Latinos leaving Catholicism and organized religion, study says

Latinos are increasingly nonreligious, leaving Catholic church - The Washington Post

Arlene Rios “came out of the closet” in 2016. She was no longer Catholic, she told family and friends, but an atheist.

Latinos, like the rest of the country, are increasingly leaving church pews. About 30 percent of Latino adults are not religiously affiliated — a dramatic increase from just 10 percent in 2010, according to a new Pew Research Center report.

Fueling the shift are young Latinos between the ages of 18 and 29, half of whom say they have no religious affiliation. U.S.-born Latinos, who are driving the community’s growth, are also half as likely to belong to a church than Latino immigrants, the Pew study found.

Latinos’ shrinking religious affiliation represents the “Americanization” of the Latino community, said Juhem Navarro-Rivera, a political scientist and a managing partner at Socioanalitica Research, a consulting firm for minority businesses.

“When we think about what it means to be Latino, for many people maybe it was being Catholic, and that is not the case,” Navarro-Rivera said. It’s time to “rethink what it means to be Latino.”

The Latino population’s shift away from the church could play out in upcoming elections as Democrats and Republicans court an increasingly important part of the voting population. In recent elections, both political parties have operated under the assumption that Latinos were overwhelmingly Catholic and increasingly evangelical, making them conservative on key issues like abortion. It was used to help explain Latinos’ bigger-than-expected level of support for President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

But Pew found that Latinos’ religious affiliation looks much closer to the average U.S. adult than previously believed. In fact, the number of Protestant Latinos, including evangelicals, has stayed relatively stable in the past decade, the report found, casting doubt on the notion that Latinos’ rightward shift in the 2020 election is related to an evangelical movement. Evangelical Latinos are also not overwhelmingly Republican — 50 percent said they are Republican while 44 percent said they are Democrats.

Republicans’ and Democrats’ efforts to invoke evangelicalism to win over votes is "not necessarily a long-term strategy for attracting more Latinos,” said Navarro-Rivera.

About 31 percent of Latino Democrats are not religiously affiliated, which includes those that identify as atheist, agonistic or “nothing in particular,” while 27 percent of Latino Republicans are unaffiliated.

Younger, nonreligious Latinos are also slightly more liberal in their views on economic justice and racial justice than previous generations, said Navarro-Rivera.

While Catholicism has been a long-ingrained facet of Latino identity, the Pew survey shows the share of Latino Catholics is shrinking. In 2010, 67 percent of Latinos in the United States considered themselves Catholic, compared to 43 percent now, which is still twice as likely as U.S. adults overall. For every one Latino adult who said they had joined the Catholic Church, 23 Latinos had left, the survey found.

The move away from mainstream religion “is a question that the U.S. as a whole is facing, because religion and religious communities once played a larger role in the fabric of American life. And this is true for Latinos as well,” said Jens Manuel Krogstad, the report’s lead researcher and a Pew senior writer and editor.

But the Latino population may be more religious than the survey shows, said Gastón Espinosa, a professor of religious studies at Claremont McKenna College. Those that identify as charismatic Pentecostals or evangelicals are sometimes counted as unaffiliated or nonreligious because they don’t belong to traditional denominations, like Catholic or Baptist, Espinosa said.

“It’s a language problem,” he said. Non-White people “don’t use the categories of religiosity used by White mainstream Christians and by sociologists ... and they’re being misclassified.”

Pew stands by its study, which specifically measured the share of people who said they were not affiliated with a religion, said Krogstad.

Rios said giving up on religion is “death by a thousand paper cuts.” She doesn’t think religion is favorable to women or like the guilt and shame that has crept into its teachings. She began attending atheist conventions but found many lacked Latino members and did not understand the significance religion played in many Hispanic households, she said. So she formed her own group, Fresno Latino Atheists, which has more than 300 members.

“For the longest time I thought maybe I was the only Latina, or maybe there’s a few of us," who are no longer religious, Rios said. “But no there’s actually a lot of us, waiting to connect.”

Catholicism and Latino culture are tightly intertwined, with many of its cultural touchstones based on religious figures — including la Virgen de Guadalupe, the rosary, or even, Rios said, the word “adios,” which means goodbye in Spanish but also literally “to God.”

Sara Youngbar, a 32-year-old Mexican American in Las Vegas, says her faith began to wane as the Catholic church struggled to quell years of sexual abuse scandals. She was sexually abused as a child, and her resentment toward the church grew, said Youngbar, who is now an atheist.

“I feel very strongly about my decision,” she said, but "sometimes I still get head shakes or suggestions: ‘Why won’t you baptize your daughters? Why don’t you send them to Catholic or Christian school?’”

Younger Latinos are breaking away from “things that have been rooted in us for generations now,” said Youngbar. “I know a lot of us feel like we’re just one of a few, but there’s slowly more (atheist) organizations and groups coming out.”

When she ran to become the first Latino City Council member in Palm Desert, Calif., Karina Quintanilla says she worried her atheism would be a stumbling block for voters. But the issue didn’t emerge, except for the occasional constituent who would pray for her — which she saw as a welcome gesture of love and care.

She grew up in a “super, super Catholic” family that migrated between Tijuana, Mexico, and Coachella Valley, Calif., for seasonal work at country clubs. When she was just 4 years old, Quintanilla recited creeds — statements of belief — at her grandmother’s catechism classes in church.

Her journey away from Catholicism started with her divorce in 2006.

“For me it was very difficult to keep the same faith when I was told that I couldn’t divorce, that the church didn’t believe in divorce. And when you’ve got an adulterous spouse and you’re being told no, stick it out — it made me think, how does this look for people in domestic violence incidents? Or situations of deep abuse? The church is going to say ‘Jesus loves you’ and ‘Pray about it’?” Quintanilla said.

Quintanilla is now openly atheist and a board member of the Center for Freethought Equality, an atheist organization that advocates for the separation of church and state, protecting civil liberties and other progressive issues. Her atheism informs her work, she said. At a recent meeting on how to provide services for the homeless, one staff member suggested reaching out to religious institutions for collaboration.

“I said, we have to include a secular component,” Quintanilla recalled. “There’s an overrepresentation of LGBTQ-plus individuals that are homeless, and you’re going to say ‘Hey, come over here,’ when it’s religious and you’re on the street because your family said if you can’t be straight, you can’t live here?"