Prof. Jonathan Calvillo Quoted in Los Angeles Times
The following is an excerpt of an original article titled “Latino evangelicals used to shun politics. Will they now become a right-wing force?” written by Cindy Carcamo and published on March 4, 2022 in the Los Angeles Times. Prof. Calvillo’s faculty profile can be found here.
After the 11:30 a.m. church service at Houses of Light one Sunday, Anthony Recio, a 31-year-old youth pastor, explained how he once supported Bernie Sanders but ended up voting for Trump twice.
“I don’t like [Trump’s] character at all,” he said, but “I want someone who can actually surround himself with people who value many of the things that I value.”
Recio, who defines himself as nonpartisan, said that although he is against abortion, his principal reason for supporting Trump was the former president’s entrepreneurialism and management of a strong economy. The Republican ideology of free markets and bootstraps individualism resonates with many evangelicals, said Jonathan Calvillo, an assistant professor at Boston University School of Theology and author of “The Saints of Santa Ana,” about how Latino identity is shaped by faith.
“It’s a very entrepreneurial sort of spiritualism,” Calvillo said. “For instance, many start their own church and then a second church. It’s very oriented toward being, in a sense, business-savvy.”
Latino evangelicals are bringing that idea of can-do spirituality to bear not only at the national and state level but on local councils and school boards. In 2020, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference launched a campaign dubbed “El Voto Hispano” to mobilize Latino evangelical voters.