The #MenToo Election: Catholics, Latinos, and the Manosphere
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Brad reflects on the significance of Trump's return to the White House and its implications. He recounts the 2017 Women's March and the rise of the Me Too movement, juxtaposed with the 2024 'Men Too' election where young men played an unexpected role in Trump’s victory. Brad discusses the impact of bro culture, the role of influential podcasts, and the shifting dynamics among Catholic and Latino voters. He further examines the strategic outreach by Trump's campaign to young men and how shifting media consumption patterns influenced the results.
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Axis Mundy We now know that Donald Trump is headed back to the White House.
There's a lot to prepare for.
There's a lot to process.
That's why we're gathering on November 21st in Los Angeles, California.
An illustrious group of thought leaders and scholars will be breaking down what happened and helping all of us to prepare for what's to come.
The event is sponsored by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Good Faith Media.
It'll include me and Dan, Rachel Lazar, Andrew Seidel, Kyate Joshi, and other scholars and thought leaders.
7 p.m.
at St.
John's Episcopal Cathedral in Los Angeles.
We hope you can join us in person.
Doors will open at 6 with book signings and a chance to hang out with me and Dan, talk with Andrew Seidel and Rachel Lazar and others.
And if you can't make it in person, we'd invite you to join us online.
Use code 50 for the next week for 50% off in-person tickets.
Sign up in the next week for half off.
You can find all the info in the show notes.
We hope to see you there.
The night before, I parked my car on Capitol Hill, just a few blocks from my old apartment.
It was a place I knew I could retrieve it easily once things were done.
Then my friend showed up from upstate New York and another from Providence.
We gathered, ate pizza, and got ready for the next day.
In the morning, we woke with excitement and a little bit of nervousness.
We headed out, jumped on the metro, and made our way with what felt like millions of others of Americans to the Women's March.
It was January 2017, and one of the largest protests of Trump's inauguration and first term was underway.
In many ways it felt great to be among so many who had gathered together to protest, to commune, and to fight back.
But when I think of that day, it feels like an eternity ago.
Not only because we've lived through a Trump presidency and a pandemic, two nail-biting elections, and now the menace of a second Trump term, but because of what's changed since then.
We've gone from The Women's March and Me Too to an election in which the incoming president reached out to young men in bro culture and the manosphere to fight back.
In many ways, it was the Men Too election.
Today I analyze that change, and then I examine how Catholic voters helped put Trump over the top, the demographics of what kinds of Catholics voted for Trump in comparison to Biden four years ago, and the ways the Latino vote has changed and Latino Protestants have become part of MAGA Nation.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White American Jesus Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Brad Onishi here on a Monday.
And we had something planned for today, but I'm calling an audible because I wanted to provide some further takeaways on the election from last week and to analyze some themes related to gender and politics and religion in the election that we just had.
As you heard at the top, I went back to 2017 and reflected on the fact that almost eight years ago I was in D.C. At the time I lived right outside of D.C. and a few friends came down from upstate New York and a couple of others congregated at my house and we all went as a troop to the Women's March in D.C. where I know many of you were and It was a moment,
I think, a kind of first moment in the Trump administration and the pushback against his misogyny and his comments on the Access Hollywood tape and so on and so forth.
And today I wanna talk about three things.
I wanna talk about Catholics and their vote.
I wanna talk about the Latino vote and how that interacts with religion, both Catholic and Protestant.
But I want to start today talking about the bro vote and the ways that the Trump campaign reached out to young men.
Now, I'm not here to say that young men swung the election.
I'm not here to say that they were the definitive demographic that put Trump into the White House.
I think that would be overstating it.
However, Republicans won young men 18 to 29 for the first time in several elections.
It's not an overstatement to say that there's been a demographic shift, according to Catherine Fung at Newsweek.
18 to 29-year-old men broke for Republicans for the first time in the last four elections, decisively choosing Trump as their next president by a whopping 13-point margin.
Now, this coheres with things we've talked about on the show here for a couple of months, one of them being the fact that young men are more religious than women.
For the first time in perhaps ever in the history of the United States, there's been a shift to the right, there's been a shift to religion among young men, and their female counterparts have become more liberal, have become less religious.
And so all of these things coincide in this election, and I want to get to some of those.
But back to 2017.
2017 was the beginning of something that was big.
Not only was there the Women's March, but there was the Me Too movement, hashtag Me Too.
And that started in large part with allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
But it continued.
And as soon as those allegations came out, there were more.
And they kind of castated.
Alyssa Milano and Jennifer Lawrence and Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow and Uma Thurman and all of them had their own responses to Me Too.
And that led to other things, like Church Too.
It led to scrutiny on Jeffrey Epstein.
So, you know, all of this kind of comes together.
You think about 2017, right?
And a women's march.
Millions of people.
Maybe not millions.
Close to a million people.
I can't remember how many were there and I'm not going to look it up.
There was a lot of people.
There was a big deal and it's something I think a lot of people remember.
The Women's March is a kind of kickoff.
And celebrities, you know, from Jidel Monet to Scarlett Johansson to everyone were there.
I remember we walked and we marched and we congregated.
And it took like two or three hours.
hours.
I think by the time we left my little house in the D.C. suburbs and got down to the National Mall and we got to where we were going to be and so on, it had been like over three hours and everybody wanted to march.
But there was all these inspiring speeches and, you know, one celebrity after another getting up to speak.
And never in my life did I think that, you know, Scarlett Johansson or Janelle Monae getting on stage would be like, oh, gosh, I wish they'd be quiet so we could just march.
But we were at that place where it was such a high profile event.
Such a high visible event.
And it was an event of solidarity and an event where so many people felt like if we stick together, we're going to be OK.
Well, you go from the Women's March to Me Too, and you have these years, 2017, 2018, 2019.
Where there is just intense backlash against the culture of sexual abuse.
You see celebrities, not only Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, but you also see like the likes of Louis C.K. or Aziz Ansari or whoever may be also come under intense scrutiny.
Celebrity after celebrity, high-profile person after high-profile person, people being accused of untoward behavior, of unwanted sexual advances, of sexual abuse, of sexual harassment, and it just seemed to be ubiquitous.
The point I'm trying to make is that that first Trump presidency inaugurated what I think was a systemic dismantling of some of the foundations of patriarchy, misogyny, and assault in places like Hollywood, but also places like political offices and so on and so forth.
Matt Lauer is another one.
I'm just thinking of others that really got caught up in scandal and accused and taken down.
I think what we saw in the 2024 election was a backlash to that backlash.
And I don't think it's right.
I don't think it's good.
But I think it's something that we have to take into account as a factor of what happened here in 2024.
For the record, it seems, according to the data that we have now, that Trump's resounding win was largely about the economy.
That the 2020 election was a backlash election to the pandemic and to Trump's mishandling of everything related to the presidency and also the scandals, the failures, the racism, all that stuff.
Okay?
People turned out and got him out of office.
Barely.
But four years have gone by, and inflation has been a constant factor.
People are having a hard time buying homes, buying milk, buying eggs, going on vacation, even though everyone supposedly has a job, according to the data, that's there.
So I don't want to overlook that, and we're going to just keep thinking about that and what that means here over the next couple of months.
But there's another way to think about this bro vote that Trump tapped into, that it's a backlash to the backlash.
That if 2017 kicked off the Me Too movement, then 2024 was the Men Too election.
It was the election where young men who have moved to the right and found a new political niche and are now ensconced in their own media enclaves have emerged and made their voice heard.
One of the things that happened after Trump was elected the first time is many of us discussed and analyzed and talked about Media silos and echo chambers.
And a lot of that was focused on, like, our parents.
Hey, the boomers are all over there watching Fox News.
How do we get them out of that little, like, echo chamber?
Well, I think one of the things that we're now understanding is that 18 to 29-year-old men have their own version of that.
And it's different, but the same in some ways.
So how did Trump reach out to young men and how did he cultivate his favorability among them?
Well, as many of you probably know already, he went on a just slew of brosphere podcasts.
This is according to Olivia Craighead at New York Magazine.
In the lead-up to Election Day, Trump went on a slew of massively popular podcasts catering to right-leaning young male audiences.
That demographic, white men ages 18 to 29, wound up voting for Trump by a 28-point margin.
As it turns out, the mastermind behind his plan might have been Trump's 18-year-old son, Barron.
So there's a bunch of pieces out today in the last week that are talking about Barron Trump as kind of a behind-the-scenes figure in connecting Trump to the bro culture and manosphere.
And all of these podcasts.
So if you read these pieces at New York Magazine and at Newsweek and at the Wall Street Journal, what you'll find is that there's this sense that Barron was kind of the testing field.
Ask Barron what podcasts he listens to.
Ask Barron who are the guys he likes, and maybe we'll go on those.
The other one is a consultant who's connected to J.D. Vance, and that's Alex Bruce Bruzovitz, who is the guy who chose Tony Hinchcliffe, Kill Tony, the comedian who made the Puerto Rico joke to appear at the New York rally.
So these are the two kind of folks that Trump and his older campaign team decided to ask about where Trump should go.
And Bruzovitz called Barron, and Barron started talking to Bruzovitz, and here we go, we're off and running.
So Trump went on a bunch of these podcasts, and we've talked about this in the past.
He was with the Nelk Boys, Patrick Bet-David, Will Compton.
He, of course, went on Joe Rogan.
He went on Logan Paul's podcast.
And that just led to, like, tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of views.
He connected with people that these young men, 18 to 29, are tuning into on a daily and weekly basis.
Joe Rogan is probably the one that you are most familiar with out of this group.
But there's somebody else who was behind the scenes that kind of is a figurehead of bro culture and this whole kind of movement, and that's Dana White.
Dana White is the head of UFC, and he's appeared numerous times at Trump rallies and other places.
But he was somebody who was kind of a key cog in this whole effort to connect Trump to these young men.
I want to thank some people UFC CEO Dana White told the crowd during Trump's victory speech in Florida in the early hours of Wednesday.
Real quick, I want to thank the Nelk boys, Aiden Ross, Theo Vaughn, Bussin' with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.
This was Dana White basically saying thanks to the brosphere out there for making this happen, for helping us to get Trump back to the White House.
Dana's very much into this world, Trump told Aiden Ross.
Dana's a young guy, sort of.
Dana's into this world like he could be an 18 or 20-year-old.
He knows more about you and the Nelk brothers, the Nelk boys, and he asked me to do their show.
I'll tell you, I got a tremendous response.
You do some of these big shows like 60 Minutes, nobody cares.
And there it is.
Think about what he just said.
You do some of these big shows like 60 Minutes, nobody cares.
What he's saying there is it doesn't move the needle.
And going on these shows, these shows that the likes of Barron Trump and other 18 and 22 and 25-year-old men listen to, does move the needle.
And we saw some of that in this election.
I will admit that the Friday before the election, I was skeptical.
I didn't think that the frat guy who likes to play beer pong and video games and hang out was going to make it to the polls, stand in line, take 45 minutes, plan his day so he could do that.
And again, I'm not saying that the bro vote was the deciding factor here, but I am saying that for the first time in four elections, this demographic broke for Republicans, and it goes in line with trends we've covered on the show.
The religious nature of young men, the ways their political views have shifted their reactions to things like gender and to issues surrounding gender and reproductive rights and sexuality.
Here is a passage from the Wall Street Journal on this very issue.
To Blake Marnell, a 60-year-old from San Diego who's gained his own MAGA fame for attending rallies, in a suit whose pattern resembles a brick wall, the manosphere is an organic phenomenon that grew out of terrain abandoned or overlooked by traditional media outlets.
It has some of the DNA of now-defunct Lads magazines and raunchy television shows from a previous generation, like Jackass or The Man Show.
Unlikely to be green-lighted in today's culture, it loves crypto, energy drinks, and Elon Musk.
Now, this brings me to a point that I want to make about this new mediascape that is attending to young men and really cultivating their interests and their politics.
If we think about this comparison that he makes about Jackass, for example, I grew up in the 90s and I remember Jackass.
I remember when it came out and I remember what it meant to like suburban kids looking for transgression, trespass, ways to be edgy and so on.
To run a shopping cart full speed ahead over a curb or to do something else that was just ridiculous.
Okay, that's one thing.
But here's the thing is Jackass and even the Man Show were not going to cultivate politics.
They weren't going to be the things that shaped how people voted or how they thought about really important issues like reproductive rights.
Now, we also used to have folks like Rush Limbaugh.
And Rush Limbaugh would, of course, get on and talk politics for hours and hours a day.
But the two were separate, right?
If you have Jackass and you have Rush Limbaugh, you have two separate things.
And you're going to capture two different audiences.
And some folks may listen to both and they may be fans of both and all that great.
The point I'm trying to make is that we now live in a situation where if you want to win a presidential campaign, you might go on a show like the Nelk Boys or Theo Vaughn's podcast and you'll talk politics and you'll then go to the very tip top of the mountain, which is Joe Rogan, who always mixes politics with culture and politics with, you know, conspiracy theories and reality TV and celebrity gossip and everything else.
Joe Rogan is the epitome of mixing what might have been the jackass lane and the Rush Limbaugh lane into one.
Now, is he Rush Limbaugh?
No, he's different than that, and I'm not trying to roll over all those differences.
I'm trying to make a point here is that this bro vote is one that exists in a new media landscape, and so we can make comparisons to...
Bygone decades, we can make comparisons to Rush Limbaugh or Jackass, but I think we have to recognize the dynamism of these podcasts, these pundits, these talking heads, these YouTube channels, the streamers, the folks on Kik, the folks on Twitch, and so on.
Here's Steve Waldman writing at Politico.
Biden won 18 to 21-year-olds by 60 to 36%.
Harris won by 55 to 42%.
So now we're in a very specific range.
New voters, 18 to 21.
This is their first time voting.
Biden wins them 60 to 36.
Harris wins them 55 to 42.
A noticeable drop.
Waldman says there's no group where the information consumption has changed more than young people.
3% of seniors get their information from social media.
46% of 18 to 29 year olds get their information from social media.
So if you're 18 to 29, there's about a 1 in 2 chance that you get your information from TikTok or from any other social media site.
The reliance on social media as a news source among those groups is probably a bigger factor in 2024 than 2020, in part because a new cohort of voters raised on social media as teenagers entered the electorate, and Latino voters are disproportionately young.
So now he's bringing in Latino voters and the ways that young Latino voters voted, and I'm going to spend time on the Latino vote in general here in a minute.
In 2020, 23% of adults got their news from YouTube.
In 2024, 32% did.
Think about that, friends.
Just think about adults in general.
One-third of adults now got their news from YouTube.
The portion on TikTok, getting your news from TikTok is 17%.
We're at a place where, like, you know how you were worried about your parents and them listening to Fox News and Newsmax?
Well, young folks are basically relying on TikTok and YouTube.
And it's not just young folks.
I mean, all adults, but it skews disproportionately to those who are 18 to 29.
Waldman keeps going.
The nature of these platforms has changed too, as more of their users come to rely on them for news.
In 2020, 28% of regular Instagram users got their news there.
In 2024, 40% did, according to Pew Research Center.
In 2020, 22% of TikToks users got news there.
In 2024, 52% did.
I can keep giving you numbers, and I'm not necessarily, I'm not a data scientist and I'm not a numbers person, but what these numbers say overall is this.
Even since 2020, the amount of people getting their news from TikTok or Instagram or YouTube has gone up consistently.
The other big factor, Waldman says, that changed is that one of the biggest platforms, X, formerly Twitter, has gone on, at least its owner, went all in for one candidate.
Here's the kicker.
You ready?
These studies reveal an interesting fault line.
While most women get their news from TikTok, most young men get their news from YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit.
This confirms that men and women often act on different sources of information.
Yet, while we spill many words analyzing whether New York Times headlines normalize bad behavior, we know very little about what news and information rises to the top on Reddit and YouTube.
And finally, if you read a newspaper, odds are 3 to 1 you voted for Harris.
So if you read traditional newspapers, if you read the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the LA Times, Star Tribune, whatever it is, on a regular basis, 3 to 1 you voted for Harris.
So, a couple takeaways before we take a break.
One, there was a deliberate effort by the Trump campaign to reach out to young men 18 to 29.
That's true.
The campaign believes it made a difference because they shouted out those folks on election night.
Dana White was kind of the lead in that whole effort.
Joe Rogan kind of the king of the pile.
And then there was all these other podcasters and YouTubers and others that really cater to the baron Trumps of the world.
And what we see is that those young people, the younger the voter is, the more they rely on social media for their news.
That's an issue we have to address.
We talked about this in 2016 and 17 about, oh my gosh, all our parents are watching Fox News.
What are we going to do about it?
Now we're in a place where young people don't know how to get news other than on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or Reddit.
And if you're a young man, there's a good chance you learn a lot of your politics from Joe Rogan or from the Nelk Boys or from anyone else that you might be listening to in your earbuds or on YouTube.
Those who read traditional news sources, what's left of journalism, seem to have voted for Harris in a big way.
We could break all that down in more detail, but I just want to conclude this by saying this was the men to election.
It's sad.
It's really hard to say that out loud.
Me Too was about dismantling decades, centuries, millennia, time immemorial of men taking advantage of hurting, of assaulting women, using power to take advantage.
There's been a backlash to that.
And there's been a backlash to that in a certain media silo that is really catered to young men.
We know the trends.
They've moved to the right.
They're more religious.
And this is a big challenge going forward, I think, full stop.
For the Democratic Party, sure, but just for our society in general.
What are we going to do about the fact that people are going to increasingly get their news from TikTok and Instagram and YouTube?
What are we going to do when the newspapers are owned by Jeff Bezos, who doesn't want to be in bad favor with Trump, or when X is owned by Elon Musk and most people are leaving it at the moment?
Those are open questions, but I just wanted to point out today the different vibe, the different tone, the different energy surrounding 2017.
The Women's March, Me Too, and now here we are with Men Too, Bro Culture, and the Manosphere.
It's a small part of Trump's comeback and his second term, but it is a part.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
Let's talk about Catholics and let's talk about Latinos.
So we talked about this a little bit on Friday and there was a question on our Instagram that I thought would be good to address today and be a way to address a couple of other things.
The question is this.
I'd also like to hear a little more about these stats.
One example is the percentage of Catholics voting for Trump increased.
I'm curious if these are self-reported Catholics.
I wonder if it's that the number of Catholics has stayed the same and the voting bloc moved away or a large chunk of the Catholics who voted for Biden in 2020 would no longer self-identify as Catholic and therefore aren't part of the 2024 stats.
So, I'll say, I have an initial answer to this, and we'll have to dig into the data more, and I don't have all the data yet, but I do have some, and I'll do my best to answer the best as I can right now.
So, a good piece by my friend and colleague Brian Kaler at Newsweek that talks about the ways that Yes, white evangelicals voted the way they've been voting for Trump for three elections now, but the Catholic vote was really important.
Here's Brian writing at Newsweek.
The religious group that really matters from Tuesday is the Catholic vote.
The exit polls four years ago put Biden narrowly winning among Catholics.
The later numbers that were probably more accurate had him narrowly losing.
Either way, the virtual tie was an important improvement over Clinton's standing in 2016.
Exit polling on data shows Harris losing Catholic voters by 18 percentage points.
That put her even below Clinton, who at least managed to win the national popular vote.
Harris cracking just 40% of Catholics as Trump ran up to 58% is a huge loss, especially in states with large Catholic populations like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Harris fell not only among white Catholics, but all Catholics, which is probably tied to her losses among Latino men.
So Biden, excuse me, Brian goes on to make points that I think are good and are similar to ones we tried to make on Friday, which is that Joe Biden is a white Catholic man.
He's a white Catholic man from Pennsylvania.
He served, of course, as Senator of Delaware for a long time.
He can play the part of Midwestern white Catholic guy, Scranton Joe.
And there are deep and wide traditions of Irish Catholic and Polish Catholic and Italian So I think that is part of it.
But I also think if we look at what PRRI says from their data from 2013 to 2023, we can get some clues about the fact that I don't think this was a matter of people no longer identifying as Catholic pushing the needle.
There's no doubt some of those, and I don't have that data.
But here's what I have.
This is from PRRI, and their work from 2013 to 2023.
White Catholics have consistently been more Republican and conservative than both Hispanic Catholics and American Catholics overall.
In the last decade, the percentage of white Catholics who identify as Republican has increased by almost 10 points.
In comparison, just 15% of Hispanic Catholics identify as Republican.
Similarly, the percentage of white Catholics who identify as conservative has remained unchanged since 2013, while the percentage of Hispanic Catholics who identify as conservative has decreased.
The percentage of white and Hispanic Catholics who identify as independent has decreased from over one-third to three in ten.
So, one of the things that I think that comes out of the data from PRRI is that white Catholics have consistently been more Republican and conservative than both Hispanic Catholics and American Catholics overall.
That is a group that is in some ways swayable, but they lean right.
And if you give them the chance, they will vote right.
If you give them the reason, if they feel like they need to, if they feel like they want to, if they blah, blah, blah, they will go to the right.
So one hypothesis would be this.
In 2020, Joe Biden did a lot better with Catholics than Hillary Clinton because he's a white Catholic guy from the Midwest.
And if you're an Irish Catholic or a Polish Catholic or Italian Catholic, there's ways that you can see at least part of Joe's story and part of Joe's...
And yes, he's moderate.
You might have heard that he's woke and Marxist and all that.
But if you examine who he is, he's one of the folks that you can recognize from your community.
Kamala Harris is a black woman.
She's an Asian woman.
She's from California.
She's married to a Jewish man.
This is a group that can be swayed to vote Republican.
And lest we not forget, there is misogyny, there is racism, there is also the economy.
And so my guess is this is not about, as this person on Instagram asked, about self-reported Catholic, or excuse me, as a large chunk of Catholics who voted for Biden in 2020 leaving the Catholic Church.
I don't think this is like a mass exodus.
It's like, well, We had all these Catholics vote for Biden in 2020, and all the Biden Catholic voters from 2020, they all left the church in the four years since, and so a huge chunk of Biden's support disappeared.
I think that is much, much, much, much, much, much less likely than the fact that a lot of white Catholics were swayed to vote for Trump because of the economy.
In addition to the fact that Kamala Harris is Kamala Harris, that she is a black Asian woman from San Francisco married to a Jewish man.
Now, when we come to questions about the Latino vote, which is of course a big thing of discussion at the moment, there's actually some things that are really interesting and worth noting.
I think Brian Kaler is right, and I think the PRI data, we see maybe a reverse in the trend from that data.
We know that about 60% of Latino men voted for Trump.
And so there probably is, in that Catholic vote for Trump, baked in some Latino men who are now voting Republican or voted Republican for the first time or whatever it may be.
We've talked about that a lot on this show, the rightward shift, the attempt to gain with the Latino community, and the success, seemingly, that the Trump campaign had with Latino men and Latino women who voted for Trump at around 40%.
But there's something else that's really, I think, important, and it plays into things we've covered extensively on this show.
Here is Pew Research from 2020, excuse me, from 2023, April 13th.
It's a report about U.S., Latinos, Catholicism, and the way that Catholicism is declining among Latinos in the United States.
As of 2022, 43% of Hispanic adults identify as Catholic, down from 67% in 2010.
So let's just stop before we get into all the numbers and all the stuff.
Let's just take a minute.
Since 2010, there has been a 24% drop in the Hispanics who identify as Catholic.
So where have they gone?
The share of Latinos who are religiously unaffiliated now stands at 30%.
That's up 10% in 2010 and 18% from a decade ago.
Now, some of the folks that we're talking about, some of the numbers, I should say, regarding Latinos and religion in this country show us that there has been a slight increase in Latinos who are evangelical Protestant.
So during the time from 2010 to 2022, Hispanic Protestants consistently have been more likely to identify as evangelical or born again than to say they are not born again or evangelical.
What the Pew data shows is that the number or the percentage, I should say, of Latino Protestants hasn't really climbed that much higher.
It's a couple of percentage points.
So we haven't gone from Latinos used to be 10% Protestant and now they're 60%.
It's nothing like that.
But what we are seeing is something that is of great interest to me and the work we do on the show is that Hispanic Protestants consistently have been more likely to identify as evangelical or born again.
That means that there's a lot more Hispanic Protestants who are kind of seeing themselves as evangelical Protestants.
And I think one of the things that we're seeing overall, and we've covered this extensively, is that there's deep outreach efforts and, in many ways, successes within MAGA Nation to include Latino Protestant Christians in the evangelical fold.
And that, in some ways, is a way to extend at least a one hand, if not two hands, of welcome, one hand at least, tentatively, with a kind of, maybe, this could be revoked at any time, invitation into whiteness.
Like, there's this sense where you can invite people, by way of evangelicalism, in Maga Nation, into the whole movement of Make America Great Again.
And to me, that's an invitation into whiteness.
That if you're born again, and you're Protestant, and you're an American citizen, then yeah, you can come on in here.
Come on in here.
It's all good.
Okay?
Now, what this tracks with is things that, of course, we've talked about extensively with Matt Taylor and the New Apostolic Reformation.
That the New Apostolic Reformation is one of the most multiracial and diverse religious movements in the United States today.
That it includes many Latinos, it includes many Asian Americans, it includes white people.
It's a place where Christian nationalism does not simply come in Caucasian.
And so for me, not only the small rise in Protestantism among Latinos, but the likelihood to identify as evangelical is a really big deal.
For the last seven weeks, we've had Leah Payne doing a series called Spirit and Power.
And that's been on our feed on Thursdays.
So if you look through those episodes, Spirit and Power by Leah Payne, you'll see a number of episodes that address Latino voters.
And one of the things you're going to hear on there from just great scholars, Lloyd Barba and Flavio Hickel and Erica Ramirez, are insights into how Latino Protestants think about key issues in politics.
There's this widespread assumption that immigration is the most important thing, that all that you would hear if you went to, say, a Pentecostal, largely Spanish-speaking church on a Sunday is about immigration and the wall.
And in fact, what you hear from these scholars is that you're probably more likely to hear about abortion.
Probably more likely to hear about protecting Israel.
And I think that's a key insight.
And we've talked about it on the show, but I think I want to make that, again, clear here as well.
So, takeaways.
When it comes to the Catholic vote, I think this is not a matter of a lot of Biden Catholics just decided not to be Catholic.
And that's what gives us Trump winning Catholics so handily.
I think it's more that, A, white Catholics are very likely to lean.
And if you give them a chance to revote Republican Republicans, I think that's a big takeaway.
I think there certainly are Latino Catholic men, especially, who did vote for Trump, and we'll dig into that, and we'll see that bear out in the numbers soon.
But then I also think that when it comes to Latinos, not necessarily Catholics, we can't ignore the Protestant factor and the ways that Latino Protestants are being brought into the larger evangelical fold, and in many ways very successfully.
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Don't forget y'all, two live events coming in November, some straight white American Jesus.
this.
One at the University of Southern California in LA with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and then the next night at the San Diego Convention Center.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
