Our next book will look at the 2024 election, which had fascinating demographic features.
Michelle Boorstein at The Washington Post:
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 poor and disenfranchised people, 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 strive.
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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.
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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 Center 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.
