MIAMI — During a Sunday sermon in mid-February, Pastor Dionny Báez shared an omen with his congregation.
“I believe that God is going to do something very great with the Latino people in the United States,” he said.
The congregation responded with applause and remained attentive to the rest of the morning evangelical service held weekly in an old nightclub.
The message evangelical leaders give churchgoers during a presidential campaign is a valuable key to understanding where the evangelical voting bloc is headed.
“We are heads of communities, right? There are literally thousands of people who are influenced by our word,” said Báez, founder of the H20 Church, in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.
Baez said his priority when supporting a candidate is that they’re aligned with his values. He advised others to do the same when they ask him for guidance on the November contest.
Evangelicals are a conservative bloc of the Hispanic electorate that is “more involved than ever” in the elections, said evangelical Pastor Samuel Rodríguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), which touts itself as the largest Hispanic Christian organization worldwide with over 40,000 churches in the United States alone.
“Evangelical Latinos this year are going to vote like no other year,” Rodríguez said. The security of the country and the economy, parental rights, the free expression of religion and the rights of Christians are the issues that are mobilizing them the most in this election cycle.
In the U.S., around 10 million Hispanics identify as evangelical or Protestant and “approximately three in ten Hispanic Republicans (28%) consider themselves evangelical Protestants,” according to the most recent figures from the Pew Research Center.
For decades, U.S. evangelicals have solidly been part of the electoral base of the Republican Party, which defends their conservative positions on abortion and other matters. As…
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