Hispanic Protestants Join Christian Nationalists to Support Trumpism

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, a narrative developed that white working class voters supported Trump because of their "economic anxiety." Eventually we learned that the movement was more of a reaction to the former guy's xenophobia. 

Some of the same people who were wrong last time are now lighting their hair on fire about the fact that in 2020, Trump increased his support among Hispanics. The tale they tell is that it has been the Democrats embrace of "wokeness" that turned off Hispanic voters. They counsel that the party needs to get "tough on crime" and address the so-called "border crisis" to win those voters back. 

In his piece making that argument, this is how Ruy Teixeira describes Hispanic voters:

Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns. Democrats will either learn to focus on that or they will continue to lose ground among this vital group of voters.

As so many political commentators do, that description assumes that Hispanic voters are a monolith, ignoring the fact that they come from over 20 different countries in Europe, Central and South America, and the Caribbean.  Here is what Meaghan Winter found when it comes to Hispanic identity.

Almost everybody I spoke with said that Latino, Latinx, and Hispanic are all unsatisfying terms: They rely on the false idea that there’s some fixed and universal pan-Latino identity, when in reality the wide range of people who represent Latinidad don’t come close to sharing the same history, let alone uniform tastes and opinions. “We as Latino people hold three different stories in our bodies,” José Humphreys, a second-generation Afro–Puerto Rican and the pastor and co-founder of Metro Hope Covenant Church, in Harlem, told me. “There’s African heritage, there’s Native and Indigenous heritage, and European. Those three stories ... manifest in different ways.”

Some polling has found that Hispanics reject the nomenclature of Latinx. Perhaps pollsters should ask how those same voters feel about Latino and Hispanic. They might be equally unpopular. It is very possible that preferred terms would be "Mexican-American," or "Cuban American," or Puerto Rican. That distinction showed up in the 2020 exit polls from Florida, where Biden lost the Cuban-American vote 41-56, but won the Puerto Rican vote 68-31. 

Looking at individual states, we also see a huge gender gap among Hispanics in some of the exit polls. Nevada stands out - where Biden won 66% of the Latina vote and only 45% of the Latino vote. While not quite as dramatic, Arizona saw a 10 point gender gap among Hispanics. It is those kinds of numbers that led Eric Garcia to explore why Latino men are moving away from Democrats.

But the dramatic difference among Hispanic voters in 2020 was documented by Public Religion Research Institute. 

The differences between Hispanic Protestants, Catholics, and those who are religiously unaffiliated persist through many questions in the survey, with Hispanic Protestants notably more pro-Trump, conservative, and Republican than Catholics or those who are religiously unaffiliated. Religion is the largest demographic divider among Hispanic Americans, excepting only partisanship.

It is Hispanic Protestants who are Trump supporters - by a large margin.

We tend to assume that the vast majority of Hispanics in this country are Catholic. But for years now Pew Research has been documenting the fact that a growing number are converting to Protestant evangelicalism.

Latinos are leaving the Catholic Church and converting to evangelical Protestantism in increased numbers, and evangelical organizations are putting more energy and resources toward reaching potential Latino congregants. Latinos are the fastest-growing group of evangelicals in the country, and Latino Protestants, in particular, have higher levels of religiosity—meaning they tend to go to church, pray, and read the Bible more often than both Anglo Protestants and Latino Catholics.

Here is what Pew documented between 2007 and 2014:

From an anecdotal perspective, I would suggest that you would be hard-pressed to find a majority-white megachurch in Texas that doesn't have a specific outreach effort to Hispanics. Many of them are planting sister churches within that community.

In her book about Christian nationalists, "The Power Worshippers," Katherine Stewart documented one of these outreach programs led by Jim Domen, founder of a group called Church United. It recruits Hispanic pastors to politicize their congregations. The group receives both logistic and financial support from Christian nationalist groups.

Church United's busy schedule of activities costs money. It is unclear from the organization's reporting where it comes from. The mailing address takes us to the Newport Beach, California post office box of a real estate investment company run by Larry Smith, a businessman with close ties to activist organizations. Smith currently sits on the board of Ralph Drollinger's Capitol Ministries. He has also served on the board of the Family Action PAC, which seeks "to recruit and elect qualified leaders who will advance a culture in which human life and family are valued, personal responsibility is encouraged, and liberty thrives...Domen told me that the FRC [Family Research Council] also donated approximately $50,000 to Church United efforts in 2018.

The issues these groups are promoting will come as no surprise. The emphasis on "human life and family" are code words for abortion and gay rights. So the appeal is the same as we see with Christian nationalists - the true base of Trump's support. 

Given all of that, it is doubtful that Democrats adopting a "tough on crime" or "secure the border" message will have much of an impact on Hispanic protestants. Much as with Christian nationalists, it is the party's commitment to equal rights for women and LGBTQ Americans that is at the heart of the division.