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Thursday, December 25, 2025

Can evangelical faith in Israel survive MAGA and the Gaza war? Israel is betting millions on it

(RNS) — Conservatives have long seen supporting Israel as an act of faith. Now, critics such as Tucker Carlson say Christian Zionism is a heresy, while more progressive Christian voices denounce Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

U.S. Christian pastors and influencers wave Israeli flags as they visit at Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem, Dec. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

Bob Smietana and Yonat Shimron
December 23, 2025
RNS

(RNS) — On Jan. 6, about 100 North Carolina pastors and their wives will travel to Israel on an all-expenses-paid trip. They will tour Galilee, where Jesus ministered, and go to Jerusalem, where Jesus was crucified. On Jan. 11, they’ll have a private dinner with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

The trip is organized by the American Renewal Project, a group dedicated to mobilizing evangelical pastors to run for office. An anonymous donor gave David Lane, a Texas political operative and evangelical Christian, $2 million for the effort.

“We believe in the Abrahamic covenant,” Lane said. “God said to Abraham, I give you my word that I’m going to give you the land. So the land is the Jews’, and because we’re evangelicals, we have been grafted in. And you know, the evangelicals are the best friends of Israel.”

But those beliefs are changing. Pro-Israel evangelicals, sometimes known as Christian Zionists, have found themselves under fire in recent months from their fellow conservatives — including podcasters and provocateurs Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens — and from Palestinian Christians and other U.S. activists who reject the idea that the modern state of Israel is the same construct as the ancient Israel of the Hebrew Bible.

Palestinian Christians at Chicago conference ask fellow believers to stand against Gaza war

In the wake of the devastating war in Gaza — in which more than 70,000 Palestinians (the majority of whom are reported to be women and children) have been killed — many younger Americans, including evangelicals, have become skeptical of Israel and of the billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded weapons the U.S. provides to it.

The latest University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll found a growing gap between younger and older evangelical Republicans. While 59% of older evangelical Republicans (age 35 and older) said Israeli actions in Gaza were justified, only 36% of younger evangelical Republicans (ages 18 to 34) said the same.

Mike Evans, left, founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center in Jerusalem, stands with freed hostages during a ceremony with U.S. Christian pastors and influencers at the site of the Nova music festival, where hundreds of revelers were killed and abducted by Hamas in 2023, near Kibbutz Reim, southern Israel, Dec. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

That pushback blew up online earlier this month after a video of U.S. evangelical Mike Evans, speaking to a group of 1,000 evangelical pastors, went viral. The video showed the pastors on a mass trip to Israel, organized by the Christian Zionist group Evans founded, Friends of Zion.

Evans professed his love for Israel in the video, and critics on social media began to claim he had sold out America by promoting a foreign country. The trip was funded partially by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs “to secure religious and political support for Israel.”

“We’re going to train 100,000 Christian ambassadors to be ambassadors in their own country, for the state of Israel, to defend Israel’s brand and to combat antisemitism,” Evans said in a video clip.

Evans has also feuded with Carlson, especially after the latter criticized Christian Zionists during an interview with Nick Fuentes, who has espoused antisemitic views. Evans told The Jerusalem Post that Carlson made comments Evans thought were reminiscent of the Nazis.

In a recent interview with podcaster Theo Von, Carlson accused Israel of genocide and called it an insignificant country that the U.S. should abandon. He also denounced pastors such as Evans who refused to criticize the war in Gaza, saying they’d made “deals” with the Israeli government.

(Image by Tumisu/Pixabay/Creative Commons)

That uproar came on the heels of another controversy about a plan to target megachurches with pro-Israel messages. Earlier this year, a Christian marketing group called Show Faith by Works began work on a $3.2 million marketing project paid for by the Israeli government.

The Show Faith by Works project includes creating a traveling pro-Israel museum for display at churches, Christian colleges and Christian events, and a “geofencing” campaign targeting churchgoers with pro-Israel ads, according to the filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Geofencing is a form of digital marketing that promotes messages to consumers within specified physical locations.

The goal of the project is “encouraging Christians to have a more favorable view of the Nation of Israel, and to encourage Christians to visit Israel for tourism purposes,” according to the filing.

The geofencing campaign, which came under criticism from several Christian denominations that had churches targeted, including the United Methodist Church, has since stalled.

“We feel like the comments about geofencing were intentionally misleading by those who wanted to slander the project,” Chad Schnitger, a marketing professional for Show Faith by Works, said in an email. “Geofencing is a common marketing tool that has been used for over a decade and cannot be used to track people.”

Both controversies revealed that Christian Zionists are now facing political realities for which they were not prepared.

“It’s really become a multifront struggle for the traditional pro-Israel evangelical position — not just a one-front, left-right struggle,” said Daniel G. Hummel, author of the book “Covenant Brothers,” which looks at how Christian Zionism has shaped the relationship between the U.S. and Israel. “I’m not sure if there are really robust strategies yet on how to address it.”

Attendees watch monitors as Tucker Carlson speaks during Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2025, Dec. 18, 2025, in Phoenix. (RNS photo/Kathryn Post)

In podcasts, webcasts and vertical video platforms such as TikTok, conservative influencers including Carlson, Owens and Fuentes traffic in conspiracy theories and inflammatory comments that often veer into antisemitism. Owens has also been among those who have tied the assassination of Charlie Kirk to Israel, without evidence.

Criticism of Israel has also grown from centrist evangelicals.

“If you truly care about the people of Israel, you have to also care about their Palestinian neighbors, even for the sake of the security of Israel,” said Mae Elise Cannon, executive director of Churches for Middle East Peace, a coalition of 36 Christian denominations, mostly Protestant but also Orthodox and Catholic, that advocate for equality, human rights, security and justice in the Holy Land.

These U.S. churches are particularly concerned with the plight of Palestinian Christians, who have faced military occupation, forced displacement, discrimination and persecution at the hands of Israel. Yet concern for Palestinian Christians has been minimized by U.S. evangelicals or wholly ignored because of their unflagging support for Israel.

Recently, another collective, the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East, has formed, advocating for peace, justice and engagement among Jews, Christians and Muslims in the region. One of its members, Randy Tomlinson, a Southern Baptist layman who lives in the Nashville, Tennessee, area, said he’s been hearing concerns from a lot from older pastors in the denomination.

“Twenty-six months into this war, more and more people are saying, ‘I look at what I’m seeing in the land and I’m not sure I can square that with my faith, and I don’t know what to do about it,’” Tomlinson said.

He doesn’t advocate abandoning Israel, but he does think evangelicals need to think more critically about Israel’s actions.

“I can ask God to bless the Jewish people but that doesn’t preclude me from loving the Palestinian people, from my heart breaking for the Palestinian church that’s dying,” he said. “We’re a generation or two away from not being the church in this place where the church started, and so, I think we need to get out of that zero-sum mindset, and get back to a point where it could be both.”

Evangelicals have long seen Israel’s rebirth in 1948 and the capture of the West Bank and Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War as signs that biblical prophecy has been fulfilled. Beliefs about the end times and the second coming of Jesus are often tied to Israel — in large part because of the strain of theology known as dispensationalism, which has flourished over the last 200 years. That theology inspired the idea of the rapture, the popular “Left Behind” book series, and other apocalyptic tales.

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But that theology has started to fade, especially with the evangelical resurgence of Reformed theology based on the works of John Calvin. And if Christian Zionist groups can no longer count on a theological consensus among evangelicals about Israel, that’s a problem. “That’s where you’re basically turning it into a PR political conversation and Israel doesn’t look great in that conversation in recent years,” Hummel said.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry, aware its public profile has crashed, has allocated $150 million in its annual budget to rehabilitate its image, especially among evangelicals. Responsible Statecraft reported that that includes a $6 million contract with a firm called Clock Tower X, owned by former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale, to deliver “at least 100 core pieces of content per month” — including videos, audio, podcasts, graphics and text — and “5,000 derivative versions” monthly. The project will help game algorithms and manage artificial-intelligence frameworks with a positive message about Israel. The campaign messages will be distributed via Salem Media Network, a conservative Christian media group.

Israel’s foreign ministry also has a campaign with Bridges Partners, a Washington-based consulting firm, to create an influencer network called the Esther Project (of no relation to the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther). Influencers can earn as much as $7,000 per post.

The publicity produced for these campaigns not only portrays Israel in a good light, it also characterizes Palestinians chiefly through the prism of Hamas. It asserts that Palestinians are complicit in Hamas’ leadership, financing and military operations and accuses them of sheltering terrorists.

Many evangelical groups are still invested in helping Israel. Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, is developing a new program called Generation Zion, aimed at training young evangelicals and young Jews as advocates for Israel. Moon, who said the Philos Project gets no funding from Israel, attended AmericaFest, an annual conservative event organized by Turning Point USA, this past week, hoping to recruit students and other younger Americans to support Israel.

Moon recently left the task force dedicated to fighting antisemitism within the conservative Heritage Foundation after its president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson’s podcast with Fuentes.

He believes a straightforward reading of the Bible shows that Israel should matter to Christians.

Along with the decline of dispensationalism and the rise of conservative critics, pro-Israel groups face more pragmatic challenges, Moon said.

Philos Project logo. Courtesy image

“We don’t have a good grasp on social media, on the pro-Israel side,” he said.

Hummel said some Christian Zionists have begun citing what he called “blessing theology” to promote the idea that Christians should support Israel. Some of those Christian Zionists are Pentecostal or charismatic Christians who see supporting Israel as part of the prosperity gospels. Others are Southern Baptists or evangelicals who say that the Bible commands them to support Israel.

Earlier this year, when Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist minister, visited the City of David — an archaeological site in Jerusalem — he quoted from a familiar passage of Genesis to justify U.S. support for Israel. “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed,” he said, quoting Genesis 12, according to his official remarks. “And I come here tonight because I’d rather have a blessing than a curse.”

Evans, of Friends of Zion, worries younger evangelicals and younger Americans generally will no longer support Israel. He blamed America’s universities for that, as well as online influencers such as Carlson, who have large audiences. Evans has seen the polling, and things don’t look good.

“The Israel haters have achieved an astonishing amount of damage to the young generation,” he said.

Evans said that while he loves Israel, he does not believe the nation always does the right thing, in the same way that the U.S. has flaws. For him, there’s a more fundamental connection to Israel that’s inspired pastors to support Israel.

“Their faith came out of this land,” he said. “Their Bible came out of this land. So that’s their connection. It’s not about politics or prophecy.”

And there are plenty of evangelical pastors who will still gladly travel to Israel, especially on a free trip.

Mike Burner, pastor of Calvary Chapel in Statesville, North Carolina, is one of them. He and his wife, Lobby, will be part of the group heading to Israel next month with the American Renewal Project.

“I’m in love with the Lord, and the Lord loves Israel,” Mike Burner said. “So, I’m going to love Israel. Do I think Israel is still the apple of his eye? I do. God said he is going to save Israel. I believe that. I believe that’s one of the promises he makes, and he keeps every one of his promises.”

Now other evangelicals are saying that uncritical support for Israel is un-Christian.

“That’s not Jesus’ way, that’s not peacemaking,” Tomlinson said. “That’s not caring for the other, that’s not praying for those who persecute you. I cannot hear Jesus saying that.”

AMERIKA

'There is no Christmas for separated families': Pastors tend to immigrant families in crisis

LOS ANGELES (RNS) — As Los Angeles pastors lead congregations and preach about the meaning of Christmas, they’re facing the emotional devastation of families struggling to cling to hope.

A Christmas Nativity scene portrayed as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center sits on display in front of the Oak Lawn United Methodist Church, in Dallas, Dec. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain
December 23, 2025
RNS

LOS ANGELES (RNS) — Nine days before Christmas, a group of clergy huddled around a young mother outside the Los Angeles Federal Building, praying for a Christmas miracle that a judge would set bond for her husband at a hearing the following day and release him from immigration detention.

Melanie, 21, who agreed to speak to RNS on the condition that only her first name be used, has been nursing a hope for months that her husband, an immigrant from Nicaragua, would be back home in time to celebrate their infant twins’ first Christmas.

In July, as her husband prepared for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in at the federal building, Melanie was confident he would be spared detention because, she told him, “we’ve been doing things right.” Leaving nothing to chance, she decided the family would go to the check-in together. Surely, she thought, they wouldn’t detain him in front of his wife, a U.S. citizen, and three kids.

But after her husband had filled out forms and answered agents’ questions about his tattoos, he was taken into a separate room. After 15 minutes, “ all of a sudden, I hear him screaming my name,” Melanie recalled.

Running to him, she saw he had been handcuffed. “ I felt like the whole world just fell on top of me,” she said. With her kids watching, the agents “cornered” her, not letting her approach her husband or say goodbye, but she said, “ I could just tell in his face that he was scared.”

Within five minutes, she was escorted out into the hot July sun. Without their father, there weren’t enough hands to carry the twins’ car seats and her toddler daughter.

The Revs. Carlos and Amparo Rincón post a video to social media from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. (Video screen grab)

It was there, stranded on the sidewalk, that Melanie met the Revs. Amparo and Carlos Rincón, married Pentecostal pastors who belong to a network of Los Angeles faith leaders who are supporting families broken apart by the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies.

“She looked younger than my daughter,” said Carlos. His wife approached the crying mother, whose eldest was inconsolable after what she had witnessed. The Rincóns have since helped Melanie with diapers, baby formula and groceries, in addition to praying for her and offering to pay her 25-year-old husband’s bond through Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, colloquially known as CLUE.

Amparo and other women lead an interfaith group with CLUE that meets every Tuesday to march in prayer around the federal building, a center for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The group calls itself the Godmothers of the Disappeared.

Melanie’s family is just one of many the pastors have found on their weekly visits. Carlos Rincón said his church, which he asked not be named out of fear of retaliation, is supporting about 25 families. One woman, a wife separated from her detained husband, texted RNS in Spanish: “There is no Christmas for separated families.”

Carlos and another group of pastors with his organization Matthew 25, alongside CLUE, plan to break away from their other pastoral responsibilities on Christmas Eve to hold a vigil outside the downtown ICE center, preaching one of his central messages that “ God himself experienced what immigrants experience.”

Detainees at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Eloy Detention Facility in Eloy, AZ. (Photo by Charles Reed/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, File)

Even so, he acknowledges, “it is hard.” He said, “ there are too many needs and too many people in so many difficult situations.”

As Advent came and the Rincóns preached about the meaning of Christmas, they faced the emotional devastation of families struggling to cling to hope. It wasn’t until Dec. 1, when Olga, a worship team leader, learned her husband had been detained, that the detentions affected the church directly.

Since then, Olga wakes up too depressed to sing. She’s having trouble eating and sleeping. Despite that, she said in Spanish, “I try to go (to church) because I know God is the one who gives me the strength to continue. He is the one who is with me every day.”

But still, Olga said, “because of what we’re living through, I don’t have a head to think. It doesn’t feel like it’s Christmastime.”

The Revs. Melvin and Ada Valiente. (Courtesy photo)

The Rev. Ada Valiente, who supports at least 30 separated families with her husband, Melvin, through their We Care ministry, said that several mothers are suffering a mental health crisis. Struggling to make practical plans to address their immediate needs and unable to plan for their future, they have little time to think about celebrating Christmas.

The Valientes, who lead two American Baptist Churches USA congregations in Los Angeles County, hear about families in need of support from other pastors, other immigrants in the detention centers or sometimes the families themselves.

While the couple will offer advice and recommend reliable immigration attorneys to anyone who reaches out, they prioritize the people with the highest needs — detainees with no family, or whose family cannot visit them because they lack legal status themselves or lack resources. Holistic support provided may include prayer, financial assistance or visits to detained and separated family members.

Melanie and an immigrant mother under the Valientes’ care who requested anonymity because she lacks legal status both said they had been charged thousands of dollars by immigration attorneys who made no effort to help the detained men.

In the months since Melanie’s husband was detained, she has managed to finish his active construction contracts. She had to give up their first apartment and move back in with her mother, who helps with the kids. Melanie also followed the legal details of her husband’s case until she found a new attorney, who was willing to sleep in the detention center’s lobby in order to see her husband.

Melanie met her husband in 2022, when her Nicaraguan mother threw a birthday party for the newly arrived fellow Nicaraguan, who had crossed into the United States legally via the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One app. He was granted parole while seeking political asylum.

She said her husband is requesting asylum based on his claim that he was wrongly incarcerated in Nicaragua for two years before being pardoned. “He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said. He’d already applied to be a permanent U.S. resident before he was detained in LA.

‘We are the life of the church right now’: Bishop Chau talks Latino Catholics, inclusion

Several of the other women receiving help from the Rincóns and Valientes also fled the human rights crisis of Nicaragua, where co-Presidents Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, have decimated civil society, including religious institutions, and instituted authoritarian rule. One woman told RNS her detained husband had been arrested, beaten and threatened with worse after participating in a march. They fled Nicaragua, leaving their children behind with relatives. When her husband was detained in the U.S., he was still in need of medical care for injuries from his beating.

Another woman told RNS that she and her now-detained partner refused to join the Ortegas’ socialist Sandinista Party because of their Christian faith, despite threats of physical harm to them and their son. Unless they joined, they were told, they would not be protected by the police. Twice, her husband was detained without cause in Nicaragua, she said.

Both women asked for anonymity because they fear deportation.

Ada Valiente, whose brother was a political prisoner of Nicaragua’s conservative Somoza dictatorship, fled with her family to the U.S. when she was a child, arriving without legal documentation but later becoming a citizen. A bivocational social worker before she retired to work full time in ministry, she has long assisted migrants from Nicaragua and political asylum-seekers.

Valiente’s faith calls her “ to help the most vulnerable and those that don’t have a voice,” she said. Every other Thursday, her women’s group members go to the detention center, where they sometimes are a detained immigrant’s first visitors in six months. “We all cry with them,” she said.

While many detained immigrants find strength in each other or in Bible study, many of those she visits are on psychotropic medications because of depression, anxiety or an inability to sleep, said Valiente. They’ll have limited access to Christmas services because there is only one chaplain for three detention centers, and while pastors like the Valientes can visit, they cannot hold services.

In the weeks before Christmas, even as the Valientes’ congregations prepare for the holiday, Ada Valiente is trying to talk one detained and demoralized man out of signing his deportation papers, while meeting with his wife to make a plan. For a mother who has received an eviction notice since her husband has been detained, Valiente is trying to secure rental assistance. (The woman, Valiente said, may receive a deportation order herself any minute.)

Telling her congregation about the work a few weeks ago, Valiente couldn’t hold back tears. “As normal as it is, you get a little bit with the blues at Christmas,” she said.

Olga said her 10-year-old son, Kevin, a U.S. citizen, told her, “I don’t want to spend Christmas or New Year’s without my dad,” and she has had to tell him, “It’s not in my hands.” Kevin also worries about his mom. When she was late coming home one night, he was sobbing, thinking she too had been detained, Olga said.

One Nicaraguan woman who asked to remain anonymous said she struggles to afford the per-minute charges to talk with her husband on a detention phone. They limit themselves to brief exchanges a couple of times a day, when he asks whether she’s taken her medication or whether she’s eaten her lunch.

When she spoke with RNS in October, she was sleeping in their twin bed holding his pajamas and spending her days beside the giant teddy bear he bought her. In the months since then, she’s had to leave the apartment, sell many of their things and find a job.

On the night Melanie’s husband was detained, one of the twins spent the night with a fever because, she said, he had spent too much time on the sidewalk in the sun when his mother was stranded. She and another mother requesting anonymity said their small children had lost weight since their fathers were detained.

Melanie’s toddler also struggled to sleep, she said: “ The day they detained him, all they gave me was a little plastic bag with his necklace and his watch, so she would just carry it around the house and be like, ‘Papa, Papa.’”

Melanie’s tattoo reading “With pain comes strength.” (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)

Latino pastors look to refit preaching and pastoral care to trauma of mass deportations

All four women told RNS they lean on their faith, trusting in God to give them strength.

The Nicaraguan mother who fled with her kids said in Spanish that she told her son: “My love, if you want to be with your dad, we have to kneel down every day, because only God can help us. God can touch the heart of the president so that he stops doing these things.”

She added: “We pray for the president, we pray for the immigration officials to understand that what they’re doing is not right because they’re hurting our family.”

Just a week before Christmas Eve, or “Nochebuena” for Latino Christians, Olga’s Guatemalan husband folded to the pressure to sign his own deportation papers, despite Carlos Rincón’s warnings.

“He was putting on a lot of stress and he was threatened, saying that if you don’t sign, we will deport you anyway, and we’re gonna make it harder for you, or if you don’t sign, you will stay for years here, detained,” said the pastor.

And the same day, Melanie’s husband’s bond was denied, with no hearing in sight until April.

“That’s my job, I guess — right now, trying to be with people that are receiving very bad news,” Rincón said.

Churches deliver Christmas to immigrants detained, deported and in hiding

(RNS) — Clergy, churches and other religious organizations wrestle with how to mark one of the most important Christian holidays while also serving an immigrant population in crisis.

Bishop Brendan Cahill, bishop of the Diocese of Victoria in Texas, preaches to migrants during an Advent service at the Del Camino Jesuit Border Ministries Casa del Migrante, Nov. 30, 2025, in Brownsville, Texas. (Photo courtesy of the Rev. Brian Strassburger)

Jack Jenkins and Aleja Hertzler-McCain
December 24, 2025
RNS

(RNS) — Earlier this month, the Rev. Pilar Pérez, a United Methodist minister in the denomination’s Western North Carolina Conference, called up a parishioner who hadn’t been to worship in a while. The pastor encouraged the congregant to attend Christmas services, even offering to give her a ride.

“I was begging her: ‘I’ll go and pick you up,’” Pérez said.

The parishioner could not be convinced. She told Pérez that come Christmas, her family planned to mark the Christian holiday the safest way they know how: by watching the service on Facebook Live.

Pérez understood. Like many immigrant families, the family members have barely left their home in recent weeks out of fear of encountering federal immigration agents. It’s a fear they believe is well founded, as immigration officers have detained and deported thousands across the country, including at least one person in North Carolina who was just outside a church.

The Rev. Pilar Pérez. (Photo courtesy of WNCCUMC)

“That’s where they are,” said Pérez, who has spent recent months delivering groceries and other necessities to such families.

Faith leaders are facing similar situations across the country this Christmas season, as clergy, churches and other religious organizations wrestle with how to mark one of the most important Christian holidays while also serving an immigrant population in crisis.

The Rev. Melvin Valiente, who pastors two Los Angeles County Baptist churches with his wife, Ada, said he is preaching a specific message to his congregations this holiday season: “Jesus knows what it is to be an immigrant, knows what it is to be persecuted.”

He also uses a system that sends out personalized texts with Bible verses, hoping Christmas messages of peace can connect with members who are too afraid to come to church.

Their church members will also be preparing bags of food for families outside their congregation who have a detained loved one or are too afraid to go out, both to fortify them with regular groceries and help them celebrate a special dinner for “Nochebuena,” or Christmas Eve. One church member plans to host lonely immigrants at her own Nochebuena dinner.

RELATED: ‘There is no Christmas for separated families’: Pastors tend to immigrant families in crisis

Back in North Carolina, attendance at Pérez’s majority-immigrant church has dropped as much as 40% since November, she said, when a surge of immigration agents deployed to her state for a week. In her congregation, 11 families essentially haven’t left their homes since.

The pastor compared the situation to the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when churches avoided meeting in person and moved worship services online.

“Isolation is hurtful — it’s hurtful spiritually, emotionally and physically,” Pérez said.

In response, Pérez’s church has partnered with another nearby Methodist congregation to offer an additional layer of protection for churchgoers. Over the past few weeks, the pastor of a nearby partner congregation has come to the church and sat near the door during worship — and plans to do so during Christmas services as well. The idea, Pérez says, is for the partner pastor to be the first person immigration enforcement officers encounter should they ever approach the church.

People protest against federal immigration enforcement, Nov. 15, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/Erik Verduzco)

Pérez and others have also delivered weekly food boxes to congregants who are still staying home, an effort bolstered by an influx of donations: A local Christmas giving ministry shifted its efforts to the nearby immigrant population, with 80% of donations heading to Hispanic families.

The Rev. Luke Edwards oversees a separate fund set up by the Western North Carolina Conference after the Charlotte raids for the needs of immigrant congregations, such as legal costs and rent.

But even with the influx of resources, Edwards said, communities are struggling. He noted that many of the Hispanic churches he works with traditionally celebrate Las Posadas, reenactments of the Christmas story, in December.

But this year, “They’re either canceling those, scaling them back, rescheduling them or moving things onto Zoom,” he said. The federal government’s mass deportation effort, Edwards said, “is impacting our churches’ ability to worship.”

In Boston, Bishop Nicolas Homicil said his largely Haitian flagship church, Voice of the Gospel Tabernacle Church, still plans to have in-person worship on Christmas, but it’s expecting lighter attendance than the up-to-300 it typically draws.

The Trump administration is slated to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Haitians on Feb. 3.

“We don’t want to fool ourselves to say, ‘Yes, we expect the church to be full,’ because there are people who are still afraid to come out,” Homicil said. “People are even afraid to come to (the) food pantry.”

He added of other Boston churches: “Every church is suffering this crisis.”

Other clergy are seeking to bring the holidays to immigrants who have already been separated from their communities. The Rev. Brian Strassburger, a Jesuit priest who works along the U.S.-Mexico border as director of Del Camino Jesuit Border Ministries, said he plans to host a Posada event outside the airport in Harlingen, Texas.

“During that span of time, we anticipate that there will be one, two or even three flights coming in and out with detained migrants,” Strassburger said. He hopes the sight of Mary and Joseph seeking shelter will offer a “public witness there in that space” and be “a sign of hope.”

The priest said his group of three Jesuits is supporting migrants who are fighting “hopelessness and despair” during Christmas. They were unable to get permission to celebrate a Christmas Mass at Port Isabel Detention Center, but they were able to celebrate several Advent Masses there, as well as host more-typical Posadas with skits and piñatas for the children in two Reynosa, Mexico, migrant shelters.

The Rev. Brian Strassburger. (Courtesy photo)

They are also planning to celebrate 10 baptisms and two first Communions on Christmas Eve in a migrant shelter in Matamoros, Mexico. The immigrants living in those shelters are in many ways stuck, lacking the means to go elsewhere in Mexico or back home and no longer able to seek U.S. asylum after President Donald Trump suspended that program in January.

Strassburger described a recent experience of holding a 2-day-old baby in the shelter and being struck by the parallels in the Christmas story.

“Standing in a forgotten, underresourced migrant shelter along the U.S.-Mexico border on the wrong side of a political boundary is much like this stable in Bethlehem because there’s no room at the inn and that’s where Christ enters into the world,” he said.

With the arrival of Christmas — a gift-giving season — religious leaders have been trying to offer what support they can.

In Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs, the English-speaking community at St. Camillus Catholic Church joined Latinos for their Las Posadas celebrations this month to show “we see us as one family” and make Latinos feel less afraid to participate, said Kathy, a coordinator of the parish’s migrant response team who asked to be identified by her first name to avoid harassment.

Since the fall, their parish has averaged more than one new family a week experiencing a detention, she said.

“To be honest, I wish that we had time and energy for some special Christmas gift programs, but the truth is we are running as fast as we can and using all of the resources we have just to kind of keep up with the day-to-day emergency needs,” Kathy said, including prayer, emergency counseling and food deliveries. They also try to have a supportive presence outside immigration court.

Federico, a Catholic leader in Chicago who asked to use his middle name because he lacks legal immigration status, said his parish is facing the same deluge. He is pleading for more wealthy congregations to step in because of the sheer scale of the needs.

In North Carolina, a Charlotte-area initiative called Operación Esperanza has emerged as a partnership between Transforming Nations Ford, a community development nonprofit, and Iglesia Tabernaculo de Gracia, a Hispanic Pentecostal church

The project has been distributing food and other items to impacted immigrant families, but according to Rosa Ramirez, who helps lead the effort, volunteers recently began asking families what their children would want for Christmas. The effort has been difficult — partly, she said, because asking for something “is, culturally, not comfortable for a lot of our families.”

But beyond that, “for a lot of our families, it’s not even about trying to figure out the holidays,” Ramirez said. “That’s just the last thing on their mind right now.”

Yet she said the holiday effort is an important part of their work — especially for families who may be celebrating Christmas alone or, in some cases, without family members who have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“It’s super important that they have choice — that our children get to consider what they would want on their Christmas list, even if that’s not something that they’ve done before or that they thought they were going to be able to do this year,” Ramirez said.

And besides, Ramirez said, the shared faith of those involved in the effort — which includes an array of local churches — points them toward an unambiguous conclusion.

“As Christians, we’re called to love our neighbor and to treat the immigrant and the foreigner as our own,” she said. “I think I’ve really seen that lived out in a way that is really beautiful to see, even though it’s such a horrifying time.”

Yoga, meditation classes taught in Spanish offer healing to stressed communities

(RNS) — ‘Our community is definitely experiencing heightened levels of stress, insecurity, uncertainty, anxiety and fear,’ said Xiomara Arauz, a Denver-based yoga and meditation teacher. ‘If the class is in Spanish and everybody speaks Spanish, people feel more safe being in that environment, feeling like they’re understood or they're accepted here.’

People participate in a class at Yogiando NYC in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood in New York. (Photo courtesy of Rosana Rodriguez)

Richa Karmarkar
December 23, 2025

RNS

(RNS) — At the New York City yoga studios she frequented in the 2010s, Rosana Rodriguez sometimes found herself the only Latina in the room. “I felt really intimidated,” said the 58-year-old native New Yorker. Predominantly white studios and expensive monthly fees gave her and others in her community the impression that wellness spaces “weren’t for them.”

But the practice of yoga itself, Rodriguez said, saved her life. It was a consistent stress-reduction technique after an abusive relationship and losing her job.

During yoga nidra — or guided meditation in the Savasana posture, often at the end of class — Rodriguez caught herself translating what her teacher said into Spanish, sparking a “revelation.” “I wanted to bring this level of healing to my community,” she said.

Rodriguez soon founded Yogiando NYC, the first Spanish-English bilingual studio in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, which has a majority Hispanic population. Offering weekly $10 yin yoga classes at Yogiando, which is a made-up word to mean “doing yoga,” since 2017, Rodriguez said the space became a hub of solace where Spanish-speakers could share their anxieties about anything from immigration to family to their jobs with one another.

“One of the things that I have prided myself in creating for this community is a safe space,” she said. “The closing meditation is that I’m saying to them, ‘You are held and protected.’ I’m teaching them how to be aware, how to listen to their body, how to breathe. Many of these women have told me, ‘I do these breathing exercises every day, and they’ve helped me.’ They’ve told me how yoga has changed their life.”

As Yogiando NYC has done, increasing language accessibility in spiritual wellness spaces across the country has opened up meditation and yoga to more diverse American populations. For Spanish-speaking practitioners like Rodriguez, offering these kinds of classes is crucial to the spiritual-wellness movement in being able to respond to growing mental health concerns as anti-immigrant sentiments and federal actions surge in a country where Spanish is the second-most-spoken language.
RELATED: In new book, yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann seeks to reclaim the practice’s spiritual roots

Xiomara Arauz, originally from Panama, teaches meditation and yoga in Spanish in Denver through the Art of Living, a global humanitarian organization founded by Indian guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Arauz and a handful of other instructors across the country have also taught online and in-person Spanish instruction of the Sudarshan Kriya, or SKY breathing technique, to hundreds since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our community is definitely experiencing heightened levels of stress, insecurity, uncertainty, anxiety and fear,” Arauz told RNS. “If the class is in Spanish and everybody speaks Spanish, people feel more safe being in that environment, feeling like they’re understood or they’re accepted here. They feel a lot better when they leave through the doors of the yoga studio than when they came in.”

Particularly in meditative practices, Arauz said, it is “a different kind of comfort” to practice in one’s native tongue, as the work “is more internal, more subtle.” And her “warm and friendly” personality is able to “come alive” as an instructor in Spanish.

“There is a nuance that I think makes a difference when you are going into these deeper states of relaxation and your conscious mind is not trying to translate,” she said. “There is no resistance in the mind to be doing something else other than absorbing it. They’re able to relax a lot more, be more there, be more present.”

Rosana Rodriguez, left, and Marisol Alvarez.

(Photo courtesy of Rosana Rodriguez)

Diana Winston, a mindfulness teacher and director of UCLA Mindful — an education and research center that provides science-backed mindfulness instruction to schools, hospitals and corporate offices — said the center’s Mindful App offers instruction in 19 languages, including a separate Spanish-only feature for California’s large non-English-speaking population. She said the organization is committed to “radical accessibility” to remove language, economic and religious barriers from mindfulness practices.

“It’s a very scary time for a lot of people in this country,” she said. “I’m very worried about the most vulnerable populations, for people who are in some ways being targeted. And I feel like anything that can help support their mental health and well-being, since that’s what mindfulness really does, that would be a fantastic thing to be able to offer.

“And my secret wish,” she added, “the people who could really use mindfulness, who are making these horrible decisions, might transform themselves, too. What if somebody moved from a place of being stuck in seeing people as other, and hatred and violence, and began to meditate and had more compassion in their heart? That would be incredible.”

Still, barriers exist to getting Spanish speakers to the studios, sometimes based on an idea that yoga and meditation conflict with their Christian faith, practitioners said. Though the last few decades have seen a seismic growth of these Indian practices in secular contexts, often far removed from their Hindu and Buddhist religious roots, some still feel reluctant, said Rodriguez, who refrains from using Sanskrit terms, or the meditative sound “Om,” in her classes.

Marisol Alvarez, a 60-year-old student at Yogiando from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, said she has been told that she shouldn’t be doing yoga, despite the physical, mental and even spiritual benefits she found in the practice.

“They said, ‘The priests don’t want you to practice, it’s not of God,'” she told RNS in Spanish. “But I’m healing. God wants me to heal. It’s very big how [yoga] has helped me with my faith, connecting with the universe, with the divine higher power.”

Alvarez has brought her daughter, her mother and people she meets on the street into yoga classes. And the studio’s community of women — who have now traveled and shared their dreams with each other — is “filled with so much love,” she said.

“There are times that I’ve arrived at the class feeling like I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “But I breathed.”

Friday, December 12, 2025

‘Yes’ to God, but ‘no’ to church – what religious change looks like for many Latin Americans

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

The Conversation

December 09, 2025

In a region known for its tumultuous change, one idea remained remarkably consistent for centuries: Latin America is Catholic.

The region’s 500-year transformation into a Catholic stronghold seemed capped in 2013, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected as the first Latin American pope. Once a missionary outpost, Latin America is now the heart of the Catholic Church. It is home to over 575 million adherents – over 40% of all Catholics worldwide. The next-largest regions are Europe and Africa, each home to 20% of the world’s Catholics.

Yet beneath this Catholic dominance, the region’s religious landscape is changing.

First, Protestant and Pentecostal groups have experienced dramatic growth. In 1970, only 4% of Latin Americans identified as Protestant; by 2014, the share had climbed to almost 20%.

But even as Protestant ranks swelled, another trend was quietly gaining ground: a growing share of Latin Americans abandoning institutional faith altogether. And, as my research shows, the region’s religious decline shows a surprising difference from patterns elsewhere. While fewer Latin Americans are identifying with a religion or attending services, personal faith remains strong.

Women known as ‘animeras,’ who pray for the souls of the deceased, walk to a church for Day of the Dead festivities in Telembi, Ecuador. AP Photo/Carlos Noriega

Religious decline

In 2014, 8% of Latin Americans claimed no religion at all. This number is twice as high as the percentage of people who were raised without a religion, indicating that the growth is recent, coming from people who left the church as adults.

However, there had been no comprehensive study of religious change in Latin America since then. My new research, published in September 2025, draws on two decades of survey data from over 220,000 respondents in 17 Latin American countries. This data comes from the AmericasBarometer, a large, region-wide survey conducted every two years by Vanderbilt University that focuses on democracy, governance and other social issues. Because it asks the same religion questions across countries and over time, it offers an unusually clear view of changing patterns.

Overall, the number of Latin Americans reporting no religious affiliation surged from 7% in 2004 to over 18% in 2023. The share of people who say they are religiously unaffiliated grew in 15 of the 17 countries, and more than doubled in seven.

On average, 21% of people in South America say they do not have a religious affiliation, compared with 13% in Mexico and Central America. Uruguay, Chile and Argentina are the three least religious countries in the region. Guatemala, Peru and Paraguay are the most traditionally religious, with fewer than 9% who identify as unaffiliated.

Another question scholars typically use to measure religious decline is how often people go to church. From 2008 to 2023, the share of Latin Americans attending church at least once a month decreased from 67% to 60%. The percentage who never attend, meanwhile, grew from 18% to 25%.

The generational pattern is stark. Among people born in the 1940s, just over half say they attend church regularly. Each subsequent generation shows a steeper decline, dropping to just 35% for those born in the 1990s. Religious affiliation shows a similar trajectory – each generation is less affiliated than the one before.
Personal religiosity

However, in my study, I also examined a lesser-used measure of religiosity – one that tells a different story.

That measure is “religious importance”: how important people say that religion is in their daily lives. We might think of this as “personal” religiosity, as opposed to the “institutional” religiosity tied to formal congregations and denominations.

People attend a Mass marking the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on June 26, 2024. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

Like church attendance, overall religious importance is high in Latin America. In 2010, roughly 85% of Latin Americans in the 17 countries whose data I analyzed said religion was important in their daily lives. Sixty percent said “very,” and 25% said “somewhat.”

By 2023, the “somewhat important” group declined to 19%, while the “very important” group grew to 64%. Personal religious importance was growing, even as affiliation and church attendance were falling.

Religious importance shows the same generational pattern as affiliation and attendance: Older people tend to report higher levels than younger ones. In 2023, 68% of people born in the 1970s said religion was “very important,” compared with 60% of those born in the 1990s.

Yet when you compare people at the same age, the pattern reverses. At age 30, 55% of those born in the 1970s rated religion as very important. Compare that with 59% among Latin Americans born in the 1980s, and 62% among those born in the 1990s. If this trend continues, younger generations could eventually show greater personal religious commitment than their elders.

Affiliation vs. belief

What we are seeing in Latin America, I’d argue, is a fragmented pattern of religious decline. The authority of religious institutions is waning – fewer people claim a faith; fewer attend services. But personal belief isn’t eroding. Religious importance is holding steady, even growing.

This pattern is quite different from Europe and the United States, where institutional decline and personal belief tend to move together.

Eighty-six percent of unaffiliated people in Latin America say they believe in God or a higher power. That compares with only 30% in Europe and 69% in the United States.

Sizable proportions of unaffiliated Latin Americans also believe in angels, miracles and even that Jesus will return to Earth in their lifetime.

In other words, for many Latin Americans, leaving behind a religious label or skipping church does not mean leaving faith behind.

An Aymara Indigenous spiritual guide blesses a statue of baby Jesus with incense after an Epiphany Mass at a Catholic church in La Paz, Bolivia, on Jan. 6, 2025. AP Photo/Juan Karita

This distinctive pattern reflects Latin America’s unique history and culture. Since the colonial period, the region has been shaped by a mix of religious traditions. People often combine elements of Indigenous beliefs, Catholic practices and newer Protestant movements, creating personal forms of faith that don’t always fit neatly into any one church or institution.

Because priests were often scarce in rural areas, Catholicism developed in many communities with little direct oversight from the church. Home rituals, local saints’ festivals and lay leaders helped shape religious life in more independent ways.

This reality challenges how scholars typically measure religious change. Traditional frameworks for measuring religious decline, developed from Western European data, rely heavily on religious affiliation and church attendance. But this approach overlooks vibrant religiosity outside formal structures – and can lead scholars to mistaken conclusions.

In short, Latin America reminds us that faith can thrive even as institutions fade.

Matthew Blanton, PhD Candidate, Sociology and Demography, The University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How Jimmy Swaggart’s rise and fall shaped the landscape of American televangelism

Rev. Jimmy Swaggart preaches at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena on March 29, 1987. AP Photo/Mark Avery

The Conversation

December 09, 2025

Jimmy Swaggart, one of the most popular and enduring of the 1980s televangelists, died on July 1, 2025, but his legacy lives.

Along with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, he drew an audience in the millions, amassed a personal fortune and introduced a new generation of Americans to a potent mix of religion and politics.

Swaggart was an old-time evangelist whose focus was “saving souls.” But he also preached on conservative social issues, warning followers about the evils of abortion, homosexuality and godless communism.

Swaggart also denounced what he called “false cults,” including Catholicism, Judaism and Mormonism. In fact, his denunciations of other religions, as well as his attacks on rival preachers, made him a more polarizing figure than his politicized brethren.

As a reporter, I covered Swaggart in the 1980s. Now, as a scholar of American religion, I argue that while Swaggart did not build institutions like Falwell’s Moral Majority or Robertson’s 700 Club, he helped to spread right-wing positions on social issues, such as sexual orientation and abortion, and to shape the image of televangelists in popular culture.

Swaggart’s cousins

Born into a hardscrabble life in a small Louisiana town, Swaggart grew up alongside his cousins Jerry Lee Lewis, the future rockabilly pioneer, and future country singer Mickey Gilley.

All three loved music and singing. They polished their playing on an uncle’s piano and sneaked into African American nightclubs to hear the jazz and blues forbidden by their parents.

While Gilley and Lewis turned their musical talent into recording and performing careers, Swaggart felt called to the ministry. He dropped out of high school, married at 17, began preaching at 20 and was ordained at 26.

He was licensed by the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination that believes the Holy Spirit endows believers with spiritual gifts that include speaking in tongues and faith healing.

The glory years

Pentecostals were nicknamed Holy Rollers because of their tendency to shake, quake and roll on the floor when feeling the Holy Spirit. Their preachers excelled at rousing audiences’ ardor, and Swaggart commanded the stage better than most. He paced, pounced and poured forth sweat while begging listeners to turn from sin and accept Jesus.

Starting small, he drew crowds while preaching on a flatbed trailer throughout the South. His following grew, and in 1969 he opened the Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge.

At capacity, the church held 10,000 worshippers, who represented a broad swath of America: young girls and grannies, white and Black, bankers and farmers. His sermons began calmly but built to a fever pitch. CBS newsman Dan Rather once called him the “country’s greatest speaker.”

During services, Swaggart also sang and played piano. In 1982, Newsweek magazine noted his musical chops, naming him the “King of Honky Tonk Heaven.” His music crossed gospel, country and honky-tonk – songs with a strong rhythmic beat – and he sold 17 million albums over his lifetime.

By 1975, Swaggart’s on-stage charisma powered the launch of a television ministry that would reach millions within a decade. Viewers were captivated by his soulful tunes and fire-and-brimstone sermons. At its height, Swaggart’s show was televised in 140 countries, including Peru, the Philippines and South Africa.

His ministry also became the largest mail-order business in Louisiana, selling books, tapes, T-shirts and biblical memorabilia. Thanks to the US$150 million raised annually from donations and sales, Swaggart lived in an opulent mansion, possessed a private jet previously owned by the Rockefellers, sported a yellow gold vintage Rolex and drove a Jaguar.

The downfall

Swaggart disliked competition and had a history of humiliating rival preachers. Wary of the Rev. Marvin Gorman, a Pentecostal minister whose church also was in Louisiana, Swaggart accused the man of adultery. Gorman admitted his infidelity and was defrocked.

Gorman had heard rumors about Swaggart’s own indiscretions, and he and his son decided to tail the famed evangelist. In 1988, they caught Swaggart at a motel with a prostitute, and Gorman reported the incident to Swaggart’s denomination. He also gave news outlets photos of Swaggart and the prostitute. In a tearful, televised apology, Swaggart pleaded for a second chance.

While his fans were willing, the Assemblies of God had conditions: Swaggart received the standard two-year suspension for sexual immorality. Defying the ruling, Swaggart went back to work after three months, and the denomination defrocked him.

Swaggart might have succeeded as an independent minister, but in 1991 the police stopped his car for driving on the wrong side of the road. Inside they found the preacher with a prostitute. This time, Swaggart did not ask for forgiveness. Instead, he informed his congregation, “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”

Afterward, Swaggart never regained his former standing. His mail-order business dried up, donations fell, and attendance at services cratered. But up until his death, he kept on, in his own words, as an “old-fashioned, Holy Ghost-filled, shouting, weeping, soul-winning, Gospel-preaching preacher.”

Swaggart’s legacy

Swaggart, like other 1980s televangelists, brought right-wing politics into American homes. But unlike Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Swaggart was less interested in winning elections than saving souls. In fact, when Robertson considered a presidential run in 1988, Swaggart initially tried to dissuade him – then changed his mind and supported him.

Swaggart’s calls for a return to conservative Christian norms live on – not just in Sunday sermons but also in today’s world of tradwives, abortion restrictions and calls to repeal gay marriage. His music lives on, too. The day before he died, the Southern Gospel Music Association Hall of Fame inducted him as a member.

But his legacy also survives in popular culture. In recent years, both reality television and scripted series have starred preachers shaped in the image of Swaggart and his peers. Most exaggerate his worst characteristics for shock and comedic effect.

“Preachers of L.A.,” a 2013 reality show that profiled six Los Angeles pastors, featured blinged-out ministers whose sermons mixed hip-hop with the Bible. The fictional “Greenleaf” followed the scandals of an extended family’s Memphis megachurch, while “The Righteous Gemstones,” a dark spoof of Southern preachers, turned a family ministry into a site for sex, murder and moneymaking.

But these imitations can’t match the reality. Swaggart was a larger-than-life minister whose story – from small-town wannabe to disgraced pastor, to preaching to those who would listen – had it all: sex, politics, music and religion.

For those who want a taste of the real thing, The King of Honky Tonk Heaven lives on. You can see his old services and Bible studies streaming daily on his network.

Diane Winston, Professor and Knight Center Chair in Media & Religion, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sunday, November 30, 2025

Was the Pentecostal Boom in Latin America a CIA Psyop?

Capitalism, Protestant Missions, and the War on Liberation Theology

By Colten Barnaby

November 30, 2025

Source: Kensington Koan

The surge of Protestant missionaries and charismatic revivals across South America didn’t happen in a vacuum; it unfolded within a Cold War landscape where the United States actively sought religious movements that could blunt the rise of Catholic liberation theology.

If you look closely at the historical record, declassified CIA cables, State Department memos, USAID contracts, congressional hearings, and the work of historians like Greg Grandin, Stephen Rabe, David Stoll, Martin-Baró, and Linda Rabben, the answer is no longer a dramatic conspiracy theory. It’s simply what happened. Not in the sense that every missionary was a covert agent. But because U.S. intelligence and diplomatic officials, from the 1950s through the 1980s, intentionally used Protestant missions as one tool in a broad counterinsurgency strategy designed to weaken liberation theology and preserve U.S.-aligned capitalist order in Latin America.

Before I expound I should let the reader know that I am no stranger to the world of Christian missions. I grew up the son of a Pentecostal pastor and went to school to get two degrees in church history. During college and seminary, I led and participated in mission trips to Fiji, the Philippines, and El Salvador. I worked at Oral Roberts University coordinating student missions trips across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. My intentions were completely sincere. Everyone around me believed we were spreading the gospel. What I didn’t understand at the time, what most missionaries never understand, is that the infrastructure we were plugged into had been shaped for decades by the Cold War, and that evangelical missions, especially the charismatic and Pentecostal branches, had been intentionally cultivated and supported by U.S. political and intelligence structures as an ideological counterweight to the very Christian movements the poor in Latin America were building for themselves.

To see why, you have to understand liberation theology. In the 1960s and 70s, Catholic priests, nuns, and laypeople across Latin America began reading the Bible with the poor in small base communities, and their work was shaped by theologians who helped give this movement its intellectual clarity. Gustavo Gutierrez in Peru, whose book A Theology of Liberation named the movement, argued that faith without a commitment to justice was empty. Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff in Brazil taught that the Gospel required solidarity with the poor and resistance to the structures that kept them poor. In El Salvador, thinkers like Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuria described the oppressed as the “crucified people,” showing that Christian faith was tested in the concrete suffering of those pushed to the margins.

These theologians did not invent liberation theology from above. They put into words what Christian base communities were discovering for themselves as they studied scripture in the shadow of military dictatorships, land monopolies, and U.S. backed elites. These communities did not just pray together. They examined the conditions of their lives. They asked why their societies were structured to benefit a small ruling class and what it meant that Jesus identified with the poor. Liberation theology took those questions seriously and treated them as a call to collective action, offering ordinary people new tools to interpret their own oppression and to organize for land reform, workers’ rights, literacy, and democracy.

Washington saw this as a threat because it encouraged people the empire needed to stay quiet to start asking political questions. The U.S. had already watched Cuba fall out of its orbit, and it was not interested in watching the rest of Latin America follow. So in the late 1960s, U.S. intelligence reports start describing liberation theology as a “subversive movement.” State Department briefings warned that Catholic priests sympathetic to the poor were helping create “pre-revolutionary conditions” in rural areas. The CIA produced internal assessments describing certain bishops as “radicalizing forces.” When the Brazilian bishops issued statements against torture under the military dictatorship, the U.S. embassy cabled Washington expressing concern that the Church was becoming politicized “in dangerous ways.”

So how do you stop a religious movement you can’t outlaw, that is spread through small communities, and whose leaders are clergy protected by the Vatican? The U.S. didn’t try to crush liberation theology directly. It tried to dilute it. Replace it. Counterprogram it. And evangelical missions became one of the most effective instruments for doing that.

This was not merely accidental alignment. It was intentional policy. The U.S. did this in several ways.

The first was through direct coordination with evangelical missionary organizations. One of the clearest examples is the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL, the academic wing of Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL specialized in going into remote Indigenous regions, studying unwritten languages, creating alphabets, and translating the Bible. These were trained linguists, many with graduate degrees. Their work, on the surface, was scholarly and humanitarian. But during the Cold War, SIL received contracts and grants from USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was a core part of U.S. soft-power strategy abroad. In several countries, including Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador, USAID partnered with SIL to carry out literacy programs among Indigenous groups. These literacy materials often included explicitly anti-communist lessons woven into biblical stories. In Guatemala, SIL teams operated in areas where leftist guerrillas were active, and the military government, backed by the U.S., gave SIL extraordinary freedoms and protection because they saw the missionaries as tools to pacify Indigenous resistance.

Anthropologists who worked in those regions documented how the presence of SIL often coincided with government resettlement programs designed to pull Indigenous people out of autonomous territories and bring them under state control. This was not because SIL itself was designing counterinsurgency tactics, but because SIL created the infrastructure, the literacy programs, the airstrips, the missionary aviation networks, that the state could use. Their aviation service, JAARS (Jungle Aviation and Radio Service), transported missionaries, medical supplies, literacy materials, and occasionally state officials in regions where guerrilla movements operated. JAARS pilots were not CIA assets, but they were operating in regions largely inaccessible to government forces without them, and the cooperation was mutually beneficial.

The second major example involves the Assemblies of God and Pentecostal missions more broadly. In Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala, especially during their military dictatorships, the U.S. government openly preferred evangelical churches to the Catholic Church. During the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, U.S. officials praised Pentecostal churches for “keeping the masses calm” and for reducing support for the left. In Brazil’s Amazon region, the military dictatorship encouraged American Pentecostal missions to expand because they provided a religious alternative to the radical priests who were helping Indigenous communities organize against land seizures. U.S. diplomatic cables from the 1970s note with approval that Pentecostal movements “lack the politicizing tendencies of certain Catholic clergy.”

Then there’s Campus Crusade for Christ, better known today as Cru. The founder, Bill Bright, made anti-communism a central part of his ministry from the 1950s onward. Campus Crusade programs were supported by U.S. embassies in various countries, especially during the authoritarian rule of Brazil’s military junta. In 1974, Bright launched the “Here’s Life” campaign in Brazil with the blessing of the U.S.-backed government. Internal documents show coordination between Campus Crusade and U.S. consular officials, who saw the campaign as a way to promote a depoliticized Christianity that discouraged support for leftist organizing. This was part of a broader U.S. strategy: if liberation theology created politically conscious Christians, evangelical revivalism created inward-focused ones.

The third major mechanism involved what the CIA called “psychological operations.” U.S. information agencies like USIA produced materials portraying liberation theologians as Marxist infiltrators who wanted to destroy the Church. These were circulated to conservative Catholic bishops, Protestant leaders, and local elites. The CIA also supported radio networks like Trans World Radio and HCJB (based in Ecuador), which broadcast sermons across the continent preaching submission to authority, anti-communism, and personal salvation rather than social transformation. Historians have shown that these broadcasts increased sharply in regions where liberation theology was strongest.

And then there is Guatemala under Efraín Ríos Montt. If there is a single moment when evangelical Christianity and U.S. counterinsurgency fully merged, it is this period. Ríos Montt was a general who took power in a 1982 military coup. He was a born-again Pentecostal and a member of an American-affiliated charismatic church. His weekly national TV addresses sounded like sermons, mixing Bible verses with calls for total obedience to the state. His government carried out one of the worst genocides in Latin American history against the Maya. Ríos Montt was not just supported by the U.S., Ronald Reagan personally praised him as “a man of great integrity.” American evangelical leaders visited him, prayed with him, and publicly defended him. Meanwhile, Catholic priests who supported Indigenous rights were being assassinated or disappeared.

Ríos Montt’s rule was not an outlier. It was the logical end of a decades-long project: replace politically engaged Catholicism with a politically harmless Protestantism, so that the structures of inequality remained untouched.

Even in countries without open dictatorships, the same pattern emerges. In Brazil, as Catholic base communities organized unions and landless workers, the Assemblies of God exploded in membership. In Chile, Pentecostal revivals surged under Pinochet. In Peru, evangelical missions expanded rapidly in the 1980s as Catholic priests began speaking against the military’s human rights abuses. In every case, U.S. officials described Protestant growth as a stabilizing force.

What makes all of this chilling is that it worked. By the 1990s, liberation theology had been sharply weakened. The Vatican, under pressure from conservative factions and geopolitical concerns, disciplined liberation theologians. Meanwhile, Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity had become the fastest-growing religious movement in Latin America. Today, Pentecostals form one of the strongest voting blocs for right-wing and authoritarian politicians across the continent.

Most missionaries who participated in this never knew. Their intentions were honest. Mine were honest. But the structure, the funding, the partnerships, the diplomatic support, the propaganda, the development projects, had been engineered long before any of us arrived. The U.S. didn’t need missionaries to be CIA agents. It just needed them to preach a version of Christianity that left the economic order untouched.

And that is exactly what happened.

The Angry Tide of the Latin American far right

By Vijay Prashad

November 30, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Protesters invade the National Congress of Brazil

The far right in Latin America is angry. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina’s Javier Milei always look furious, and they always speak loudly and aggressively. Testosterone leaks from their pores, a toxic sweat that has spread across the region. It would be easy to say that this is the impact of Donald Trump’s own brand of neo-fascism, but this is not true. The far right has much deeper pedigrees, linked to the defence of the oligarchical families that have roots in the colonial era across the virreinatos (viceroyalties) from New Spain to Rio de la Plata. Certainly, these far right men and women are inspired by Trump’s aggressiveness and by the entry of Marco Rubio, a furious defender of the far right in Latin America, to the position of US Secretary of State. This inspiration and support are important but not the reason for the return of the far right, an angry tide that has been growing across Latin America.

On the surface, it looks as if the far right has suffered some defeats. Jair Bolsonaro is in prison for a very long time because of his role in the failed coup d’état on January 8, 2023 (inspired by Trump’s own failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021). In the first round of the presidential election in Chile, the candidate of the Communist Party, Jeannette Jara won the most votes and will lead the centre-left bloc into the second round (December 14). Despite every attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro remains in charge and has mobilised large sections of the population to defend the Bolivarian Revolution against any threats. And, in late October 2025, most of the world’s countries voted for a UN General Assembly resolution that demands an end to the blockade on Cuba. These indicators —from Bolsonaro’s imprisonment to the vote on Cuba— suggest that the far right has not been able to move its agenda in every place and through every channel.

However, beneath the surface, there are indications that Latin America is not seeing the resurgence of what had been called the Pink Tide (after the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998) but is experiencing the emergence of an angry tide that slowly has begun to sweep the region from Central America down to the Southern Cone.

Elections in South America

The first round of the Chilean presidential election produced a worrying result. While Jara of the Communist Party won 26.85 percent of an 85.26 percent turnout, the far right’s José Antonio Kast came in second with 23.92 percent. Evelyn Matthei of the traditional Right won 12.5 percent, while the extreme right candidate who was once with Kast and now to his right, Johannes Kaiser, won 14 percent. It is likely that Jara will pick up some of the votes of the centre, but not enough to overcome the advantage of the far right which looks to have at least more than 50 percent of the voters on its side. The so-called social liberal, Franco Parisi, who came in third, endorsed Kast in 2021 and will likely endorse him again. That means that in Chile, the presidency will be in the hands of a man of the far right whose ancestry is rooted in German Nazism (his father was a member of the Nazi Party who escaped justice through the intercession of the Vatican) and who believes that the dictatorship in Chile from 1973 to 1990 was on balance a good idea.

North of Chile, in Bolivia, the new president Rodrigo Paz Pereria, son of a former president, beat the far right’s Jorge Tuto Quiroga (a former president) in the second round of the election that had no candidate of the left (this after the Movement for Socialism governed Bolivia continuously from 2006 to 2025). Paz’ own party has a minority position in the legislature and he will therefore have to align himself with the Quiroga’s Libre coalition and he will likely adopt a pro-US foreign policy and a libertarian economic policy. Peru will have its own election in April, where the former mayor of Lima —Rafael López Aliaga— is expected to win. He rejects the label far right but adopts all the generic policies of the far right (ultra-conservative Catholic, advocate for harsh security measures, and favours a libertarian economic agenda). Iván Cepeda of Colombia is the left’s likely candidate in their presidential election in May 2026, since Colombia does not permit second terms (so President Gustavo Petro cannot run again). Cepeda will face strong opposition from Colombia’s oligarchy which will want to return the country to their rule. It is too early to say who Cepeda will face, but it might be journalist Vicky Dávila, whose far right opposition to Petro is finding traction in unexpected parts of Colombian society. It is likely that by the middle of 2026, most of the states along the western edge of South America (from Chile to Colombia) will be governed by the far right.

Even as Bolsonaro is in prison, his party, the PL (or Liberal Party), is the largest bloc in Brazil’s National Congress. It is likely that Lula will be re-elected to the presidency next year due to his immense personal connection with the electorate. The far right’s candidate – who will be either Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo state, or one of the Bolsonaro’s (wife Michelle or son Flavio) – will struggle against him. But the PL will make inroads into the Senate. Their control over the legislature has already tightened the reins on the government (at COP30, Lula’s representative made no proposals to confront the climate catastrophe), and a Senate win will further their control over the country.

Common Agenda of the Angry Tide

The Angry Tide politicians who are making waves have many things in common. Most of them are now in their fifties —Kast (born 1966), Paz (born 1967), Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado (born 1967), and Milei (born 1970). They came of age in the post-dictatorship period in Latin America (the last dictatorship to end was in Chile in 1990). The decade of the 1990s continued the economic stagnation that characterised the 1980s —The Lost Decade (La Década Perdida) that convulsed these countries with low growth rates and with poorly developed comparative advantages forced into globalisation. It was in this context that these politicians of the Angry Tide developed their common agenda:

Anti-Communism. The far right in Latin America is shaped by an anti-left agenda that it inherits from the Cold War, which means that its political formations typically endorse the era of US-backed military dictatorships. The ideas of the left, whether from the Cuban Revolution (1959) or from the era of the Pink Tide (after 1998), are anathema to these political forces; these ideas include agrarian reform, state-led finance for industrialisation, state sovereignty, and the importance of trade unions for all workers and peasants. The anti-communism of this Angry Tide is rudimentary, mother’s milk to the politicians and used cleverly to turn sections of society against others.

Libertarian Economic policies. The economic ideas of the Angry Tide are shaped by the Chilean “Chicago Boys” (including Kast’s brother Miguel who was the head of General Augusto Pinochet’s Planning Commission, his Minister of Labour, and his head of the Central Bank). They directly take their tradition from the libertarian Austrian School (Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard as well as Milton Friedman). The ideas were cultivated in well-funded think tanks, such as the Centro de Estudios Macroeconómicos de Argentina (founded in 1978) and the Chilean Centro de Estudios Públicos (founded in 1980). They believe the State should be a force to discipline the workers and citizens, and that the economy must be in the hands of private interests. Milei’s famous antics with a chainsaw illuminate this politics not only of cutting social welfare (the work of neoliberalism) but of destroying the capacity of the State itself.

Culture Wars. Drawing on the wave of anti-gender ideology and anti-migration rhetoric, the Angry Tide has been able to appeal to conservative evangelical Christians and to large sections of the working class that has been disoriented by changes seen to come from above. The far right argues that the violence in working class neighbourhoods created by the drug industry is fostered by ‘liberalism’ and that only tough violence (as demonstrated by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele) can be the solution; for this reason, they want to strengthen the military and police and set aside constitutional limitations on use of force (on October 28, the government of Bolsonaro ally Cláudio Castro in Rio de Janeiro sent in the police who killed at least 121 people in Operation Containment). It helps the far right that it adopted various conspiracy theories about how the ‘elites’ have spread ‘globalised’ ideas to damage and destroy the ‘culture’ of their nations. This is a ludicrous idea coming from far right and traditional right political forces that champion full-scale entry of US corporations into their society and culture, and that have no respect for the histories of struggle of the working class and peasantry to build their own national and regional cultural worlds. But the Angry Tide has been able to construct the idea that they are cultural warriors out to defend their heritage against the malignancies of ‘globalisation’. Part of this culture war is the promotion of the individual entrepreneur as the subject of history and the denigration of the necessity of social reproduction.

It is these three elements (anti-communism, libertarian economic policies, and the culture wars) that brings together the far right across Latin America. It provides them with a robust ideological framework to galvanise sections of the population to believe that they are the saviours of the hemisphere. This Latin American far right is backed by Trump and the international network of the Spanish far right (the Foro Madrid, created in 2020 by Fundación Disenso, the think tank of the far right Vox party). It is heavily funded by the old elite social classes, who have slowly abandoned the traditional Right for these new, aggressive far right parties.

Crisis of the Left

The Left is yet to develop a proper assessment of the emergence of these parties and has not been able to drive an agenda that sparkles with vitality. A deep ideological crisis grips the Left, which cannot properly decide whether to build a united front with the traditional right and with liberals to contest elections or to build a popular front across the working class and peasantry to build social power as a prelude to a proper electoral push. The example of the former strategy (the electoral alliance) comes from Chile, where first the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concertación) formed in 1988 to keep out the parties of the dictatorship from power and second the Apruebo Dignidad formed in 2021 that brought Gabriel Boric of the centrist Broad Front to the presidency. But outside Chile, there is little evidence that this strategy works. The latter has become harder as unionisation rates have collapsed, and as uberisation individualises the working class to erode working class culture.

It is telling that Bolivia’s former socialist Vice President Álvaro García Linera looked northwards to New York City for inspiration. When Zohran Mamdani won the mayor’s race, García Linera said, “Mamdani’s victory shows that the left must commit to boldness and a new future”. It is hard to disagree with this statement; although, Mamdani’s own proposed agenda is mostly to salvage a worn-out New York infrastructure rather than to advance the city to socialism. García Linera did not mention his own time in Bolivia, when he tried with former president Evo Morales to build a socialist alternative. The left will have to be bold, and it will have to articulate a new future, but it will have to be one that emerges from its own histories of building struggles and building socialism.Email

Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Tings Chak is the art director and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.” She is also a member of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society.

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Further Reading and Sources

The Angry Tide of the Latin American far right

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