c. 2004 Religion & Ethics Newsweekly

DEMING, N.M. _ Republicans and Democrats alike are using faith-based appeals in an effort to attract the rapidly growing but largely untapped Hispanic population, according to activists and academics.

“There’s a line in the `Our Father,’ you know: `Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,”’ said Santiago Juarez, director of VIVA _ the Voters’ Initiative for Voices in Action, a nonpartisan group seeking to register Hispanic voters.

“Well, there’s one way we exercise `thy will on earth,’ and that is we get involved in the political process. What we’re trying to do is reach a community and reach communities that have not been engaged,” he said.

Juarez and VIVA were registering voters at St. Ann Roman Catholic Church here as part of a partnership with the Diocese of Las Cruces. He made his comments in a report on Hispanics and politics for the PBS television show “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly” airing this weekend. Hispanics are one of the nation’s most rapidly growing minority groups.

There are roughly 40 million Latinos in the United States and an estimated 8 million to 10 million of them are registered to vote this year. According to the Census Bureau, the Hispanic population is expected to triple over the next 50 years, creating a huge pool of voters up for grabs. But their political strength remains largely untapped and experts say faith-based organizations are having a key influence as Hispanics develop their political muscle.

“They (Hispanics) look to the church for advice on how to live in a new and different environment,” said Timothy Matovina, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism who has written widely on Latinos. “And so when the church encourages civic participation by voter registration, by becoming concerned and knowledgeable about the issues, by voting responsibly, this carries tremendous weight with Hispanics.

At St. Ann’s Catholic Church, VIVA representatives encouraged parishioners to see voting as part of their moral responsibility as citizens.

“The Catholic Church is not saying which candidate it endorses; it doesn’t. Which party it endorses; it doesn’t,” VIVA’s Paco Vallejos told the congregation. “It’s simply saying to us to do your work, change the world. Use your conscience.”

Like most relatively new immigrant groups, Hispanics _ with the exception of Cubans _ tend to vote Democratic. In 2000, about two-thirds of Latino voters voted for Al Gore. But there is great ethnic and growing economic diversity within the community and that means Democrats don’t have a lock on the Latino vote, according to the experts.

“The Hispanic vote is not a single unified bloc,” said Matovina. “It tends to still be strongly in the Democratic Party, but because of Cubans, who vote … their national interests on the island, because of upward mobility, because of some resonance with Republican stands on moral issues, there are a number of reasons why Republicans are gaining a somewhat more important percentage of the Latino vote.”

Like some in the African-American community, many Hispanics lean liberal on economic issues but are conservative on social issues like abortion and gay marriage. One evangelical group seeking to capitalize on the latter leaning is Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs, Colo., radio ministry headed by James Dobson.

“We know for sure that the majority of Hispanics are pro-life and pro-family,” said Yuri Mantilla, who leads the effort to organize Latinos for Focus on the Family. “The issue of abortion, the issue of stem cell research, the issue of homosexual marriage are issues that are going to affect our children, our grandchildren, the future of our nation.”

Mantilla said the issue of gay marriage is especially galvanizing Hispanic voters.

“You need to understand that the Hispanic culture is so pro-family that to tell Hispanics that marriage is not the union between a man and a woman _ forget it,” he said. “You immigrated to this country, now marriage is going to be the union between a man and a man and a woman and a woman? That’s absolutely unacceptable to Hispanics.”

But Notre Dame’s Matovina questioned how effective a campaign based on the issues of gay marriage and abortion will be among Latinos.

“They tend to be far more concerned in their voting patterns with the issues that affect their families, day-to-day living in their own family lives, such as education, immigration, welfare, job training, concern for youth and so on. And so I think they tend to be, they are, the more important issues on which they base their vote.

Community organizer Juarez was even more dismissive.

“The issues around gay marriage, the issues around abortion, are not designed to say, `Go vote about it.’ They’re designed to say, `You know what? That’s one you can’t win, so stay at home.”’

Both President Bush and Democrat John Kerry have been actively courting the Hispanic vote and both of their efforts acknowledge the deep spirituality among Latinos.

Bush’s Spanish-language Web site emphasizes the president’s compassionate conservatism and his faith-based initiatives. For his part, Kerry, weeks before he began talking about religion and faith on the campaign trail, released a Spanish-language TV ad promoting his candidacy that said, “Faith is the foundation of our culture. We need a leader guided by this value.”

Matovina said that Hispanics are wary of too close an alliance between church and state, but at the same time, they “do want to know the person they’re voting for is a person they can trust. And to them, a person they can trust means a person who has a deep-based faith in God which guides their life.”

MO/PH END DEA/LAWTON

(Kim Lawton is managing editor of “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.” a weekly PBS television show.)