If you have followed the religion beat for several decades, you know that one of the most important trends has been the rising numbers of Hispanics — in Latin America and in the United States — who have converted to various forms of Protestantism. Check out this huge study by the Pew Research Center on the Pentecostal side of that trend.
But that’s just, you know, religion stuff. That kind of information isn’t really real until it affects something important — like politics. Right?
That brings us, once again, to the closer-than-expected 2020 showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And, no doubt about it, the Washington Post political desk was impressed with the many hooks that GOP leaders used to reel in lots of Hispanic voters in Florida, which is supposed to be the ultimate multicultural swing state in American politics.
The story considered many different angles, from the usual stress on Cuban conservatism to talk of how immigrants from troubled lands in South America may have been swayed by warnings about “socialism” and images of mobs in major-city streets crashing into businesses and public buildings. The headline focused on one location: “Miami-Dade Hispanics helped sink Biden in Florida.”
There was, however, an important topic missing in this story. Want to guess what that was? This was — no surprise — one topic discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Click here to tune that in.
This political trend in Florida was so important that the Post produced another story about it: “Democrats lose ground with Latino voters in Florida and Texas, underscoring outreach missteps.” Readers who dug deep into this piece finally hit the following:
The Democratic Party’s failure in Florida to build a permanent campaign infrastructure to target Latinos left the Biden campaign at an early disadvantage, said Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and strategist in the state. Amandi said he has warned Democratic leaders about this election cycle after election cycle, but has seen little change.
Although Cuban Americans, who tend to live in Miami-Dade County, have historically been Republican-leaning voters, their commitment to the GOP is not monolithic. Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans, whose numbers have grown in the state in recent years, are often assumed to be Democrats. That is not always the case among many evangelical Protestants and those who have recently moved from Puerto Rico.
If you missed that three-word phrase — “many evangelical Protestants” — there was this sentence later:
Evangelical churchgoers saw every day, on screens and in pews, how the Trump campaign was making its case to millions of evangelical Latino Protestants in Florida and across the country.
Frankly, I thought the most interesting comment in that story was the Democratic pollster’s statement that he had been warning his party about these trends “election cycle after election cycle.”
You can see the same theme in a Religion News Service story that ran with this headline: “How Trump’s strong play for Hispanic evangelicals helped him stun Biden in Florida.” This story also caught a crucial fact — that the greater Orlando area is crucial.
So why did the GOP pick up so many Hispanic votes? Read this carefully:
One answer, said the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and Florida resident, is religion.
“It confirmed what I’ve been saying for about three or four election cycles: that Latinos are not a monolith writ large, and that Hispanic evangelicals are quintessential swing voters,” said Salguero, who served on the White House’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships under former President Barack Obama. …
The president’s approach was aggressive: He launched his Evangelicals for Trump initiative from a primarily Spanish-speaking evangelical church in January. Vice President Mike Pence, a staunch evangelical, has repeatedly visited similar communities in the region.
“Pence came multiple times to central Florida, to Orlando and Kissimmee,” Salguero said. “The Trump-Pence campaign had an intentional and long-standing outreach to the Hispanic evangelical community.”
The Biden campaign’s overtures to the group were milder — a trend Suarez says persisted before this election. “I think the Biden campaign is going to say, ‘We blew it: we took for granted the Latino vote and the evangelical vote,’” he said.
Actually, Pence grew up Roman Catholic and then switched over to evangelical Protestantism, so he has walked the same conversion road as many believers in evangelical pews in Florida. Pence likes to call himself an “evangelical Catholic.”
So what’s the point?
In keeping with our “Groundhog Day” graphics theme in other posts during this long week, the point is a familiar one here at GetReligion: journalists could have seen this big political story coming if they had paid attention to religion-beat trends during the previous decade-plus.
Also, I have argued — for four years — that the rising number of Latino evangelicals voting Republican was the big story of Trump’s Florida victory IN 2016. If you watched the CNN-Fox map pros back then you could see the rising Trump totals in the Interstate corridors around Orlando-Kissunnee. That’s prime megachurch territory, including many packed with evangelical and Pentecostal Hispanics.
In a way, the shocking rise of the Hispanic evangelicals in Florida, Texas and elsewhere wasn’t all that shocking at all. It was rather old news — for people on the religion beat.
Moving on. What’s the next hot religion-and-politics story?
It’s in Georgia, where the emphasis will soon be on the fact that the state’s two open U.S. Senate seats will be up for grabs in a special run-off election in a matter of weeks. At this point, it appears that if the Democrats take both seats (combined with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris), they will have a razor-thin Senate majority to go with their shrinking majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Would they dare pack the U.S. Supreme Court or add new stars to the American flag with a one-vote majority?
Georgia is about to become the center of the political world. I would imagine that former President Barack Obama may get an apartment in downtown Atlanta — perhaps in or near CNN Center — to help get out the urban and inner-suburban vote.
So what is hot story here?
White evangelicals, of course.
Only this time there will be an angle that I predict blue-zip-code journalists will not be able to resist, as in whether or not progressive evangelical Democrats can slice off a not-insignificant chunk of white evangelical votes — as it appears they did for Biden.
In a state like Georgia, lots of Black church Christians don’t embrace a “liberal” political label, by the way. They would stress that they are moderates or even conservative Democrats. So there are two religion angles to watch there.
What happens with Trump off the ballot? Who will get out the votes in these crucial Senate run-off races?
Oh, and can Georgia officials pull off another wave of mail-in votes?
In conclusion, let me add one other item — as a kind of meditation on the stunning drumbeat of news this week.
During a Zoom podcast with Ed Stetzer of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, the Rev. Rick Warren of the influential Saddleback megachurch in California offered an interesting set of observations about faith and politics.
News hook? Maybe it’s this: I imagine that quite a few pastors are going to be discussing some of these themes in the weeks ahead.
WARREN: Most Christians today have been seduced by politics. And what I mean by that is they spend more time listening to political news than they do listening to the word of God. Or they're on social media all the time. You need to get out of Facebook and get your face in the book of God's word. …
Some Christians act like that -- the instrument of God in the world today is their political party. And I'm going, “Well, for heaven's sake! What did God do before a hundred years ago before your party existed? What did he do for thousands of years? How did God get anything done without your political party?"
There’s more:
Politics is a legitimate calling and vocation. And I know people who are called by God into public service, but at the same time — much of the time — the kingdom of politics is diametrically opposed to the kingdom of God — diametrically opposed. And so if all we're doing is listening, listening, listening to the political commentators and the vitriol studies have shown that even if something is untrue, you hear it enough time and you start believing it.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass this link on to others.