For Some Latinos, ‘Prosperity Gospel’ Led Them to Trump

The Washington Post / Michelle Boorstein

17:26 JST, December 25, 2024

ALLENTOWN, Pa. – The Lehigh Valley Barbershop was bustling with the next generation of American strivers. The mood among the young men, mostly first- or second-generation immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, was hopeful. Their candidate, Donald Trump, had just won the presidential election.

Sitting in high-end silver chairs, the young men talked about the businesses they had built, or would build. That would be more possible, they hoped, with the return of Trump, someone to whom they could relate – a businessman who has made mistakes, they said, but still keeps striving.

“Kamala said, ‘Trump is for the rich, I fight for the poor.’ But I don’t want to be low-class – I hope that’s not a bad way to say it. But I don’t want to be there,” said Christian Pion, 31, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He became a U.S. citizen last year, a decade after coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic, and cast his first presidential ballot for Trump. “God doesn’t want you to be poor.”

Next to him, his best friend, Willy J. Castillo, 39, who owns the shop and others, worked the register as he talked about Trump’s drive to succeed, overcome and survive. Castillo, who also voted for Trump, identifies with that: “The Bible says ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ right?”

The mix of hope, drive for success and belief in a God who rewards faith, sometimes with financial accomplishments, has become dominant across the United States and Latin America, experts on Latino religion say. The belief system is sometimes called “seed faith,” “health and wealth gospel,” or “prosperity gospel.”

In the past half-century, driven by larger-than-life pastors, it has overtaken other more traditional theologies centered on God’s priority being the poor and disenfranchised, some experts said. This belief system, they said, helps explain what exit polls showed was a significant shift among Latino Christian voters to Trump, who they see as an uber-successful, strong and God-focused striver.

“If you take Trump and all his characteristics, it’s almost exactly as any prosperity gospel preacher,” said Tony Tian-Ren Lin, an Asian-Latino pastor in New York City who wrote a book on Latino Americans and the prosperity gospel. “The big personality, talking a big game, saying things like ‘no one can do it’ but him … If for years you’ve been listening to someone like that, you’re not surprised when a political leader says those things.”

Nationally, network exit polls showed that between 2020 and 2024, Trump gained 14 points in support among Latinos, although a bare majority favored Harris, the Democratic nominee. In that same period, he gained 25 points among Latino Catholics and 18 points among Latino evangelical Protestants.

The shift is evident here in Lehigh County, in the eastern part of pivotal Pennsylvania. It is the county with the highest proportion in the state of Latino voters – 29 percent, according to the U.S. Census. The Democratic Party’s margin in presidential contests over Trump shrank in Lehigh by 4.9 percentage points, from 7.6 percentage points in 2020 to 2.7 percentage points in 2024. But in majority-Latino Allentown, the county’s biggest city, the move toward Trump was even more pronounced. The 10 city precincts with the highest-proportion of Latino voters shifted to Trump by an average of 20 percentage points since Trump faced Biden in 2020, according to a Washington Post analysis of precinct results from Lehigh County and demographic data from L2, an election data provider.

The prosperity gospel is rooted in American Pentecostalism and evangelical Protestantism, but experts say it’s become huge across faith in general, and especially among unaffiliated, often online spiritual influencers. Trump grew up in the church of the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, whose book “The Power of Positive Thinking,” was a huge bestseller and is considered a classic of the prosperity gospel.

A Pew Research survey in 2014 found wide majorities of Protestants and Catholics in almost all of Latin America agreed that “God will grant wealth and good health to believers who have enough faith.” In the Dominican Republic – the ancestral or birth home for many in Allentown – 76 percent of Protestants agreed and 79 percent of Catholics did. The firm PRRI asked a similar question in March and found 44 percent of U.S. Latinos overall agreed, higher than any other group except African Americans. What that means politically is that wealthy candidates like Trump are seen by some as both faithful and worthy of emulation.

The movement started in the United States with healers and televangelists like Oral Roberts and Benny Hinn, who told followers that giving them money would lead to God’s blessings, conjuring a transactional God. By extension, personal wealth was seen as a goal for the faithful. It focused on the power of the self, and the idea that God would reward positivity, hard work and confidence.

The acceptance of the prosperity gospel has been boosted by the fact that many adherents view institutional religion as corrupt, for varied reasons.

Christian broadcasters and evangelical missionaries decades ago took the ideas overseas, where University of Pennsylvania religion scholar Anthea Butler said the prosperity gospel became “supersized,” especially in Latin America and Africa, and then returned to the United States with new waves of immigrants. Experts say its ideas now are so widespread in spiritual and secular life that it has become the gospel of the American Dream.

And few have had more faith in the American Dream than religious immigrants.

Maria Perez, 53, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic 20 years ago, was pushing her granddaughter in a stroller to church in downtown Allentown. She said she voted for Trump because she believes God picked him for economic and political success – a belief underscored by his surviving two assassination attempts, she said. Trump’s lifestyle shows he’s uber-rich, she said, dismissing his multiple business bankruptcies as low moments in a booming career.

Perez goes to church once or twice a month and smiled as she talked about the pastors and spiritual figures she listens to online every day. “They give me hope that God wants us to do well here. And I know Trump wants us to do well, too.”

In Trump’s first term, Pion said, he built a successful trucking business that made $500,000 in its first year. But during President Joe Biden’s tenure, he said, the market and gas prices changed, to the point where he is now having to sell his two trucks and lay off three employees.

When Pion became a U.S. citizen last year, Castillo got him a gift: an AI video that shows a computer-generated Trump offering congratulations.

“Now we can say ‘I am an American and I need my money and I want it now,’” Trump appears to say in the video. “As your presidential candidate for 2024, I’ll make sure your truck company thrives.”

Latino Christian leaders say the prosperity gospel is one of multiple factors that led voters to Trump, including the rising cost of living, abortion, a wariness of women’s and LGBTQ rights, misinformation and Trump’s appeals to a group he’s called “my beautiful Christians.”

Bishop William Surita, a semiretired pastor who helps oversee a network of Hispanic evangelical churches in the Allentown area, said the prosperity gospel is part of a nuanced set of emotions that pulled people to Trump, rather than something conscious. “They think because you got a businessman, he knows about the economy,” said Surita, who declined to say how he voted. “Anyone who follows Trump knows he hasn’t been a good businessman.”

Another factor is the slight shift of Latinos – both in Latin America and the United States – from Catholicism to Evangelicalism. And evangelical Christianity in the United States is overwhelmingly tied to the Republican Party and its candidates.

Nilsa Alvarez, national Hispanic director for the conservative Christian group Faith & Freedom Coalition, helped coordinate swing state voters and said a factor in the state was a story from a pastor who spoke this fall at an event with more than 175 Latinos.

The pastor, she said, shared a story about a transgender boy whose teachers, without parents’ consent, “took her to get a sex change operation and she died.” When The Post contacted the pastor, Edelmiro Santana, he said someone whose name he didn’t know had come up to him at an event and told him that story and he was simply passing it on without proof. Trump often told a similar unsubstantiated anecdote about schools operating on children to change their gender.

But Alvarez dismissed the prosperity gospel as a factor, saying Latinos were motivated by wanting change on the economy.

Mark Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center, said it’s possible the Latino belief in the prosperity gospel has made what he characterizes as the Democratic Party’s messaging less attractive.

“Is it that Latinos identify with Trump as a successful person, or is it that Latinos have stepped away from the Democratic Party because it doesn’t talk about economic success and focuses more on poverty, on helping those who need help?” he asked.

Butler, the Penn religion scholar, said the prosperity gospel’s rise helps explain why many Latino Trump supporters weren’t turned off by his promise to deport millions of immigrants. The prosperity gospel, she said, isn’t only about getting rich.

“It’s about family – I want to keep my family intact, I want to provide for my family, I want to give my children opportunities,” she said, “And for a lot of immigrants, especially from Latin America, it’s ‘I want to be part of what America is,’ which is about being hard working and having all these things.”

So when immigrants are portrayed in a negative light – including by Trump – “it’s like: ‘If those people aren’t representing me well, I don’t want those people to come either!’” she said. The Democrats’ embrace of “those people,” Butler said, showed those voters the party “didn’t fit the version of success.”

Lin noted that Latino immigrants are strongly influenced by the prosperity gospel because they are part of a self-selecting group.

“The more you believe in the prosperity gospel, the more you want to come. You have the faith and believe you deserve it. You want the American Dream. If you stay [in your home country], you’re not taking action, you lack faith,” said Lin, who profiled newcomers for his book.

Mike Madrid, a political consultant and expert on Latino voters, said Trump is successfully selling a kind of spiritually-tinged hope to people who are fighting to make it in a country where wealth and material success are celebrated.

“It’s hope. It’s hopeful,” he said. “You’re selling people an element of faith. ‘Have faith in this and you will achieve economic success, God wants that for you.’ That becomes a religion in an age where that is what is valued.”