Are Hispanic Evangelicals A Growing Force?
Hispanic Americans hold a parade and fiesta at St. Procopius Elementary School in Chicago to celebrate Dia de los Muertos. (Photo by Kate Gardiner)
(ANALYSIS) 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,” 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 10 points higher than Asians and 20 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?
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.