Spirit & Power Episode 2: Latinx Charismatics & the 2024 Election
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In “"For Such a Time as This," Latinx Charismatics & Pentecostals & the 2024 Election,” Dr. Leah Payne speaks with three scholars who study the intersection of religion, politics, and Latinx communities in the United States.
Dr. Flavio Hickel Jr. is an assistant professor of American politics at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He was also a fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) for the last two years. Flavio's current research focuses on the Latinx community and Immigration policy, and he's co-authored hot off the presses analysis of recent polling data about charismatic Christianity at PRRI in The Washington Post, Religion News Service, Axios, and other news outlets.
Dr. Erica Bryand Ramirez is a sociologist of religion and currently Director of Applied Research at Auburn Seminary in Manhattan. In addition to writing about Pentecostals and Politics for The Washington Post and Religion News Service, Erica’s series on Texas Megachurches on The Anxious Bench is a fascinating analysis of charismatic communities and how they envision national politics.
Dr. Lloyd Barba is an assistant professor of religion at Amherst college whose writings include Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farm Workers in California and an edited volume on the politics of immigration and the Latino faith community entitled Latin American and US Latino Religions in North America which also features Dr. Erica Ramirez.Lloyd has also written about Pentecostals and politics for The Washington Post, Religion News Service, and other news outlets. He currently co-hosts another Axis Mundi podcast called Sanctuary: on the Border Between Church and State
Resources & Links
PRRI Data: Religious & Political Affiliations of Hispanic Americans
Book by Dr. Johnathan Calvillo: The Saints of Santa Anna: Faith and Ethnicity in a Mexican Majority City
Book by D. Daniel Ramirez: Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century
Latino Protestants in America: Diverse and Growing, Gerardo Martí, Mark T. Mulder and Aida I. Ramos (Rowman & Littlefield)
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I'm Leah Payne, a historian and expert in Pentecostal and charismatic movements in the United States and beyond.
Welcome to Spirit and Power, a limited series podcast where we do deep dives into how charismatic and Pentecostal movements are shaping the American political and social landscape.
Today on Spirit and Power, for such a time as this.
On Thursday, September 12th of 2024, Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, appeared on charismatic televangelist Kenneth Copeland's Flashpoint Live Omaha, a rally for, quote, patriots and believers to come together to get informed, equipped, and activated, end quote, with the goal of rescuing America.
Rodriguez appeared on stage with many charismatic luminaries of the religious right, including New Apostolic Reformation-affiliated Dutch Sheets and Lance Walnau.
Rodriguez enjoyed cheers from the audience with his call for spirit-empowered activism.
This idea of kumbaya Christianity, of comfortable Christianity.
No! This nation is going to hell in a handbasket.
Therefore, if you're truly spirit-filled, you stand up, you raise your voice for such a time as this, and you begin to prophesy like you've never prophesied before.
That's the clarion call.
And he made an impassioned plea for the pressing social and political issues he believed were facing the American electorate in 2024.
Our children and our children's children will walk upon the ruins of the giants and the walls that we bring down in our generation.
This is that year.
We're about to bring some giants down in 2024 all over America.
We're going to bring down the giant of abortion.
We're going to bring down the giant of mutilation of children.
These giants are coming down this year in the name of Jesus.
How is charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity shaping the values and voting preferences of Latinx communities this election cycle?
I've invited three leading scholars in the fields of Latinx Christianity and American public life into conversation about the charismatic factor in the 2024 election.
My name is Flavio Hickel, Jr.
I'm an assistant professor of American politics at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
I was also a fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute for the last two years.
Flavio's current research focuses on the Latinx community and immigration policy, and he's co-authored analysis of recent polling data about charismatic Christianity at PRRI in the Washington Post, Religion News Service, and other outlets.
Hi, I'm Erica Brian Ramirez.
I'm a sociologist of religion and currently director of research at Auburn Seminary in Manhattan.
And I'm so happy to be here in this space with you talking about my favorite subjects, politics and Pentecostals.
In addition to writing about Pentecostals and politics for the Washington Post and Religion News Service, I should also add that Erica's series on Texas megachurches on the anxious bench at Patheos is where you can find especially fascinating analysis of charismatic communities and how they envision national politics.
Last but not least...
I'm Dr. Lloyd Barba. I'm an assistant professor of religion at Amherst College.
I wrote a book titled Sowing the Sacred, Mexican Pentecostal Farm Workers in California, published by Oxford University Press in 2022.
Lloyd has also written about Pentecostals and politics for the Washington Post and other outlets, and he co-hosts another Axis Mundi podcast called Sanctuary, on the border between church and state.
And he and Erica have just co-authored a book chapter about the politics of immigration and the Latino faith community.
We started off with a question for the political scientist among us, and it was a simple one.
Why does religion get such little coverage in stories about the so-called Latino vote?
Here's Flavio Hickel, Jr.
It's a great question and one that I'm struggling with as I'm doing more and more research on this.
I think for the longest time we focused on Latino politics from a sort of obvious racial and ethnic sort of perspective.
So to what degree are Latinos' political attitudes and behavior governed by fulfilling or trying to advance their sort of ethnic interests in our politics?
And whatever religious differences there might be, they wouldn't be as important on an individual level to overwhelm Acting upon your political interests.
That was a governing reason why most people were researching Latino politics from that perspective to the detriment of religion.
I think that we should be moving away from that.
And there's been some new work on this.
So PRI put out some data recently on Latino Protestantism that Axios did a big story on the other day.
And I think that's a positive development.
They noted that among other racial and ethnic groups, Latinos are moving away from the Catholic Church, which I think has been also the big story in Latino politics of how Catholicism has influences their political attitudes.
But Latinos are moving away, and what might that mean as they become more Protestant?
Or become religious nuns.
My reaction to it is I think we need to think a little bit more about what does it mean to be Protestant or non-Catholic.
So in other words, let's draw a distinction between Protestantism and Evangelicalism.
And more to the point of I think what we're going to get into today, there might be meaningful differences in thinking about charismatic versus non-charismatic Latinos.
And how that might influence your politics in ways that defy what you believe is in your ethnic group interest, or might, more provocatively, influence how you come to understand what your ethnic group interest is.
So, rather than seeing it's religion or politics for Latino, it might very much be the interaction of religion and ethnicity influencing their politics.
Erica, could you reflect on what Flavio has been saying as a sociologist?
What is your impression of kind of the lay of the land when it comes to thinking about Latino politics and religion?
The data is showing our need to rethink how we link Ethnicity, with religion, with politics.
And it made me reflect that thinking about the politics of Latinos in the U.S. as maybe some of the oldest modeling around assumptions.
So, Mexican Americans who are in the U.S. or Mexicans who are in the U.S. as 0.5 generation arrivals, new arrivals, for decades were assumed to be Catholic.
And because Catholic, therefore Democratic.
And it was just this kind of easy motif being read onto Mexican and then Mexican-American voters.
As early as the 1910s, what was happening was the beginning of a Protestant, what Catholics call a leak, which I love that word, like the leaking out of Mexican faithful to Protestant networks.
And I'll leave some space for Lloyd to make a comment on this, but I think if we go back and look at the history of Mexicans, and I'm saying Mexicans because they really are the first group that comprise what we know of as Latinos in US politics.
When you look at how they've been becoming Protestant since the turn of the 20th century, really scholarship is just catching up in how to interpret how they directly relate their ethnicity With their voting patterns.
That being said, I want to tee up you, Lloyd, to tell this story.
Their ethnicity and faith in ways that to social scientists look like undermining their interests.
So in the chapter Lloyd and I just wrote, I'm hoping you'll begin here, Lloyd.
We covered a pastor who was arrested, but when he makes comments about his politics, they are very surprising.
Nice pitch, Erica. Thank you.
So I'll pick up exactly from where Erica took off.
So there's a couple of cases that we tracked.
In this case, it's a Pentecostal pastor affiliated with the Assemblies of God.
CNN reported in 2017 that Pastor Noe Carillas, a Guatemalan immigrant, was detained by ICE at his routine check-in after living in the U.S. for decades and leading a church in California.
Despite his efforts to adjust his immigration status, policy changes under President Donald J. Trump prioritized his deportation, even though he had no criminal record.
Carillas, supported by his family and congregation, continued to pray for compassion from both the government and the church And what's quite astonishing about the language used by the pastor, the family, the community that's impacted, it's more of a, we have to have a plan in place if this happens again.
So it's really reactive, much more than proactive in this case.
This is where I think there's some differences.
So part of it depends on how we frame what's a key issue for Latino voters.
If we're going to say it's immigration, I think one, it's important to interrogate some assumptions around that to begin with.
If you're going to say for Latino voters, it's still going to be some other traditional values like reproductive rights or opposition to or support of gay marriage.
That's a whole nother thing. Part of the assumption here goes back to this old, old saying, Among Mexicans, right?
90% of Mexicans are Catholics, but 100% are Guadalupanos.
So goes the saying, which, again, statistically is just not true.
But the sentiment there is that there is sort of a Catholicism that has pervaded much of the Mexican culture and its diaspora communities in the U.S. Now, when Erika was talking about unpacking some of these assumptions, one of them is that, okay, Mexican Catholics are more likely to be Democrat.
And then the kind of always used as a counter example is, well, Cubans tend to be a bit more reactionary, so they're going to fall along the lines of being Republican.
In the field that Erica and I know best, the world of charismatic and Pentecostals and some of their voting behaviors, I don't think there's so much of a national difference.
I think it really, there's an influence according to sort of templates for this is how you should vote biblically and do hold much more sway than one's national background.
Flavio, I wonder if you could explain how some of the 2023 and 2024 polling data we have might add some insight to the historical and sociological perspectives we've just heard.
It's certainly not a solo effort that...
Dr. Leah Payne and I have both collaborated extensively to come up with this metric, but essentially we said, okay, what are the core beliefs and behaviors that really constitute the charismatic movement?
And so we started by thinking about that, and can we distill this into a series of yes, no.
Have you personally experienced this thing, or have you personally witnessed it occurring?
And that'll give us a sense of whether someone is participating in a Pentecostal or charismatic religious movement, regardless of whether they self-identify as such.
Side note, this is actually really important when it comes to identifying charismatic Christians.
The label of charismatic is mostly about particular beliefs and practices, not about official affiliation or denomination.
For a whole host of reasons, not everyone is going to self-identify as Pentecostal.
They may not even recognize what the term charismatic means.
And so asking that kind of affiliation question isn't going to get you where you need to be, particularly as a lot of Pentecostals and charismatics may self-identify as Catholic, for example, but are still predominantly worshipping in a charismatic space.
So we said, let's focus on the beliefs and experiences.
So the questions we ask people, have you experienced or witnessed others speaking in tongues during a religious service?
Perhaps the quintessential Pentecostal charismatic behavior.
We also ask about divine healing of an illness or injury.
It's another core element of it.
We ask about definitive answers to a specific prayer request, this notion that God is directly responding to you.
Whether you've had a direct revelation from God, which invokes the idea of prophecy.
And then finally, the more recent one in our most recent surveys we've looked at is whether the quote-unquote spirit has empowered you or someone else to do a specific task.
So the spirit operating through you And so I can run through the data of what this looks like among people.
But basically what we thought was, okay, we know people are answering yes or no to these five different questions.
We thought, let's arrive at a conservative estimate of how many people are actually charismatic.
So in other words, if you just said yes to one of these, you might be sort of a passing dalliance with the charismatic movement, right?
We said, let's adopt a conservative estimate.
And if you answer four out of those five questions affirmatively, you are considered charismatic for our purposes.
So it's not enough to just one time experience divine healing.
You also have to speak in tongues and believe in prophecy.
We wanted to make sure that this was a regular core component to their practice of Christianity.
So that's a very conservative estimate.
And using that data, predominantly I'm looking at the Latino community, and that's what we're talking about here.
I ran a panel in 2023, and I identified that about 20% of my sample of about 800 Latinos could be characterized as charismatic.
A similar sample in 2024, that number was actually 30%.
That's not to say that the number of charismatics is growing by 10% year after year, but it's to say that we're probably thinking about the size of the charismatic community within the broader Latino community in the United States is probably in this 20 to 30% range.
They are predominantly self-identifying as evangelical Christian.
That's where most of them are coming from.
There's some other interesting associations or lack thereof.
So as you guys were talking about before, we don't find an association with national origin.
So that's not popping out.
Although you might expect, given that Pentecostalism has grown More quickly in Central America that there might be something going on there, but we don't actually find that relationship.
And I could talk more about it.
But I think all of this is really important to speak to the last point that was made.
If we think about the influence of Catholicism, it's not just the beliefs that should be impacting people's political attitudes.
It's the way Latino Catholicism socializes you politically in the United States.
So the argument is that the Latino Catholic Church has Worked to help instill political values that are more democratic-leading, support for labor rights, immigrant rights, things of that nature.
So if you're not getting the socialization from the Catholic Church, you might not be getting it at all, or you might be getting it from different places.
And particularly for our concern, if you're getting it from a charismatic church, if you're getting politically socialized by a charismatic church, you might be getting different messages.
Dr. Erica Ramirez jumped back in to talk about how charismatic evangelicals are socialized politically.
So it's no surprise to me, Flavio, that you're finding that there isn't a strong identification with national identity, especially if you're dealing with Latino populations within evangelical congregations, right?
So you can take that, you can unpack that two ways.
One, I wrote immediately down diasporic, like this would have to be a diasporic identity or like a maintained identity.
So if you were looking for active identification among what we would call Cuban evangelicals who are being charismaticized to track with the conversation, then you would be looking for some rhetoric around Cuban-ness or Cuba.
And it doesn't surprise me that you are not finding that, right?
Because some of what my Anxious Bench series is meant to do is study how evangelicals worship, and many of them even worship in non-denominational settings that are, for instance, intergenerational, right?
That's great. But they're also interracial.
And there is scant reference to national identities that are exogenous to the U.S. So there's a nowness to The orientation of the present.
If there is going to be a mention of the nation, my money would be on that you would hear probably Israel mentioned first, and it might be a reference to ancient Israel, but maybe both.
Maybe it's ancient and present Israel.
And then Then you might hear a reference to the U.S. and praying for the U.S. So those would be kind of the limits of the references to national identity or national belonging, which a friend of ours did a lovely book, a lovely treatment of this way that evangelicalism delinks converts or adherents from their Some of the regional megachurches that I attend here,
with as many as 22,000 people who go there, are singing songs in Spanish, including their adherents who are Caucasian.
What we know is evangelicalism is swift moving and early on the scene to acclimating to changing environs and a part of how it survived to this point.
So how did megachurches and charismatic visions of Israel become prominent in charismatic and Pentecostal Latino circles?
Stay with us for more insights.
Here's Lloyd Barba, reflecting on how the growth of Pentecostalism in Latinx communities has changed social and political orientations of those communities over time.
In the community that I studied, from the 1910s to the 1960s, in large part, they're migrant laborers.
Their intention isn't necessarily to stay in the U.S. I was not able to observe any attitudes or patterns about voting, specifically.
But one does see something Flavio brought up.
What are some social causes or political causes that they attach themselves into?
That they attach themselves to, rather.
And well, for farm workers, farm labor.
So you do see at the time, actually, even among Pentecostals, I found a case of a church in Madeira where the entire, it's a small church, but the entire church joined Cesar Chavez's cause.
And you have support of Chavez by numerous Pentecostal ministers and even churches.
And you know, you have that That phrase from the book of Judges, and there arose generation which knew not the Lord.
What we can take from that, from ancient wisdom, is this idea that when one generation arises, the patterns of the concerns, the crises, if you will, of the previous generation lose out to some extent.
And I think we do see it in the example of Pentecostals.
So one of the things that changes in the second generation moving really to the 60s and 70s is language.
Also, immigration might be a bit further removed.
By the time we get to third generation, some of those stories are being lost at that point.
You have something quite different. It's kind of a socialization into these causes.
How do you get people in these churches to care about these causes?
In Catholicism, there's a robust place to develop this in Catholic social teaching.
And there's plenty on immigration that has been pronounced by bishops, archbishops, the U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops.
One of the things Erika and I have observed is that drawing from the work of Daniel Ramirez, Pentecostals lack a social teaching.
There is on the topic of immigration, whereas it might be more robust tapping into some of these older arguments made by evangelicals more broadly on things like immigration and gay marriage.
When it comes to immigration, among Latino Pentecostals, one would expect to have thought long and hard about this and have developed a social teaching on how to biblically respond to this.
We really don't see that quite yet.
And I think that's really to the detriment of Latino Pentecostals who sincerely care about immigration.
So, you know, they're not going to be hearing it from their pulpits in any sort of systematic way.
The Pentecostalized way of looking at social and political issues, particularly within the Assemblies of God, a historically white Pentecostal denomination, has led to some surprising perspectives, as was with the case of Pastor Carillas, So he gets the help from the Assemblies of God, also a broad array of religious activists in Southern California, including Matthew 25 and other groups.
He ends up in the detention center, and through a letter-writing campaign, advocacy campaign, calling in, he eventually gets out of the detention center.
So he's rounded up, I believe in 2017, this dragnet that Trump rolls outright through zero tolerance policy.
Even after coming out of the detention center, being back in his church, He still says that if he were able to vote, he would probably still vote for Trump.
And the reason for that, as much as that might shock us, is he has this quote about prioritizing issues, how voters might prioritize issues.
He says, we have to have a comprehensive view of politics and remember that issues like abortion, crime, healthcare, and the economy are important too.
Our view can't be limited to just the situation of the immigrant community.
And he himself, in this case, he's a Central American.
What was arriving at here is this question of identity prioritization.
Again, Flavio Hickel, Jr.
To what degree, if I'm Latino, am I forming my political attitudes by primarily thinking about my Latino ethnic identity versus a religious identity and religious interest?
Do I see tension there?
Or maybe I don't see tension there.
Maybe I find a way to... Do both, or maybe I just subsize one or the other.
In the two surveys we've done looking at Latino charismatics in particular, there is no relationship between religious beliefs and the strength of your Latino identity.
There is no relationship between being charismatic and whether You have what we call group consciousness, meaning that you feel like all Latinos should work together to the benefit of other Latinos, right?
We don't see that charismatics have less of this.
That's not suggesting that they're deprioritizing their Latino identity.
That's at least the initial take on it.
It's also true to your point that immigration is not the most salient issue for Latino voters.
It's a stereotype that it is, but it never is.
It's an identifier of sort of whether a politician or a party is friendly, because it's understood that if you support restrictive immigration policies, that you're more hostile to Latinos.
But one could easily see how you could rationalize support for A politician that supports restricted policies, as you're describing here, because you are focusing on other issues or there are other aspects of your identity that you see as more important at the time, having greater significance.
Flavio, I think part of it has to do with the fact that I think we're all within some, you know, a somewhat comparable age range group.
And a lot of us will probably remember in 2006, really 2005, 2007, all the debates around comprehensive immigration reform.
You see, it's a lot of people, Mexican, for any country.
These people is not a criminal.
These people come for work only.
Only need work. The sheer number of people sends a message, but so do the signs that they're holding.
Look at this one in Spanish.
Working. It's not a crime.
Down here, we are part of the solution, not part of the problem.
It's really one of the reasons why I started to even start thinking about this.
I myself come from immigrant parents from Mexico, so this was really in the air in Stockton, California, participating in the day without an immigrant, right?
You don't pump gas, you don't show up to work, you don't go to school, et cetera, et cetera.
So during that time, I think one of the phenomenon that emerged was that Latino evangelicals, let's say, but particularly Latino Pentecostals, took a major lead, or at least they're elevated on a national platform, namely through the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference handed over to Samuel Rodriguez in 2006, previously in the hands of Jesse Miranda when it was called Amen.
And immigration was all the, you know, All the rage, right?
Comprehensive immigration reform.
So it was a priority for the NHCLC. We do have more recent interview material with Sam Rodriguez in which it's quite clear that he says there's an extent to which they sort of over-prioritized immigration and they put on the back burner some of the issues they care about, namely abortion.
As well as other support for Israel and so on.
But this came after well over a decade, kind of moment of reckoning.
Oh, maybe we got too into immigration to the point that Sam Rodriguez was supporting Obama.
But after Obama, we know he eventually turns to support of Trump in so much that he's a part of Trump's sort of spiritual advisory board.
I don't want to get too off track with that, but again, I do think there's a reason why scholars have focused on immigration as such the important issue for Latinos.
In large part, it's still the unresolved issue.
We still don't have comprehensive immigration reform, right?
Here we are almost 20 years later without it.
And I think there's an extent to which the tide has really shifted.
If we look at the RNC, the Republic National Convention, Mass deportation now.
Kamala Harris' messaging is that she's tough on the border.
The discourse has moved so far right on this that churches for sure, Latino Pentecostal evangelical churches, are not in lockstep with those of us who have cared for immigration for decades at this point.
I would also point to the way that certain dramas have played out.
When I think about the sharp rise in People who are reporting that securing the border is of number one or number two importance around this election.
So interesting, when Trump first appeared as a candidate on the scene early 2016, his rhetoric around the border was seen as beyond the pale, They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.
It was framed as Intensely xenophobic and racist.
And it has continually been censured by the media from that day to this day.
And yet, what has happened has not been what has been expected.
It's not the Republican platform that has changed.
It has been the Democratic campaign.
And platform that has changed.
And the electorate overall is reporting.
It has gotten into the consciousness.
Overall, now there's a comprehensive willingness, whether you're a Republican or Democrat, to say the border is of penultimate importance or ultimate importance.
I think the economy still ranks number one.
But given that new statistic, the new rhetoric we're seeing out of the Democratic campaign, whether it was Biden or now Harris, there is a pivot on the border.
I look to actually these little dramas in the life of the electorate as having reshaped public perceptions.
So for instance, Governor Greg Abbott's bussing migrants into Illinois or New York, going into a legal lawfare with the Biden campaign, putting Democrats' backs against the wall.
On the issue of immigration.
Up until that point, you see this concern for the border very easily, almost viscerally expressed on border states.
But in making this a problem for the Northeast or the Midwest, I think it was a tactic that paid off.
Aside from that, you have Donald Trump's regular rhetoric about crime, people who are victims of crime.
I think recently I was watching him talk about, is it MS-13?
Am I saying that correctly?
MM-13. MS. MS-13, good.
And the way he really viscerally describes the crimes that they have committed against, in this case, a 12-year-old girl.
This is the Donald Trump we have come to know.
He described in similarly visceral terms how he frames late-term abortion.
So he gave us visceral terms in the 2016 campaign.
He said, they rip babies from the womb, is what he said.
I hesitate to bring that fully into the conversation.
But looking at him as a rhetorician, now his focus is Describing migration in the most visceral, criminal terms.
So there's a continuity there, but it's now really focused on the border and it is achieving results.
And to go back to the data that you shared, Flavio, at the beginning of this question, Do Latinos positively or negatively relate to their ethnicity in any one sense?
The data is not conclusive.
It doesn't tick.
They are now less likely to identify strongly with their ethnicity or more likely depending on their charismaticism or their degree of charismaticism.
But I can tell you this, if you look for their investment in law and order and crime, there's probably going to be a positive relationship there between They go to neo-charismatic or Pentecostal churches and their tolerance for their perception of crime that is being unaddressed.
So that being said, it seems like never ending rhetoric about the border, but my hunch is there's more here about the border is taking shape and not just criminal crossing, but criminal behavior once they're here.
That I think that Donald Trump is Circulating these ideas for the body politic.
I agree with Erica's hunch there.
The issue, I think, is the elephant in the room is that those who are declaring law and order are also supporting a convicted felon, someone who's been found guilty of sexual assault and so on.
So there's some cognitive dissonance that happens there, certainly.
But of course, that's a story they spun into martyrdom, political martyrdom, at least.
One thing I can say for sure is that Trump didn't build the big wall, the big beautiful wall as he called it, right?
He physically did not build it all 2000 plus miles, but he built it up in the American imagination so that we think the wall is a panacea to the immigration crisis that we face.
And if he's been successful in that, that is really how you push policy to make it much more reactionary, to make it much more xenophobic.
To kind of get off of the historical perspective here, we're really back in the 1990s of California with the passage of Prop 187, which was extremely punitive, right?
It's disqualifying undocumented immigrants from a host of social services, emergency room visits, you name it, basically, emergency room visits, access to school and the school lunches and everything else.
And that passed by majority vote.
And I think we've made full circle now to that's where we are again, but not just in California, but as a country.
And in large part, I think Eric is right that Trump has been effective in bringing the border issues to states in the Midwest.
I was in Arkansas back in February giving a talk and driving through Arkansas, I saw, I can't remember the politician's name, but his, you know, the big letters in the poster was tough on immigration.
I'm thinking, Yo, Arkansas is not a border state, right?
It's pretty far away. How does that matter?
The wall has been built up.
And I think he's been very effective in that.
So, two reactions I have.
Number one, I totally agree with everything being said.
I think Abbott's move, moving immigrants around, from his perspective, is a bit of a masterstroke in forcing Democrats and Democratic cities to deal with this.
The two developments I would think about, number one, there is a lot of good work coming out of political science that's looking at Latino participation in border control itself.
So, border control is a huge employer.
In border states and among Latino populations, and that is having some meaningful impact on Latino attitudes regarding the border and some of this kind of stuff.
Another thing I would bring up if we're thinking about law and order and charismatics again, I do find some evidence that Latino charismatics are far more likely to adopt Christian nationalist beliefs, which Is going to have some relationship to the sort of law and order messaging, particularly if we think about one of the core beliefs being that US law should be based on Christian values or the belief that they are.
So that's part of it. The last thing I would bring is a lot of my work is looking at what we're describing as Latino resentment of immigrants.
This tendency, which you do see in the 90s in California in response to these propositions, that there is a significant minority of Latinos that Recognize that Latinos occupy this sort of lower status in American society unfairly, and they blame immigrants, Latino immigrants, for that.
They say, essentially, Anglos would treat us better if it weren't for these Latino immigrants that are making us look bad.
They adopt many of the negative stereotypes about immigrant criminality and the negative effect of immigration on the economy, all of which is objectively false, right?
But they adopt these stereotypes and it leads them to express support for restrictive immigration policies and politicians that promote it.
I say all this as part of the broader context of why is immigration becoming a bigger issue because Certainly, if you can point to, as the Trump campaign repeatedly does, if you can point to Latinos supporting Donald Trump and supporting building a wall and restrictive immigration policies, that certainly provides a permission structure for non-Latinos in American society to say, I can support Donald Trump and these restrictive policies, and that doesn't make me racist.
I want to answer that question based on where I'm located in the world, which is the South of Texas.
Latinos in the South of Texas are growing, in my opinion, kind of resistantly.
Christian nationalists.
They're growing defiantly Christian nationalists.
And I think that somebody who really embodies this well is the, I wrote about Mayra Flores' campaign.
In 2022, Mayra Flores, a 36-year-old South Texas native, made history by flipping her 84% Hispanic district to Republican for the first time in over 150 years.
A former immigrant child, she credited her rise from working in cotton fields to Congress Flores leans into a Pentecostal-flavored Christian nationalism, emphasizing her loyalty to God, faith, country, while rallying religious and Latino support.
Despite her brief term, her victory challenged assumptions about the loyalty of Latino voters to the Democratic Party, signaling shifting political dynamics in Texas And she's actually re-campaigning and her emphasis there because she's a childhood arrival to the U.S. and she stresses legally.
So it's amazing to hear how layered or textured she delivers her perspective on border politics, because she will say the border is a place of a lot of suffering and a lot of vulnerability.
And the longer, essentially, she's saying that we leave it the wild, wild west, the more that deaths are on our hands.
So she laments the border, but her approach to the border is we need really strong border policies so that it disincentivizes, for instance, the trait sex trafficking, right?
Or unaccompanied children who are really vulnerable to being sex trafficked.
That's how she talks about the border.
A little known, I think, something that has not gotten a lot of energy, I think, around her is that she's married to a border patrolman.
In reality, we live every single day in our districts and we see the impact throughout our state.
As a spouse of a border patrol agent, I can tell you that they need our help.
I can tell you that there is no better group of people to help resolve the issues than the Texas congressional delegation.
The Biden administration has stated that he doesn't care about South Texas.
He doesn't care about the border crisis.
That there is more important things.
He is a disgrace.
He should be ashamed of himself and resign.
When you point up that Latinos in Texas, for instance, I'm hearing you as somebody who protects, are involved in Border Patrol, and they have been for generations.
By the way, they've been voting for Republicans.
My area, that's a 30 to 35 percent vote for Nixon.
So in some ways you can over read Latino, Protestant, because I'm thinking a lot of Protestant support for Trump.
If you forget that it's pretty stable support over decades at this point.
That said, I think that does it create a permission structure?
Does it create a plausibility structure?
Yeah, absolutely.
It also suggests that inviting Latinos into public discourse on the sole basis of immigration, and if you're Democrat, might not be the best way of conceptualizing what is appropriate Hispanic participation In the life of the public is just one kind of participation doesn't seem like a very democratic option at all.
So I think that it's both and.
And I think that as you see campaign rhetorics move, I think you'll get out of a polarized system where we're just struggling to understand how religion can be a good influence in the life of the public.
So for Latino charismatics, what would be one to three of top-line issues?
So I'll answer the question with just a very brief caveat.
So one thing I do like sort of the language we're using around Latino Protestants And the other term we're using is Latino Charismatics.
So generally speaking, Latino Protestants, they're kind of the term used for Protestants in Latin America, Evangelicos.
So we're not talking about the Latino who tends a UMC church.
They're going to vote very differently from your Latino at Assemblies of God Church, for example.
To be very, very clear, I think there are numerous congregations, especially the immigrant congregations that are predominantly comprised of immigrants, where these spaces can be ones where ethnic identity is reinforced.
But we're also talking patients in which they're predominantly immigrants.
In many cases, we know this of Latino churches in Texas, in California.
Many are undocumented in these spaces.
So even if immigration is heavy on their mind, it's a recent experience, that's not going to translate to voting, right?
Which is the bigger issue we're talking about today.
So that's part of the disconnect as well.
Many who would really care about voting in ways that Provides better immigration policies, they can't vote.
So that's a non-starter. So the issues that will predominate among the Latino charismatics who can vote, I'm going to stick to the issues of abortion.
And the innocuous term they'll use is family value, but they mean traditional family values of a heteronormative family.
And increasingly so, after October of last year, a support for Israel.
Those are all important.
I've seen more and more Israeli flags that are flown, and there's some sort of affinity to be teased out in Latino appropriation of all things Israel.
Leah, have you written about the use of the shofar?
That's there, and it's more than just symbolic or musical.
If you want to call it music in some cases, I've heard some of those shofars blowing.
I know. You know, I've always said that they should stick to the tambourine.
You know, it's a long-standing kind of gospel.
It's a lot easier to play.
But so long as this movement continues towards, you know, Christian nationalism and this rule of law concern, yeah, I think they're going to side against border policies, at least for those who are able to vote.
Okay, Erica, you're going to have the last word.
I think that I heard your question is like, what should be their agenda?
Is that what you asked? No, I was saying just what is in your mind.
But if you want to answer, it should be because I think Lloyd kind of stuck the landing on the what is as a historian.
That's right. Lloyd, that was exactly right.
I was like, there's only one way to read this.
I think Samuel Rodriguez, I would additionally offer that Reverend Samuel Rodriguez, who is very much a media figure, would add into that religious freedom.
He's articulating that.
They have felt the near presence of the government in their religious lives and need to push back on that.
So that will be in their minds.
I am curious about, there's a lot of talk about what is the Latinx vote.
And while I think it is certainly fair to think in terms of states, to think in terms of nations of origin, how many generations are they in this particular nation as shaping their votes, I wish there could be a comprehensive look at education.
That is something that I think whether you're a recent arrival and you're in Miami, or you're a fifth generation in the south of Texas, That we could look to education and healthcare more comprehensively.
like what are the stats on those for Latino population overall in the US? I would love
for that to be a way that Hispanic communities, including religious ones, approach the ballot.
If you want to find out more about how doctors Erica Ramirez, Flavio Hickle Jr. and Lloyd Barba
approach their sociological, political science and historical work,
You can find links to their scholarship in today's notes.
You can find me at drleahpain.com and on most social media platforms at Dr.
Leah Payne. Thanks for listening.
Spirit Empower is a limited series podcast from me, Dr.
Leah Payne, with research from Carrie Gaspard.
It's produced in conjunction with Straight White American Jesus and Axis Mundi Media.
And there's even more of this week's episode available.
In fact, I'm going to ask my guest this week to reflect on...
One charismatic and Pentecostal-driven story that people should be paying attention to but aren't.
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