Penn State in the late ’80s, Rodriguez was a “science guy,” he says. “But studying mathematics and the probability of chance—as well as the complexities of what it took to create the Big Bang—there was no doubt in my mind that a higher intelligence had to be at work.” It was math that revolutionized him, Rodriguez says. “My belief in God is undergirded by calculus.”

Rodriguez, now 54, went on to become the CEO of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, leading a network of more than 42,000 evangelical churches that cater to Hispanic Americans. In 2010, he also founded New Season, a megachurch in Sacramento, California, where he serves as lead pastor. Between his church and the NHCLC, there are more than one hundred million souls in his flock.

Born to working-class Puerto Rican immigrants in the steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—his father drove a Mack truck and his mother was a homemaker—the baby-faced Rodriguez has been politically outspoken, especially when it comes to immigration reform. He’s advised presidents on both sides of the political aisle, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and hasn’t been afraid to push back. In 2017, he shared a statement about Trump’s controversial border wall, saying while he agreed with Trump that “securing our borders is critically important,” he “vigorously oppose(d)” forcibly remov[ing]. . . undocumented people. . . living in the United States.

Rodriguez believes the reason for his meteoric rise is down to the enthusiasm of Hispanic believers. “Wherever you see a wildfire of spirituality, you see a Hispanic presence,” he tells me. “The Latino community is a passionate community.”

That “wildfire of spirituality” has been changing course in recent years. Although two-thirds of U.S. Latinos were raised Catholic, nearly a quarter of them have left the church, according to 2022 Pew research. One out of every three Latinos who’ve abandoned the Roman Catholic Church in this country has joined Pastor Sam as a Pentecostal, a branch of evangelical Christianity.

In fact, some researchers project that by 2030, half of the entire population of American Latinos will identify as Protestant evangelicals. Compare that growth with white evangelical Protestants, whose numbers have declined from 23 percent of the American population in 2006 to 14 percent in 2020. With the Hispanic population’s projected growth, in less than a decade, we may see forty million Latinos—a congregation the size of California—heading to American evangelical churches every Sunday.

And as their numbers burgeon, so does the faith’s political power. Latinos—a segment of American society once assumed to lean Democratic—have begun to identify more and more with conservative doctrine, and one only need study their religious migration to understand why.

Latino immigrants arrive in this country weary of corruption, violence, and the lack of opportunity in their homelands. They come here with a hunger for a better economy, heightened security, a more controlled society, a more governed self, a system that demands principles and opens the door to a better life. Pastor Sam’s evangelical church, and others like it, offer just that.

“We have all heard the old song—the song of hatred, sin, racism, intolerance, division, strife, brokenness,” says Rodriguez. “It’s time to sing something new.”

( Simon & Schuster)

In 1980, only six percent of the world’s Christians were Pentecostalist, but those few went forth and brought in converts, as the faith required. As a result, a mere generation later, one in four of the world’s Christians was a member. With each evangelized recruit becoming an evangelizer, the mission continued its powerful algorithm for exponential growth. Today, every twenty-four hours, the Pentecostal church adds another 35,000d born-again faithful to its ranks. Pentecostalists now represent some six hundred million believers worldwide, twenty million of them in the United States, with an overwhelming majority in Latin America and Africa. Clearly, this is the fastest growing religion on earth. It counts a tidy third of the two billion Christians on the planet. By 2050, it aims to count a billion.

For Pentecostalism, a physical church—sometimes the size of an airport—is vital to the mission. Across the U.S., Latino pastors with an eye on U.S. Census predictions have been energetically “planting” new churches, and thousands of Latino Pentecostal congregations have been cropping up every year in both urban and rural areas. Many of them are villages unto themselves: part music stadium, part hall of worship, part school, part way station for any conceivable need. 

And while the congregation at a Catholic Mass is made to sit and listen to a priest at an altar, the evangelical church urges them to speak, shout, share the faith, hug a stranger, join the family. “You can’t do that in Catholic churches,” says Rodriguez. “We offer Latinos greater equity in the moment. Greater unity.”

The megachurches also offer important education-oriented services, including remedial tutoring for flagging students, music classes for toddlers, English-language learning for immigrants, speed-dating events for young professionals, financial advice for small-business owners, counseling for troubled teens, even cures for addiction. 

For those who need assistance reading a legal document in English, or applying for a green card, or even finding the right childcare, the church becomes a one-stop destination. This network of support is a powerful magnet for a working-class cohort attracted to the lure of economic advancement—the promise that, once they ascend the money ladder, they can redraw themselves as not poor, not inferior, not objects of prejudice, but as inheritors of the beautiful “reset” that is implicit in the American Dream. 

The overwhelming majority of these newly minted Protestants, according to data from the Asbury Latino Center, are millennials or Generation Xers, and mostly female. The lion’s share are also foreign-born immigrants with less than a high school education, and they live in households that subsist on less than $30,000 a year. 

Pentecostalism—which touts itself as “prosperity theology”—promises a road to upward socioeconomic mobility. To reach salvation, there is no need to confess to a priest. Conversion and baptism alone can win it. Neither is there a need to die poor in order to inherit the earth; life can be better right here, on this very ground.

At the same time, the code of ethics for Protestant evangelicals is rigorous: in many churches, converts are expected to attend religious services regularly, bond with neighbors, reject homosexuality, prohibit drinking, spurn sex before marriage, condemn abortion, decry racism, and place a man as the bedrock of his family (although women are valued as church equals). For a culture steeped in machismo yet weary of violence, the appeal is obvious. 

But not all evangelicals count themselves among the struggling classes. Some are Hollywood stars, like pop star Selena Gomez, who was—until scandals of infidelity rocked her church’s leadership—a regular worshipper at the Hillsong Church in Los Angeles. Gomez, a third-generation Mexican American, hasn’t been shy about attaching her faith to her public persona. Her social media posts, her interviews, even her songs are filled with euphoric references to God, Jesus, and the Bible. “I’m literally just laying down and thanking Jesus,” she wrote on Twitter (now X) back in 2019. Star promotion like this can have an exponential effect on recruitment.

But sometimes, the most persuasive models of success are evangelical leaders themselves.

During services at the Mosaic megachurch he founded in Los Angeles, El Salvador–born Erwin McManus, 65, emerges onstage in skinny black jeans and black leather high-tops, like a pop star swanning into the Chateau Marmont. Born Irving Rafael Mesa-Cardona, McManus rarely refers to his Latino roots. His upbringing was difficult; his teachers called him “retarded,” he’s claimed. He talks about being an imperfect man who had to encounter Jesus before he could find the valuable human being buried deep within his soul. 

Meanwhile, in Orlando, Florida, another megachurch with a similar name opened its doors in 2003: This is Mosaic. One of its pastors, Javier Antique, a Venezuelan army veteran who works as an emergency room nurse during the week, is committed to spreading the gospel to working-class Latinos who labor in the giant amusement parks and tourist hotels that have sprung up around them. 

This is Mosaic grew from modest prayer gatherings in a Clermont, Florida, aerobics gym to massive music extravaganzas in the reconfigured shell of a former appliance megastore in Winter Garden, Florida, in 2017. Within a few years, the church had raised enough money to purchase a second colossal building near Orlando’s Walt Disney World.

On any given Sunday, when rock bands ramp up the speakers and the church walls begin to shake, thousands of worshipers crowd into This is Mosaic’s two venues.

Pastor Antique began his evangelical path in Venezuela as a translator for Team Mania Ministries, a worldwide, youth-oriented mission committed to “raising up a young army who will change the world for Christ.” When he immigrated to Tyler, Texas, in 2001 and began work there as an urgent-care nurse, he was recruited by This is Mosaic. Called to grow the newly planted church in Orlando, he is now responsible for drawing Latinos to the flock.

“They come with nothing but two hands and a desire to work,” says Antique. “We need to help them. I try to be loving and kind, so that people can see Jesus in what we do.”

What this means for future elections remains to be seen. Across the United States, more Latino pastors with an eye on U.S. Census predictions are energetically “planting” churches than ever before, winning Latino souls one at a time. After all, the Census Bureau has projected that, by 2060, Hispanics will number 111 million, nearly a third of this country’s entire population, and white evangelicals are not blind to the promise of growth inherent in that calculation. In fact, since 2006, white evangelical churches have experienced a precipitous drop in their numbers, shrinking from 23 percent of the American population in 2006 to 14 percent in 2020. 

Rodriguez fully understands the meaning of this. “We Latinos are not extending our hand to primarily white denominations and asking, ‘Can you help us plant churches?’ ” he says. “We’re going to them, saying, ‘You all need our help.’ This is a flipping of the script.”

Excerpted from LatinoLand © 2024 by Marie Arana, published by Simon & Schuster on February 20, 2024.

Marie Arana is a Peruvian-American author of nonfiction and fiction, as well as the inaugural literary director of the Library of Congress. Follow her on Twitter (now X) @aranama.

And to support our mission of independent journalism, become a Free Press subscriber today:

Subscribe now

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through Bookshop.org links in this article.

 

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Substacks

Things Worth Remembering: ‘A Game Most Like Life’ Charles Lane

Published

on

By

It feels like only yesterday I called up my friend Douglas Murray with a strange idea: What if you wrote a column for us about poetry?

We had no idea if anyone would be interested in it. I still wasn’t sure many people would be interested in The Free Press itself. But I knew I didn’t want this institution we were building to focus solely on what was wrong with the world. As I wrote at the time: “If ours is an era of building and rebuilding, what things are worth saving?”

In the two years since this column began, the world has changed so much. We have a new president. One war has started—and perhaps is now ending. Another still rages.

The Free Press has covered it all. And so has Douglas himself, reporting from Israel and Ukraine, and speaking across the globe. Meantime, he has written nearly 100 editions of Things Worth Remembering—an unbelievable feat. Somehow he also found time to write a forthcoming book about the future of the West.

Given how much is on his plate, for the time being Douglas is stepping back from this incredible column he’s helped to build. He’ll continue to be a beloved contributor to, and friend of, The Free Press. And fear not: Things Worth Remembering will carry on every Sunday.

Over the years, fans of this column have said to me: “If I had to choose one thing worth remembering, it’d be. . . . ” It made me realize most writers have a poem they return to when they feel lost, a song they replay, or a snippet of some great book that materializes again and again. So we are expanding the column to bring in new voices and choices. I think you’ll love what they have to say.

Today, on Super Bowl Sunday, we start with our deputy editor, Charles Lane, who knows exactly what Americans should remember on this important date: a speech given multiple times, in the late ’60s, by the greatest football coach in the world, Vince Lombardi. It touches on a lot of things we care a lot about at The Free Press: courage, hard work, and excellence. I hope you like it as much as I do—don’t forget to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, everyone!
—BW

“I sometimes wonder whether those of us who love football fully appreciate its great lessons,” said Vince Lombardi, in what friends and family called “the speech.”

The greatest professional football coach of the twentieth century, Lombardi tried and tested various versions of this talk as an in-demand public speaker during the late ’60s. The text quoted here is from “a representative version” of the speech, which his son Vince Jr. compiled and published in 2001. Lombardi’s words are undeniably magnificent, even to those who might have no interest in tonight’s Super Bowl.

Lombardi acknowledged that his was “a violent game,” suggesting that it would be “imbecilic” to play it otherwise. But this “game like war,” he believed, was also “a game most like life—for it teaches that work, sacrifice, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness, and respect for authority are the price one pays to achieve worthwhile goals.”

Lombardi’s is not quite the household name it was—time does that to fame. To the extent he is remembered today it is often as the originator of a ruthless coaching doctrine—“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”—that someone else actually coined.

Still, every year the Super Bowl restores him, at least for a moment, to popular awareness: The winning team tonight will take home the Vince Lombardi Trophy, a brilliant 20.75-inch–high, seven-pound prize made out of pure sterling by Tiffany silversmiths.


Read more

 

Continue Reading

Substacks

February 8, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

on

By

Yesterday the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration announced a new policy that will dramatically change the way the United States funds medical research. Now, when a researcher working at a university receives a federal grant for research, that money includes funds to maintain equipment and facilities and to pay support staff that keep labs functioning. That indirect funding is built into university budgets for funding expensive research labs, and last year reached about 26% of the grant money distributed. Going forward, the administration says it will cap the permitted amount of indirect funding at 15%.

NIH is the nation’s primary agency for research in medicine, health, and behavior. NIH grants are fiercely competitive; only about 20% of applications succeed. When a researcher applies for one, their proposal is evaluated first by a panel of their scholarly peers and then, if it passes that level, an advisory council, which might ask for more information before awarding a grant. Once awarded and accepted, an NIH grant carries strict requirements for reporting and auditing, as well as record retention.

In 2023, NIH distributed about $35 billion through about 50,000 grants to over 300,000 researchers at universities, medical schools, and other research institutions. Every dollar of NIH funding generated about $2.46 in economic activity. For every $100 million of funding, research supported by NIH generates 76 patents, which produce 20% more economic value than other U.S. patents and create opportunities for about $600 million in future research and development.

As Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times explained, the authors of Project 2025 called for the cuts outlined in the new policy, claiming those cuts would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.” Dr. David A. Baltrus of the University of Arizona told Jewett and Stolberg that the new policy is “going to destroy research universities in the short term, and I don’t know after that. They rely on the money. They budget for the money. The universities were making decisions expecting the money to be there.”

Although Baltrus works in agricultural research, focusing on keeping E. coli bacteria out of crops like sprouts and lettuce, cancer research is the top area in which NIH grants are awarded.

Anthropologist Erin Kane figured out what the new NIH policy would mean for states by looking at institutions that received more than $10 million in grants in 2024 and figuring out what percentage of their indirect costs would not be eligible for grant money under the new formula. Six schools in New York won $2.4 billion, including $953 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would allow only $220 million for overhead, a loss of $723 million.

States across the country will experience significant losses. Eight Florida schools received about $673 million, $231 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would limit that funding to $66 million, a loss of $165 million. Six schools in Ohio received a total of about $700 million; they would lose $194 million. Four schools in Missouri received a total of about $830 million; they would lose $212 million.

Lawmakers from Republican-dominated states are now acknowledging what those of us who study the federal budget have pointed out for decades: the same Republican-dominated states that complain bitterly about the government’s tax policies are also the same states that take most federal tax money. Dana Nickel of Politico reported yesterday that Republican leaders in the states claim to be enthusiastic about the cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency but are mobilizing to make sure those cuts won’t hurt their own state programs that depend on federal money. Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt told Nickel that governors can provide advice about what cuts will be most effective. “Instead of just across the board cutting, we thought, man, they need some help from the governors to say, ‘We can be more efficient in this area or this area, or if you allow block grants in this area, you can reduce our expenditures by 10 percent.’ And so that’s our goal.”

Yesterday, Tim Carpenter of the Kansas Reflector reported that Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) is concerned about the Trump administration’s freeze on food distributions through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID buys about $2 billion in U.S. agricultural products a year, and farmers are already struggling with rising costs, low prices, and concern with tariffs.

Their spokespeople urge the continuation of USAID: the senior director of government affairs at the American Farm Bureau Federation said that “USAID plays a critical role in reducing hunger around the world while sourcing markets for the surplus foods America’s farmers and ranchers grow.” Moran added: “Food stability is essential to political stability, and our food aid programs help feed the hungry, bolster our national security and provide an important market for our farmers, especially when commodity prices are low.”

Meanwhile, federal employees are telling the stories of the work they’ve done for the country. Yesterday, a public letter whose author claimed to be an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation whose job is at risk in Trump’s purge of the agency wrote an amalgamation of the FBI agents being purged: “I am the coach of your child’s soccer team,” the letter read. “I sit next to you on occasion in religious devotion. I am a member of the PTA. With friends, you celebrated my birthday. I collected your mail and took out your trash while you were away from home. I played a round of golf with you. I am a veteran. I am the average neighbor in your community.”

But there is another side to that person, the author wrote. “I orchestrated a clandestine operation to secure the release of an allied soldier held captive by the Taliban. I prevented an ISIS terrorist from boarding a commercial aircraft. I spent 3 months listening to phone intercepts in real time to gather evidence needed to dismantle a violent drug gang. I recruited a source to provide critical intelligence on Russian military activities in Africa. I rescued a citizen being tortured to near death by members of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang. I interceded and stopped a juvenile planning to conduct a school shooting. I spent multiple years monitoring the activities of deep cover foreign intelligence officers, leading to their arrest and deportation. I endured extensive hardship to infiltrate a global child trafficking organization. I have been shot in the line of duty.”

“[W]hen I am gone,” they wrote, “who will do the quiet work that is behind the facade of your average neighbor?”

Less publicly, Joseph Grzymkowski expressed on Facebook his pride in 38 years of service “with utmost dedication, integrity, and passion. I was not waste, fraud, and abuse,” he wrote. “Nor was I the “Deep State…. We are the faces of your Government: ordinary and diverse Americans, your friends and neighbors, working behind the scenes in the interest of the people we serve. We are not the enemy.”

Wth his statement, Grzymkowski posted a magazine clipping from 1996, when he was a Marine Analyst working in the Marine Navigation Department for the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), located in Bethesda, Maryland—now known as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Springfield, Virginia. That office provides maritime intelligence for navigation, international obligations, and joint military operations.

On January 6, 1996, a historic blizzard dumped snowfalls of 19 to 31 inches on the East Coast. Stranded alone in the station when his relief couldn’t get through the snow to work, Grzymkowsky stayed at the radio. “I realized there were mariners who needed navigation safety messages delivered, and I wasn’t about to jeopardize the safety of life or cargo at sea simply because we were experiencing a blizzard,” he told a journalist. “One doesn’t leave a watch on a ship until properly relieved, and I felt my responsibility at the watch desk as keenly as I would have felt my responsibility for the navigation on the bridge of a ship.”

For 33 hours, he stayed at his desk and sent out navigation safety messages. “I had a job to do and I did it,” he recalled. “There were ships at sea relying on me, and I wasn’t going to let them down. It’s nothing that any other member of this department wouldn’t do.”

Notes:

https://grants.nih.gov/grants-process

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43341/45

https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/20

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget

https://www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-state/alabama

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/impact-nih-research/serving-society/direct-economic-contributions

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/us/politics/medical-research-funding-cuts-university-budgets.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/06/trump-usaid-money-american-farms/

https://kansasreflector.com/2025/02/07/kansas-moran-davids-sound-alarm-on-delay-of-usaid-food-aid-to-starving-people-worldwide/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/07/republican-state-doge-budget-013596

https://southfloridareporter.com/a-trump-policy-change-will-restrict-billions-in-funding-for-medical-research-programs-at-universities/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12HuhGA67_QPIibLa6nB32BtepQR3zQE_DvDTDGrZ5dU/edit

Grzymkowski article is from a 5th Anniversary Special Edition (1996–2001) of NIMA’s Edge magazine, an authorized, internal information publication published for the National Imagery and Mapping Agency personnel and its customers.

https://msi.nga.mil/

https://msi.nga.mil/whats-new

Bluesky:

dianamonkey.bsky.social/post/3lhocfav66s2p

X:

By_CJewett/status/1888208159866544526

Share

 

Continue Reading

Substacks

The Pot of Gold at America’s Western Edge A.M. Hickman

Published

on

By

The boughs of the pomegranate bush clattered in the morning wind, branches drooping with heavy, frost-bruised fruits. The bush lilted her morning greeting to the rows of olive and grapefruit and palm, nodding to the yerba santa and the blue oaks. My own eyes seemed to be covered in a golden gauze as I rose to survey the variegated domain of fertile hills sprawling out before me. Everything was yellow with the spicy nicotine and ocher diamonds of the impossible California skies.

For those who have never been to California before, picture this: a heady sabbatical in Tuscany with Dr. Seuss. Everything in this westernmost state seems to ebb and flow in brief fits and starts through manicured vineyards, blossoming pastures, ranch roads, and hazardous gravel switchbacks slung high above dusty, half-filled reservoirs. It is America’s shimmering Eden, her promised land, the trophy of our young Republic that stands proudly as proof that every ounce of westerly motion was worth it.

To the pioneers, it was the end of the road. It was as far as a wagoneer could travel, cresting high over the infamous Donner Pass, if they had not yet succumbed to madness or scrofula, nor to hunger, smallpox, or cannibalism. Catching sight of the Pacific Ocean, the good earth bowed for the pioneers and did her curtsy. God Himself was the conductor of this symphony of holy life and sun-kissed valleys and endless deep-green ridgelines—and at the end of His great rhapsody, a frontiersman would build his fence lines and furrows and aqueducts.

In some sense, California is the mother of the very particular, feverishly intense, and unstoppable optimism that makes the United States what it is. All Americans are Californians at heart. We are, at our best, a fanatically optimistic sort of people—who might push for a half-year’s time across rough country just to see if the rumors of gold might be half true.

And in the case of California, the rumors were true: There was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. From the earliest “salad days” of these western farmers to the oil booms, the mining frenzies, the rise of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and later, the heady madness of Silicon Valley’s technological revolution. The incredible winnings of California’s early settlers course through the blood of Americans the whole country over, whether they have each seen California for themselves or not.

It all began the first moment that the pioneers caught sight of the poppies along the Sacramento River.


Read more

 

Continue Reading

Shadow Banned

Copyright © 2023 mesh news project // awake, not woke // news, not narrative // deep inside the filter bubble