Latino Protestants in America: Growing and Diverse by Mark T. Mulder, Aída I. Ramos, Gerardo Martí (review)

The cover story of the April 15, 2013, issue of Time magazine catalyzed a national conversation on religion in the United States, heralding “The Latino Reformation.” A recent rise of Latino Protestant churches across the United States has been largely overlooked by the American public and has received only limited attention by scholars of religion and even less by those in Latino studies. Latino Protestants in America: Growing and Diverse seeks to bridge that gap of (mis)understanding between specialists in various disciplines and lay readers. Sociologists Mark T. Mulder, Aída I. Ramos, and Gerardo Martí offer the first comprehensive overview of this changing religious American landscape, maintaining that the current seismic demographic shifts are important not only with respect to Latina/o populations but also for the larger social, political, and lived experiences of religious communities in the United States. The study synthesizes the latest scholarship (mostly sociological), surveys of religious life (e.g., Chicago Latino Congregation Study, Hispanic Churches in American Public Life Survey, and more than two dozen studies by the Pew Research Center), as well as in-depth ethnographies conducted by the Latino Protestant Congregations (LPC), a project comprising a team of sociologists across the country under the leadership of Martí and Mulder.

The authors begin by citing key demographic changes (already well known to scholars in Latino studies): Latinos account for the largest racial minority in the country (17%) and are increasingly geographically more dispersed, now residing in the Deep South, Midwest, and the Great Lakes area (23). How do these shifts betoken and contribute to a rapidly growing Protestant Latino presence? In 2014, some 22% of Latinos identified as Protestant, and based on current and expected trends, the authors expect this to swell to 50% by 2030, changing the face of politics and economics as well as the social standing of Latinas/os (2). Moreover, they cite studies that Latino Protestants are more religiously active than Catholics or White and Black Protestants (134).

Beyond Time magazine’s national and perhaps startling statistics, how does this impact Latino studies? The authors contend that “Latino Protestant churches function as important institutional contexts in which Latino identity can be reified, reduced, or negotiated” and that congregations are “microcosms of a larger, aggregate process of racialization in which Latino racial/ethnic identity is being ironed out” (73). Because of attention to Catholicism in Latino culture, the authors leverage Catholicism as a touchstone for analytical comparison to show the ways in which Latino identities are negotiated across various religious, regional, and institutional contexts. This book also offers significant insight into Latino Protestant congregations in the Midwest.

The authors demonstrate how Latino Protestants can differ in terms of history, immigration, identity negotiation, worship and liturgy, and political and social engagement. Chapter 1 casts off popular conceptions of Latino church services as “passionate” or a “fiesta” with a “Latino flavor” (4–6). As they note later, such characterizations provide no analytical value and in fact reinforce ethno-racial essentialisms (139–40). The chapter also addresses a fundamental tension throughout the book about being Latino and “not Catholic” (1–22). Protestant identity means more than being “not Catholic”; in fact, the “double marginalization” of Latino Protestants in the United States (religiously within ethnicity and ethnically within the country) prompts seeking new ways of reconciling ethnicity and race (105). The authors’ overview of Latinos’ waning affiliation with Catholicism in Latin American countries is complemented by their explanations for the factors attracting US Latinos to Protestantism. Scholars of Latino studies would take interest in the identity issues they explore that follow conversion: not only are English-dominant Latinos more likely to convert; converts tend to foreground their religious identity over their ethnic identity (12). Readers unfamiliar with the contours of Latino Protestantism will appreciate the lay of the land that the...