Blessing La Política: The Latino Religious Experience and Political Engagement in the United States (review)

This book’s unifying thread is its response to the influential 1995 work of Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Scholzman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Contributors to the current volume endorse the “civic voluntarism” model that Verba and his colleagues proposed. But they offer counterevidence to Verba et. al.’s explanations vis-à-vis why Latinos are less likely than African Americans to hone their civic skills through participation in church activities, especially the contention that, among Latinos and other groups, Catholicism tends to foster less participation in democratic political systems than Protestantism.

Anthony Stevens-Arroyo introduces Blessing La Política with a critical assessment of the thesis that Protestant religious practice predisposes its adherents to modernity more ably than Catholicism, tracing the etymology of this thesis from the famous work of Max Weber down to present debates about the political participation of U.S. Latinos. In another chapter, Stevens-Arroyo presents the findings of a 2001 study on Latino congregations and leadership of the Program for the Analysis of Religion among Latinos (PARAL). On a number of indicators the PARAL study showed that the political involvement of Latino Catholics and Protestants is much more comparable than the Verba et. al. research would lead one to surmise, though unfortunately the PARAL data does not encompass analysis of the growing numbers of Latino Pentecostals and evangelicals. Carlos Vargas-Ramos expounds similar conclusions in a chapter on Latinos, religion, and political participation in New York City. While offering little comparative analysis with Latino Protestants, two other case studies explore the public face of Latino Catholic communities, one the Puerto Rican festival for Santiago Apóstol (St James the Apostle) in New Haven, Connecticut, and the other the civic engagement of Mexican immigrants of the Catholic Charismatic group Sangre de Cristo en el Barrio (Blood of Christ in the Neighborhood) in Los Angeles. Investigations of Latino voting in the 2004 presidential race and subsequent national elections conclude the volume. Finally, an essay of Michael Jones-Correa and David Leal contests the findings of Verba et. al. with data from national surveys and is prominently cited and summarized in the volume, but “for technical reasons” (ix) could not be included. Readers are advised to consult these scholars’ “seminal article” (ix) in the Political Research Quarterly (December 2001).

One key distinction presented in the book that this reviewer would like to see developed further is the tendency for Latino Protestants to engage more directly in partisan political activities than Latino Catholics. A Catholic Charismatic Renewal informant from Los Angeles captured this distinction well in her statement that church leaders should not seek to influence partisan elections, but rather be advocates for community issues and marginal peoples. In her view, “this is not called politics, this is called defending one’s pueblo” (131). While distinctions such as these merit further exploration in future research, Blessing La Política presents important insights that ably address its intention to demonstrate “Latino Catholics and Protestants move through diverse paths on the way to political activism” (xi).