(RNS1-MAY1) Luis Rosas of Holyoke, Mass., is prayed for by Julio Parissi, husband of Carmen Calderon-Parissi, pastor of Movimiento Iglesia Cristiana Pentecostal Church in Holyoke, during a service. Religion News Service file photo by Mieke Zuiderweg.

(RNS1-MAY1) Luis Rosas of Holyoke, Mass., is prayed for by Julio Parissi, husband of Carmen Calderon-Parissi, pastor of Movimiento Iglesia Cristiana Pentecostal Church in Holyoke, during a service. Religion News Service file photo by Mieke Zuiderweg.

(RNS) With less than six months to go before the start of the 2010 census, immigration reform activists — divided over whether undocumented immigrants should volunteer to be counted — are escalating rhetoric as they seek critical support from Latino evangelical pastors.

On Oct. 1, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) launched a nationwide campaign to encourage participation in the census and recruit support from faith leaders. Arturo Vargas, NALEO’s executive director, said nonparticipants in the census “cause injury to their community” by keeping public resources from reaching their neighbors in need.

At the same time, a group of evangelical Latino pastors who support a census boycott is not backing down.

The heated exchanges underscore the high stakes of the once-a-decade population count. Communities with large immigrant populations stand to win more representation in Congress and attract millions in additional federal funding under existing formulas.

Yet if immigrants avoid census takers en masse, such benefits may never materialize.

The boycott threat “is the only reason why we’re beginning to see some movement in Congress on comprehensive immigration reform,” said Miguel Rivera, president of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders (CONLAMIC), which supports a boycott.

Congressional Democrats, he said, don’t want to lose political clout on Capitol Hill due to an undercount in immigrant communities and are more open to new legislation.

Tensions intensified when CONLAMIC accused NALEO of spreading “lies” and “terrorizing” undocumented immigrants by suggesting that public services, including funding for public schools, will suffer if immigrants aren’t counted.

“It’s a lie that schools will lose money,” Rivera said. “… They’re financed by taxes paid by residents in the community,” including undocumented immigrant homeowners.

Whether undocumented immigrants get counted or not may hinge to a large degree on the advice they hear inside Latino evangelical congregations, observers say. These churches, which often gather in rented retail storefront spaces, serve as trusted havens for transient populations, including millions of first-generation immigrants, according to Arlene Sanchez-Walsh, associate professor of Latino church studies at Azusa Pacific University.

“The issue with the census is: can you frame it in a theological frame?” Sanchez-Walsh said. For pastors to be influential on the issue, she said, “people need it tied to a theological matrix. Otherwise it’s very hard to bring it down to the grass roots as a spiritual issue and say, `This is why this matters to you.'”

To date, it’s not clear how much support the boycott idea is gaining in Latino evangelical churches, home to an estimated 7 million to 9 million worshippers. Rivera says 314 pastors in his network voted unanimously to urge a census boycott; he estimates that 2.5 million immigrants in CONLAMIC’s network have pledged to take what he calls the “radical” measure of skipping the census.

Sanchez-Walsh, however, says support for a boycott is probably far lower, since Rivera and his New Jersey-based efforts are still largely unknown in the West and Southwest.

Activists on both sides are targeting evangelical pulpits and pews by framing the issue in moral terms. Opponents of the boycott charge that it would be immoral to sit out because doing so would disenfranchise underprivileged Hispanic communities.

The census “should garner a faith response (because) one person answering the census could have an effect on (congressional) redistricting,” and Hispanics need full representation, said Luis Cortes, president of Esperanza, a network of more than 10,000 Latino evangelical congregations.

“It’s an affront to human dignity to make (undocumented people) invisible” by encouraging nonparticipation, added Gabriel Salguero, an evangelical pastor and director of Hispanic programs at Princeton Theological Seminary. “Invisibility is not an option.”

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Boycott supporters, meanwhile, are grounding their moral case in terms of social justice. Rivera sees a boycott as “protection” from federal immigration raids that occurred in areas in which the 2000 census identified immigrant population centers.

Brazilian immigrant Fausto da Rocha, an evangelist at The Temple of Miracles church in Quincy, Mass., advocates for a census boycott every day on his Portuguese-language AM radio talk show. He makes the same case at church, both before and after services.

“How is (a boycott) going to hurt us? We’re already suffering,” da Rocha said. “We can’t let the government, the politicians, destroy our families. More and more families are separated and broken” because of the country’s immigration policies.

The solution, he said, is immigration reform, and a census boycott brings necessary pressure to make it happen.

A census boycott would be called off, organizers say, if Congress were to pass immigration reform before April. Lawmakers are expected to introduce new legislation in the House and Senate as soon as this fall.