Latino evangelicals used to shun politics. Will they now become a right-wing force?

It was only a few days before the 2020 presidential election when a woman named Martha called into Pastor Netz Gómez’s Spanish-language evangelical Christian radio show to say she was confused about who to vote for. “Our motto in 2022 is, ‘Don’t just pray,’” said Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, a Hispanic Christian organization with more than 40,000 member churches. “Register all the people in your church to vote life, religious liberty and biblical justice.” Pastor Netz Gómez of Houses of Light Church is plugged into a vast network of evangelical churches and leaders who are becoming increasingly involved in government and politics. “We grew up hearing from our pastors in previous generations that politics was of the devil, politics was corrupt.” That shifted between 1980 and 2004, as Latino evangelicals gravitated toward conservative Republican candidates, while other Latinos who previously had voted Democratic drifted from the party over abortion and the Obama administration’s mass deportations of immigrants who were in the country without legal status. “Once I arrived, I felt I needed more of a connection to God.” A mother of three who attends Houses of Light church, Buch doesn’t have U.S. legal status and can’t vote.