Latinx Protestants and American Politics

Abstract

AbstractThe rise in the proportion of Latinx Protestants in the United States may be coinciding with an increased alignment with neoliberal political agendas—a rising Christian Latinidad aligning with white Christian priorities—which benefits a long-established hierarchy of whiteness and further accentuates racial and economic inequalities. The significance of this still-strengthening religious identity is that any prolonged intensity of this alignment will likely affect the near future of American politics. This brief essay indicates a way to thread together several analytical narratives and to heuristically suggest an approach to emerging patterns of evidence. In short, it appears that contemporary Latinx Protestants should be understood today as steadily developing a distinctly and religiously informed racialized orientation, a process of religious racialization, one that is aligned with the Christian Libertarian imperatives found among white evangelicals. A closer examination of the historical development of Latinx Protestants in the United States with the backdrop of the historical development of neoliberalism and global capitalist structures of political power will serve to further refine our notions of ethnicized religion and the religious mobilization of voters. I anticipate that a broader historical lens, increased attention to political ideologies, greater cross-disciplinary dialogue between various lines of investigation, and a more highly textured assessment of the relation between individual religiosity and State mechanisms of power will yield fruitful and even more provocative lines of inquiry very soon.