Hispanic Evangelicals - A Growing Force?
A fascinating story of race, religion, and immigration
I read a story a few weeks ago in the Free Press that had an intriguing title, “Latinos are flocking to evangelical Christianity.” The piece was an excerpt from a book called Latinoland: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority by Marie Arana. The book is based on over 200 interviews with Hispanics from all facets of American society in order to develop a clearer picture of what Hispanic culture looks like in the United States.
Arana spends a bit of time discussing the religiosity of Hispanics in the United States through the lens of case studies and some data. For instance, she cites a book called Latino Protestants in America: Growing and Diverse by Mulder, Ramos, and Marti which argues that half of the Latino population in the United States will be Protestant by 2030.
However, the premise of the piece in the Free Press is that there’s been a huge groundswell of Latinos not only moving toward Protestantism but specifically in the direction of evangelical Christianity. That’s a pretty interesting claim. I need to check on that with some data.
Here’s the most recent data I have, collected in November of 2022. I broke it down by race and then calculated the share of each group that self-identified as evangelical.
The big outlier here is African-Americans - 44% of them said that they were evangelicals in late 2022. I don’t know what comes to mind for you when someone says the word “evangelical,” but the data suggests that it’s incredibly prevalent among the Black community in the United States. At the other end of the spectrum are Asians, with just 15% saying that they are evangelical.
Between those two extremes lie white and Hispanic respondents. In both cases, just about a quarter of each racial group self-identifies as an evangelical. That’s about ten points higher than Asians and twenty points lower than African-Americans. I don’t see any evidence here that evangelicalism is especially prominent among Hispanics living in the United States.
But is it growing? I performed the same calculation for every year of the Cooperative Election Study from 2008 through 2022. Here’s what I found:
For Black respondents, the share identifying as evangelical has declined by about five percentage points, from 49% in 2008 to 45% in 2022. The decline among White respondents is even more significant, dropping from 33% in 2008 to just 25% in the most recent data. There has also been a decline among Asian respondents, though it's fairly modest at just 3 points.
Hispanics stand out as an exception in this trend. In 2008, 26% of them identified as evangelical/born-again, and in 2022, that figure was exactly the same at 26%. What is surprising is the minimal variation in these percentages from year to year. Sometimes it's 24%, other years it's 27%, but that line hovers around 25% for essentially the entire time series. There's no evidence here of any significant surge in evangelicalism among Latinos.
However, I had this lingering idea that I really wanted to explore further - immigration. It's undoubtedly a significant part of the story among Latinos in the United States. Consider these statistics: Here is the share of each racial group that is either an immigrant themselves or has at least one parent who immigrated to the United States.
White: 10%
Black: 17%
Hispanic: 57%
Asian: 88%
Thus, the interplay between immigration and religion among Hispanics warrants deeper exploration. I broke down the Hispanic sample by immigrant status for both 2008 and 2022. Here’s what that reveals:
In 2008, just 10% of Hispanic immigrants identified as Protestants. By 2022, this share had nearly doubled to 19%. Meanwhile, the percentage identifying as Catholic saw a significant decline, falling from 65% to just 47% between 2008 and 2022. Simultaneously, the share of those with no religious affiliation (the "nones") increased from 19% in 2008 to 31% in 2022.
This general pattern is observed across all levels of immigrant status, except for first-generation immigrants. The share identifying as Protestant has risen modestly, the Catholic share has rapidly declined, and the "nones" have become a larger proportion of Hispanics at the same immigration level. Thus, there is evidence that Protestantism is gaining ground among Hispanics in a broad sense.
However, what does the data say about evangelical self-identification among Hispanics by immigrant status? Are we witnessing a significant influx of evangelical immigrants from Hispanic countries, or is there a trend of Hispanic individuals, who have been in the U.S. for generations, leaning towards evangelicalism?
Remarkably, the share of Hispanic immigrants to the United States identifying as evangelical has increased significantly, from 22% in 2008 to 32% in the most recent data. There’s also a noticeable rise in the evangelical share among second and third-generation Hispanic Americans, with about three in ten stating they are evangelical.
Yet, we encounter a mathematical conundrum. Earlier data indicated that the overall share of Hispanics identifying as evangelicals has remained relatively stable at around 25%. However, we also observe data showing a modest increase in the Protestant share among Hispanics across all levels of immigrant status, along with a rise in evangelical self-identification. This suggests a nuanced shift in religious identity among Hispanics, segmented by immigrant status.
I have previously discussed the rise of non-Protestant evangelicals, and I am wondering if this trend might apply to Hispanics as well. It's conceivable that the share of Protestant evangelicals has decreased while there has been an uptick in the number of Catholics identifying as evangelical. These shifts could largely offset each other, maintaining a stable overall number. To investigate this possibility, I delved into the data further.
Hm. Well, there’s certainly nothing major jumping out of this graph. It seems reasonable to conclude that the share of Hispanic Protestants identifying as evangelical has decreased slightly. In the earliest data from the Cooperative Election Study, this figure was around 73%, while the most recent data shows a slight decline to about 70%. The trend for non-Protestant evangelicals remains remarkably consistent, hovering at 17% in both 2008 and 2022.
A key insight emerges specifically concerning first-generation Hispanic immigrants, who appear to diverge significantly in their religious affiliations. Unlike other levels of immigrant status, first-generation Hispanics have not seen an increase in Protestant affiliation. Similarly, this group hasn't experienced the notable rise in evangelical self-identification that other immigrant levels have observed.
This distinction is crucial, especially considering that one-third of all Hispanics in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study reported having at least one parent born outside the United States, making them the largest group among Hispanics. Although Asian Americans exhibit a higher overall immigration level, with the majority (55%) being immigrants themselves, first-generation Hispanics constitute 3% of the total U.S. population. Their voting behavior could significantly influence the outcome in pivotal states like Arizona during elections.
Given these dynamics, religion among first-generation Hispanics warrants closer attention, particularly as we approach the 2024 election. Their unique religious landscape sets them apart from other Hispanic groups and underscores the importance of understanding these nuances in political and social analyses.
Code for this post can be found here.
Ryan, I think some reporting from the field should be combined with your data-driven approach in this case. The big store in Hispanic Christianity both in the U.S. and in Central and South America is Pentecostalism. So much so that Baptist and other Premillennial/semi-fundamental Hispanic churches now frequently worship in Pentecostal style. I believe this trend has also strongly affected Hispanic Catholic worship as well. Since Pentecostalism is in general a variety of Evangelicalism, I wonder if part of the bigger story is the Pentecostal takeover of Hispanic Christianity? I _think_ such a phenomenon would help explain a few things, including, _maybe_, the movement of American Hispanic voters to the right. What do you think? Do you have any way to get at this in the data? --Jim Robb
I'm honestly surprised that Hispanics continue to show up this Catholic in the data, just based on personal experience. I strongly suspect that a lot of US Hispanics are very nominal/cultural Catholics and that evangelical Hispanics are, on average, a lot more involved in church, such that the population of US Hispanics that are in church on any given Sunday might possibly already be majority evangelical (with a lean towards Pentecostal/charismatic), and if not true today, then it's even more likely to be true in the near future (e.g. that 2030 prediction cited in the post).