New York, US
AP
Catholics remain the largest religious group among Latinos in the United States, but the number of Latinos who identify as religiously unaffiliated continues to grow.
Those are among the key findings in a comprehensive report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center that surveyed 7,647 US adults from 1st to 14th August of last year.
Parishioners attend Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in the Queens borough of New York on Sunday, on 8th May, 2022. PICTURE: AP Photo/Brittainy Newman/File photo.
The report, which uses the terms Latino and Hispanic interchangeably, found that Catholicism remains the largest faith among Latinos in the US, even as the number of Latino adults who identify as Catholic steadily declined over the past decade. The number went from 67 per cent in 2010 to 43 per cent last year.
Still, the survey said Latinos remain about twice as likely as US adults overall to identify as Catholic, and less likely to be Protestant.
“Latinos, especially here in the US, are still very faith-centred,” said Rev Carlos Velasquez, pastor at St Brigid, a majority Latino Catholic church in an area straddling Brooklyn and Queens in New York City.
“Faith is a big part of all of people’s lives in Latin America…and when they come here, faith is what grounds them,” he said. The church helps with the difficult transition of emigration, when many are starting from scratch, he added.
Latinos who are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – are now about 30 per cent of the overall Latino population. That’s up from 18 per cent a decade ago and 10 per cent in 2010. The numbers of Latinos who are religiously unaffiliated is in line with US adults overall, the report said.
The religiously unaffiliated – commonly known as the “nones” – are the fastest-growing group in surveys asking Americans about their religious identity.
“Even though Latinx Americans may be, like all other Americans, increasingly unaffiliated, that certainly doesn’t mean they’re non-religious,” said Elizabeth Drescher, an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University who wrote a book about the spiritual lives of the nones.
“They may not be engaged in institutional religion for a variety of reasons, but they may still have the kind of classic of religious measures of religiosity – like belief in God or a higher power,” she said.
The poll says the “demographic forces shaping the nation’s Latino population also have impacted religious affiliation trends.”
Among US Latinos ages 18 to 29, 79 per cent were born in the US. Nearly half (49 per cent) in this age group now identify as religiously unaffiliated. But only about one-in-five Latinos 50 and older are unaffiliated. Most of these older Latinos (56 per cent) were born outside the US.
Overall, 52 per cent of Latino immigrants identify as Catholic and 21 per cent are unaffiliated. US-born Latinos are less likely to be Catholic (36 per cent) and more likely to be unaffiliated (39 per cent), according to a 2022 Pew survey of Latino adults.
Hispanic Americans are also strikingly underrepresented in Catholic schools and in the priesthood.
Nearly a quarter of all US Hispanics are former Catholics: While about two-thirds of Hispanic adults (65 per cent) say they were raised Catholic, 43 per cent say they are currently Catholic, according to the survey.
“What’s happening to Catholic Latinos [in the US] is what’s happening to Catholics across the world,” said Rev Felix Sanchez, pastor of St Pius V, a majority Latino parish in New York City’s Jamaica, Queens.
“People are attending church less,” he said. Young people are participating less in their parishes. He cautioned against presenting Latinos as a monolithic group, though.
“It’s not the same to talk about an Argentine than an Ecuadorean, or a Mexican. And it’s not the same a first generation versus a third generation,” Sanchez said. “They all have different histories, traditions. What unites us is that we understand each other because we share the same language, but each one has its own cultural richness. – and we have to respect that.”
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Protestants
Protestants are the second-largest faith group after Catholics, the report says. They account for 21 per cent of Hispanic adults – a number that has remained relatively stable since 2010 – with 15 per cent of Latinos identifying as evangelical Protestants.
“Latino evangelicals have received national attention recently due to the political activism of some evangelical churches,” the survey says.
“The interest in Latino evangelicals comes as white evangelicals have become a bulwark of support for Republican candidates in US presidential elections, and after elections in which a rising share of Latino voters have supported Republican candidates.”
Republican candidates across the US are seeking to expand recent gains the party has made with Hispanic voters from Florida to California. What seems to be driving them are bread-and-butter issues, including crime, struggling schools, as well as food and gas prices creeping beyond their paychecks’ reach.
The report says 28 per cent of Hispanic Republicans identify as evangelical Protestants compared to 10 per cent who identify as Democrats.
Latino immigrants are slightly more likely than US-born Latinos to be evangelical (19 per cent vs 12 per cent). “Evangelicalism is especially prevalent among Latinos with Central American origins, mirroring a pattern seen in those countries. Roughly three-in-ten Central Americans (31 per cent) say they are evangelical Protestants,” the report says.
Among evangelical Protestants who are Latino, half identify with the Republican Party or are independents who lean toward the GOP; and 44 per cent are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents.
Among Latino Catholics, by contrast, 72 per cent identify as Democrats.
Religiously unaffiliated Latinos are also mostly Democratic (66 per cent).
Most US Latinos (65 per cent) also say they were raised Catholic. Far fewer say they were raised Protestant (18 per cent) or religiously unaffiliated (13 per cent).
Older Latinos and those born outside the US are especially likely to say they were raised Catholic, the report says.
“Like all Americans, many Latinos switch away from their childhood religion,” it says, adding that one-third of Latino adults said their current religion is different from their childhood faith.
The poll’s margin of error, for the full sample of respondents, is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.
