Gaston Espinosa, associate professor of American religions, politics, and society, has written an article for online magazine Religion Dispatches, examining Latino Protestant Evangelical support for Barack Obama in the 2008 Election. In the June 28 story, "Obama Threaded the Moral Needle of Latino Evangelicals in '08," Espinosa argues that President Obama earned Latino votes through a "combination of targeted and aggressive outreach to evangelicals, the candidate's ability to talk about his faith, and a compromise on the abortion and gay rights issues."
"This shift in Latino evangelical consciousness made Obama's talk about faith-based organizing all the more appealing, and almost certainly helped flip the valuable Latino vote in the 2008 election," Espinosa writes. "While Latino Protestant evangelicals cast 58% of their vote for Bush in 2004, they cast 57% of their votes for Obama in 2008; causing many to wonder just how it happened."
In a July 16 article for The Economist, describing how Latinos are changing the nature of American religion, Espinosa says that although 68 percent of Hispanics in America are still Catholic, about 15 percent are now born-again evangelicals, who are fast gaining "market share," estimating that about 3.9 million Latino Catholics have recently converted to Protestantism. In other places, he has argued that when combined, more than 20 percent of the U.S. Latino population (46 million) is now Protestant or Evangelical (9.2 million), a finding consistent with most other studies on the subject.
This growth was confirmed by several recent national surveys, which found that "for every one [Latino] who comes back [to the Catholic church], four leave it," he says.
Espinosa was also one of several scholars commenting on the recent decision of some Hispanic Protestant leaders to not participate in the 2010 U.S. Census for an Aug. 17 article ("Counting Controversy") in Christianity Today.
Espinosa is the Arthur V. Stoughton Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the CMC Religious Studies Department and the 5cs Religious Studies Program. He currently serves as President of La Comunidad of Hispanic Scholars of Religion at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and as the Co-editor of The Columbia University Press Series in Religion and Politics. He is preparing for publication a new edited book entitled, Religion, Barack Obama, and the 2008 Election.