Pastor Luis Cabrera has spent weeks traveling across Texas to meet with other Latinos in the faith community. He is preaching a different kind of gospel: Vote.
He hands out voter guides featuring “God-fearing” candidates to other pastors, leads them in prayer and talks about what they are allowed to do under their tax-exempt status, which bans them from engaging in any kind of political campaigning.
“We have been voiceless, we have been asleep, we have been lazy and so I just decided to do something about it,” said Cabrera, the senior pastor and founder of City Church Harlingen, an evangelical leaning church in South Texas.
When disaster hits, Latino pastors serve hot meals and clean debris. As the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the country, they helped people who could not afford to pay rent. With the midterm election only weeks away, more and more of them are stepping into the political battle for the so-called Latino vote.
Cabrera is part of a growing group of Latino faith leaders who are not shying away from politics anymore, claiming they grew frustrated over how the values and morals they preach have been lost to many people in America.
“I was tired of the condition of the nation and the church. I was seeing how everything was just shifting and I saw the evil in this land,” Cabrera said.
Latino Protestant churches surfaced as a key organizing space since the 2020 election when then-President Donald Trump did considerably better in some Hispanic areas than he did in 2016. In the weeks ahead of the midterm elections, some of its leaders held voter registration events and made appearances in political events putting in evidence the potential of their political influence as the Hispanic electorate rises.
In Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott is up for reelection and a new congressional map is expected to bolster the GOP’s majority, Cabrera’s goal is to get more Latino pastors and their parishioners involved in politics. For him, it all started in the months ahead of the 2020 election when he talked about politics in one of his sermons and the positive response from thet community led him to organize nearly two dozen prayer circles, which he eventually took the “Trump train” events held at the time in the Rio Grande Valley.
CNN News