Hispanic Pasotr in California Who Was Once Into Marital Arts

It was only a few days before the 2020 presidential election when a woman named Martha chosen into Pastor Netz Gómez'southward Spanish-language evangelical Christian radio evidence to say she was dislocated about who to vote for.

Gómez, the head pastor at Houses of Light Church in Northridge, immediately perked up. This was a gamble for him to gently nudge another member of the faithful toward the biblical and conservative values that he embraces. And so he directed Martha and other listeners to a 2020 Castilian-language voter guide that Houses of Light church building leaders had created for their congregation.

"United states Christians who vote biblically can make a not bad difference in our nation," said Gómez, a 61-year-old pastor from Mexico City who leads the two,000-potent nondenominational church, which leans evangelical.

Gómez and his partner on the bear witness, Walter Rivas, a church building leader, also referred listeners to conservative websites.

"This is part of the enkindling that we are having every bit a church," Rivas told listeners of Good News for the Family unit (Buenas Nuevas para la Familia). "Don't exist agape to participate. It's something nosotros have to exercise every bit citizens of this country. Nosotros have to align ourselves, as our pastor said, with God's plan."

E'er since Ronald Reagan gained the White House in 1980, much attending has focused on bourgeois white evangelical Protestants' growing political clout. But there'due south been far less attention paid to Latino evangelicals. Even equally the number of U.S. white evangelical Protestants has declined since 2006, Latinos are increasingly abandoning their traditional affiliation with the Roman Catholic church and converting to evangelical Christianity.

Catholics no longer constitute a majority of the U.S. Latino population. In Pew Research Heart RDD (random-digit-dial) surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 47% of Latinos described themselves as Cosmic, down from 57% a decade agone. Meanwhile, the share of Latinos who place as born-again/evangelical Protestants is xvi%, and the share of Latinos who say they are religiously unaffiliated is now 23%, up from 15% in 2009.

Many Latinos are becoming politicized through evangelical churches led by pastors who insist they aren't beholden to any party, but typically espouse conservative stances on cadre issues such as abortion, religious liberty and same-sexual activity marriage, and are stepping up their activism ahead of national elections in 2022 and 2024. The Houses of Lights' 2020 online voter guide gave former President Trump a four-star rating of "Very good," while and so-Presidential candidate Joe Biden garnered zero stars and a "Terrible. Don't vote" rating.

"Our motto in 2022 is, 'Don't just pray,'" said Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, a Hispanic Christian organisation with more than 40,000 member churches. "Annals all the people in your church to vote life, religious freedom and biblical justice."

Pastor Netz Gómez of Houses of Light Church building is plugged into a vast network of evangelical churches and leaders who are becoming increasingly involved in government and politics.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

For a long time, Latino evangelicals shunned politics, Rodriguez said. "We grew upward 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 Autonomous drifted from the party over abortion and the Obama administration's mass deportations of immigrants who were in the land without legal status.

Rodriguez believes that the Democratic Party has turned its dorsum on Latino evangelicals.

"It's not that I embrace the values of the Republican Party," he said. "Information technology'southward that the Republican Political party embraces more of my values, while the Democratic Political party is not only confronting my values but vehemently opposed to who I am equally an evangelical."

"We're creating our own path," added Rodriguez, who in 2017 made headlines when he was invited to pray at Trump's inauguration ceremony. That path, he said, includes non only working in tandem with their white evangelical counterparts, just forging their own alliances that "reconcile the message of Rev. Billy Graham with the march of Dr. Martin Luther Male monarch Jr."

Pastor Gómez, who immigrated to the U.Due south. to take a job as an art managing director, stresses that he doesn't tell his flock how to vote, but does encourage them to do and so, even holding voter registration drives on church grounds.

He start became engaged in politics well-nigh 13 years ago, meeting and learning from some of the nigh influential leaders in conservative Christian circles: Craig Huey; Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family unit Research Council; and Jim Domen, founder of Church building United in Newport Beach.

Domen's group encourages pastors throughout the state to become politically engaged, locally and nationally, sending pastors to Washington, D.C., and Sacramento to see with political leaders. Gómez attended one of those field trips to Washington and is now considered a "pastor of regional influence" for Church United.

Much of Domen'southward efforts are concentrated on Latino leaders. Most one-half of the 2,000 pastors involved with Church United are Castilian-speaking, he said.

"We want to bring them to the table," Domen said.

Parishioners nourish service at Houses of Light Church building in Northridge.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Pastor Netz Gomez, centre, of Houses of Light Church on stage with fellow worship leaders.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Tucked into an industrial area a few blocks away from Northridge Manner Center, Houses of Lite Church building is more a block-length community eye than only a church. And Gómez, sporting jeans, a well-fitted polo shirt and a Tumi haversack ane weekday last year, resembled a hip techie more than than an evangelical pastor.

"We definitely need more than room," said Gómez, who 22 years ago started his church in his living room and has watched information technology steadily aggrandize. "More people keep coming."

The church provides three weekly worships and a menu of support services, including parenting classes, marriage counseling, friendship groups, bible studies, a total-time youth ministry building and a Sunday school staffed by 85 teachers before the pandemic. At that place's also a volume shop, studio, prayer room and a food depository financial institution that feeds hundreds of people every Saturday.

Virtually half of Latinos who converted from Catholicism to evangelicalism said that an important factor was finding a church that "reaches out and helps its members more than," co-ordinate to a 2104 Pew Research Heart written report.

Such services are specially attractive to freshly arrived Latino immigrants navigating a new country.

"They provide a sense of customs hope and purpose and pregnant that resonates with their Latin American values," said Gastón Espinosa, a professor of religious studies at Claremont McKenna Higher. "These churches besides provide a moral framework that helps them interpret the earth and American social club. These churches are welcoming, and they also help preserve their cultures considering they are pastored by Latino pastors for Spanish-speaking people."

The growing number of U.Due south. Latino evangelicals is closely tied to immigration from Latin American countries where evangelicalism has gained a foothold in recent decades. Latino evangelicals are more likely than Catholic or unaffiliated Latinos to be foreign-built-in, says Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center. Pentecostalism and related "charismatic" religious movements — such equally evangelicalism — take been burgeoning in Latin America for at least the past century.

"When we talk about Latino evangelicals, we are talking about people from Central American countries, and less then Mexican, and also some Caribbean countries," Lopez said.

Irma Buch, a 34-year-one-time Guatemalan immigrant who lives in Van Nuys, said that her parents were Cosmic and raised her every bit such. She converted to evangelicalism after her clandestine journey to the United States more xiv years ago.

"I felt God'due south hand on my way hither," she said. "One time 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. Simply if she could, she would have voted for Trump because of his anti-ballgame stance.

"Information technology's true that he deported many people," she said. "Just at the aforementioned time, nosotros see that he does things that please God."

Trump's tough-guy, dominion-breaking persona likewise appeals to a certain strain of evangelicals, specially Pentecostals, according to Erica Ramirez, a sociologist of religion and director of applied research at Auburn Seminary in New York City.

"The snark and anti-institutionalism of President Trump reveals instead the persistence of anti-elitist affinities in a group of people who accept demonstrated, over hundreds of years, an appetite for disrupting genteel politics," Ramirez wrote in a theological publication published in July.

"Disrespectful mockery is an indelible trait of U.S. evangelicalism," she wrote.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

After the eleven:30 a.m. church service at Houses of Light i Sunday, Anthony Recio, a 31-twelvemonth-erstwhile youth pastor, explained how he once supported Bernie Sanders only ended upwardly voting for Trump twice.

"I don't like [Trump's] grapheme at all," he said, but "I want someone who tin really surround himself with people who value many of the things that I value."

Recio, who defines himself every bit nonpartisan, said that although he is confronting abortion, his principal reason for supporting Trump was the sometime president's entrepreneurialism and management of a stiff economy. The Republican ideology of costless markets and bootstraps individualism resonates with many evangelicals, said Jonathan Calvillo, an assistant professor at Boston University School of Theology and author of "The Saints of Santa Ana," about how Latino identity is shaped by faith.

"It's a very entrepreneurial sort of spiritualism," Calvillo said. "For instance, many showtime their own church and then a second church. It'southward very oriented toward beingness, in a sense, business-savvy."

Latino evangelicals are bringing that idea of can-do spirituality to bear not only at the national and state level but on local councils and school boards. In 2020, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Briefing launched a entrada dubbed "El Voto Hispano" to mobilize Latino evangelical voters.

This year, the campaign was revamped to prioritize local government offices and school boards, Rodriguez said. He was inspired by last year'south Virginia governor's race, in which Republican candidate Glenn Younkin drilled down on local issues such as parental control over COVID-related health measures in schools and the educational activity of controversial subjects like racism.

"Our faith and education coalition now includes a parental-engagement school board component that we didn't take before," Rodriguez said. "Engage Latino evangelical parents to attend schoolhouse board meetings, to run for local school board."

It's all part of what Gómez tells his flock is using "politics equally a ways to an terminate, and not the end itself."

"It's not fifty-fifty about Democrats or Republicans," Gómez said. "We want in a way to be relevant and speak of what is happening. It's non similar the church is just within these four walls."

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Source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-04/latino-america-evangelical-political-force

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