Evangelicals pushing Republicans to back immigration reform
Immigration reform is a topic at Orangewood Nazarene Church, where James Montaño worships.
David Kadlubowski/The Republic
RELATED PHOTOS
The Republic | azcentral.comFri Jun 7, 2013 10:50 AM
The radio ad opens with Valley megachurch Pastor Don Wilson declaring that “Christians should be known for their love,” while soothing guitar music plays in the background.
But the ad’s religious tone quickly segues into the thorny political issue of immigration reform, with Wilson imploring evangelicals to join a movement that asks political leaders to support changes rooted in biblical values.
Those values, Wilson intones, respect the rule of law, protect family unity, guarantee secure borders, ensure fairness to taxpayers and, finally, “establish a path toward citizenship” for the 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.
“Our Arizona elected officials need your prayers,” concludes Wilson, senior pastor of the 20,000-member Christ’s Church of the Valley, based in Peoria. “They need to hear your voice.”
The 1-minute ad has been running all week on two Valley radio stations: conservative talk-radio station KKNT-AM (960), “The Patriot,” and Christian radio station KPXQ-AM (1360).
Similar ads narrated by other prominent evangelical Christian leaders from around the country have been running this week in 13 other key states.
The ads are part of a growing campaign by politically influential evangelical Christian leaders using Bible Scripture to drum up support for immigration reforms that include a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.
The ads are timed in advance of the full U.S. Senate’s debate over the sweeping immigration-reform bill, which is expected to start next week. The bill, crafted by a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight, will need to gain the support of conservative Republicans to ensure passage in the Senate and later in the GOP-controlled House.
But many GOP members of Congress and some conservative Democrats remain opposed to any bill that includes a pathway to citizenship, which they view as a form of amnesty that would reward immigrants who broke the law and thus encourage more illegal immigration in the future.
Political analysts, however, say the growing movement by evangelical leaders could help sway some conservative GOP members in Congress to back immigration reforms that include a pathway to citizenship, because evangelical Christians make up a large part of the Republican voting base.
About a quarter of the nation’s adult population are evangelicals, according to some estimates, which amounts to roughly 58 million people based on 2010 census data.
In 2012, White evangelicals made up about a third of registered voters who identified themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
During the 2012 presidential election in November, 79 percent of born-again Christians/evangelicals voted for Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, according to Pew.
“It’s a community that has tended to be Republican and conservative,” said John Green, who studies religion and politics as director of the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute. “(And) because this group is very closely connected to the Republican Party and Republicans pay a lot of attention to them, then if evangelicals could be mobilized for immigration reform, that has the potential to push Republican lawmakers toward some kind of compromise.”
The support from evangelicals may also provide political cover for GOP lawmakers concerned that voting for a bill that includes a pathway to citizenship could make them vulnerable to a primary challenge from members of their own party trying to paint them as being soft on illegal immigration.
“If I were a Republican member inclined to support immigration reform, I’d feel a little more comfortable going into a town-hall meeting talking about the support of evangelical groups. That might help provide a bit of insulation against some of the criticism,” said John J. “Jack” Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California.
‘Welcome the foreigner’
The campaign represents a major shift by evangelical Christian leaders, who in the past tended to oppose a pathway to citizenship, which they saw as being at odds with strongly held beliefs of the importance of following the rule of law, experts say.
Many experts also say the shift is being driven by theology — evangelicals believe the Bible calls on Christians to “welcome the stranger” — as well as efforts by evangelical leaders to reach out to growing numbers of Latino immigrants.
“A lot of this simply has to do with the sense among many evangelical leaders that the immigrant community, particularly the Hispanic community, is very important to the future of evangelical churches, that the missionary opportunities are very large,” Green said.
Evangelical leaders also understand that many of their churches are filled with Latinos and Latino immigrants, many of whom have recently converted.
Merci Alejandro, 47, was born Catholic but converted to evangelical Christianity about 30 years ago.
Alejandro, whose parents were from Mexico, attends Orangewood Nazarene Church in Phoenix. She was thrilled when the pastor recently gave a sermon in support of immigration reform based on Bible Scripture because she knows some immigrants who are in the country illegally and would like to see them get their papers.
“He talked about how we should welcome the foreigner,” she said. “And how Jesus cared for and loved the foreigner.”
Every year, about 600,000 Latinos in the U.S. convert from Catholicism to evangelical denominations, said Gaston Espinosa, a religion professor at Claremont McKenna College and an expert on Latino evangelicals.
The Southern Baptists claim at least 2,000 Latino churches. The Assemblies of God claim 2,400 Latino churches, he said.
“This is actually a pretty important development, I would argue, in American evangelism, where you have these White, Euro-American evangelical leaders of national stature coming on board to support this,” Espinosa said.
Evangelical leaders also have been forced to confront the immigration issue because, under President Barack Obama’s administration, the government has deported record numbers of immigrants, affecting many immigrant families in their churches, he said.
The deportations have “put them in something of a dilemma of what they are supposed to do because they are supposed to be about pro-family and not wanting to divide families,” Espinosa said. “On the other hand, they are supposed to uphold the rule of law.”
It’s unclear, however, whether the push by evangelical leaders for immigration reforms will create a backlash among non-Hispanic evangelicals.
A March survey by Pew Research Center indicated there is less support among White evangelicals for allowing undocumented immigrants to gain legal status or citizenship compared with White mainline Protestants and White Catholics.
White evangelicals also are more likely to view immigrants as a burden and a threat to traditional American customs compared with White mainline Protestants and Catholics, the survey said.
“Just because the leadership of a religious group takes a particular point of view does not mean the members will adopt that point of view en masse,” said Greg Smith, senior researcher at the Pew Research Center.
Conservatives’ questions
The $250,000 radio ad campaign is being funded by the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant-advocacy group in Washington, D.C., in partnership with the Evangelical Immigration Table, a coalition of prominent local and national evangelical leaders who represent a broad range of evangelical churches and organizations.
Those leaders include Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition; and Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
The radio ad campaign has come under attack from some conservative websites and bloggers because the National Immigration Forum receives some of its funding from George Soros’ liberal Open Society Foundations.
None of the funding the National Immigration Forum receives from the Open Society Foundations was used to pay for the Evangelical Immigration Table’s radio ad campaign, said Ali Noorani, the forum’s executive director.
He said that the forum also receives money from conservative donors and that the forum’s board of director includes many conservatives, including Jeb Bush Jr., the son of former governor Jeb Bush.
The radio ads began airing nationally May 30 and will air in Arizona through Sunday, Noorani said. They are running in 14 states that have representatives in Congress considered key to passing an immigration-reform bill.
Arizona was picked primarily because U.S. Rep. Trent Franks sits on the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over immigration issues.
Arizona’s two senators, Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake, are members of the Gang of Eight that crafted the bill pending in the Senate.
Last week, a group of Valley evangelical leaders who are part of the Evangelical Immigration Table met with Franks at his Glendale office, hoping to persuade him to support an immigration-reform bill that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Franks, a Republican and evangelical Christian, is perhaps the most open of Arizona’s Congress members about his faith. He sometimes makes biblical references and argues policy based on religious principles.
When asked about immigration, he points to personal experience: It took years for his wife, who is from the Philippines, to obtain citizenship.
Although Franks made no commitment during the meeting, the evangelical leaders left encouraged after the discussion scheduled for 30 minutes stretched to an hour and a half, said Adam Estle, who attended.
Estle is a lay leader at the Orangewood Nazarene Church in Phoenix and is the immigration- program director at LifeBridge Community Alliance, a church-affiliated program that provides services to immigrants.
Franks declined to be interviewed about the meeting.
But he told The Arizona Republic last month in Washington that one of his foremost immigration concerns, besides securing the border, is figuring out a fair way to deal with the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.
Like many conservative House Republicans, he emphasized a preference for allowing undocumented immigrants to gain legal status over a direct path to citizenship. And he said legalization must not crowd out immigrants already in line for green cards.
If Congress lets illegal immigrants gain legal status or citizenship too quickly, Franks said, that will undermine those who have been trying to come to the United States the legal way.
The bill pending in the Senate says undocumented immigrants can’t get green cards until all immigrants who have been waiting to come here legally have received theirs first.
“My deepest desire is to do the thing that is first and foremost just,” Franks said after exiting a Judiciary Committee hearing. “What if we move to a path to legalization? How do we reconcile that with justice and fairness with those that come here legally?
“If we get that right, the rest, to me, would be easy.”
Republic reporter Rebekah L. Sanders contributed to this article.
But the ad’s religious tone quickly segues into the thorny political issue of immigration reform, with Wilson imploring evangelicals to join a movement that asks political leaders to support changes rooted in biblical values.
Those values, Wilson intones, respect the rule of law, protect family unity, guarantee secure borders, ensure fairness to taxpayers and, finally, “establish a path toward citizenship” for the 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.
“Our Arizona elected officials need your prayers,” concludes Wilson, senior pastor of the 20,000-member Christ’s Church of the Valley, based in Peoria. “They need to hear your voice.”
The 1-minute ad has been running all week on two Valley radio stations: conservative talk-radio station KKNT-AM (960), “The Patriot,” and Christian radio station KPXQ-AM (1360).
Similar ads narrated by other prominent evangelical Christian leaders from around the country have been running this week in 13 other key states.
The ads are part of a growing campaign by politically influential evangelical Christian leaders using Bible Scripture to drum up support for immigration reforms that include a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.
The ads are timed in advance of the full U.S. Senate’s debate over the sweeping immigration-reform bill, which is expected to start next week. The bill, crafted by a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight, will need to gain the support of conservative Republicans to ensure passage in the Senate and later in the GOP-controlled House.
But many GOP members of Congress and some conservative Democrats remain opposed to any bill that includes a pathway to citizenship, which they view as a form of amnesty that would reward immigrants who broke the law and thus encourage more illegal immigration in the future.
Political analysts, however, say the growing movement by evangelical leaders could help sway some conservative GOP members in Congress to back immigration reforms that include a pathway to citizenship, because evangelical Christians make up a large part of the Republican voting base.
About a quarter of the nation’s adult population are evangelicals, according to some estimates, which amounts to roughly 58 million people based on 2010 census data.
In 2012, White evangelicals made up about a third of registered voters who identified themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
During the 2012 presidential election in November, 79 percent of born-again Christians/evangelicals voted for Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, according to Pew.
“It’s a community that has tended to be Republican and conservative,” said John Green, who studies religion and politics as director of the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute. “(And) because this group is very closely connected to the Republican Party and Republicans pay a lot of attention to them, then if evangelicals could be mobilized for immigration reform, that has the potential to push Republican lawmakers toward some kind of compromise.”
The support from evangelicals may also provide political cover for GOP lawmakers concerned that voting for a bill that includes a pathway to citizenship could make them vulnerable to a primary challenge from members of their own party trying to paint them as being soft on illegal immigration.
“If I were a Republican member inclined to support immigration reform, I’d feel a little more comfortable going into a town-hall meeting talking about the support of evangelical groups. That might help provide a bit of insulation against some of the criticism,” said John J. “Jack” Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California.
‘Welcome the foreigner’
The campaign represents a major shift by evangelical Christian leaders, who in the past tended to oppose a pathway to citizenship, which they saw as being at odds with strongly held beliefs of the importance of following the rule of law, experts say.
Many experts also say the shift is being driven by theology — evangelicals believe the Bible calls on Christians to “welcome the stranger” — as well as efforts by evangelical leaders to reach out to growing numbers of Latino immigrants.
“A lot of this simply has to do with the sense among many evangelical leaders that the immigrant community, particularly the Hispanic community, is very important to the future of evangelical churches, that the missionary opportunities are very large,” Green said.
Evangelical leaders also understand that many of their churches are filled with Latinos and Latino immigrants, many of whom have recently converted.
Merci Alejandro, 47, was born Catholic but converted to evangelical Christianity about 30 years ago.
Alejandro, whose parents were from Mexico, attends Orangewood Nazarene Church in Phoenix. She was thrilled when the pastor recently gave a sermon in support of immigration reform based on Bible Scripture because she knows some immigrants who are in the country illegally and would like to see them get their papers.
“He talked about how we should welcome the foreigner,” she said. “And how Jesus cared for and loved the foreigner.”
Every year, about 600,000 Latinos in the U.S. convert from Catholicism to evangelical denominations, said Gaston Espinosa, a religion professor at Claremont McKenna College and an expert on Latino evangelicals.
The Southern Baptists claim at least 2,000 Latino churches. The Assemblies of God claim 2,400 Latino churches, he said.
“This is actually a pretty important development, I would argue, in American evangelism, where you have these White, Euro-American evangelical leaders of national stature coming on board to support this,” Espinosa said.
Evangelical leaders also have been forced to confront the immigration issue because, under President Barack Obama’s administration, the government has deported record numbers of immigrants, affecting many immigrant families in their churches, he said.
The deportations have “put them in something of a dilemma of what they are supposed to do because they are supposed to be about pro-family and not wanting to divide families,” Espinosa said. “On the other hand, they are supposed to uphold the rule of law.”
It’s unclear, however, whether the push by evangelical leaders for immigration reforms will create a backlash among non-Hispanic evangelicals.
A March survey by Pew Research Center indicated there is less support among White evangelicals for allowing undocumented immigrants to gain legal status or citizenship compared with White mainline Protestants and White Catholics.
White evangelicals also are more likely to view immigrants as a burden and a threat to traditional American customs compared with White mainline Protestants and Catholics, the survey said.
“Just because the leadership of a religious group takes a particular point of view does not mean the members will adopt that point of view en masse,” said Greg Smith, senior researcher at the Pew Research Center.
Conservatives’ questions
The $250,000 radio ad campaign is being funded by the National Immigration Forum, an immigrant-advocacy group in Washington, D.C., in partnership with the Evangelical Immigration Table, a coalition of prominent local and national evangelical leaders who represent a broad range of evangelical churches and organizations.
Those leaders include Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition; and Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
The radio ad campaign has come under attack from some conservative websites and bloggers because the National Immigration Forum receives some of its funding from George Soros’ liberal Open Society Foundations.
None of the funding the National Immigration Forum receives from the Open Society Foundations was used to pay for the Evangelical Immigration Table’s radio ad campaign, said Ali Noorani, the forum’s executive director.
He said that the forum also receives money from conservative donors and that the forum’s board of director includes many conservatives, including Jeb Bush Jr., the son of former governor Jeb Bush.
The radio ads began airing nationally May 30 and will air in Arizona through Sunday, Noorani said. They are running in 14 states that have representatives in Congress considered key to passing an immigration-reform bill.
Arizona was picked primarily because U.S. Rep. Trent Franks sits on the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over immigration issues.
Arizona’s two senators, Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake, are members of the Gang of Eight that crafted the bill pending in the Senate.
Last week, a group of Valley evangelical leaders who are part of the Evangelical Immigration Table met with Franks at his Glendale office, hoping to persuade him to support an immigration-reform bill that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Franks, a Republican and evangelical Christian, is perhaps the most open of Arizona’s Congress members about his faith. He sometimes makes biblical references and argues policy based on religious principles.
When asked about immigration, he points to personal experience: It took years for his wife, who is from the Philippines, to obtain citizenship.
Although Franks made no commitment during the meeting, the evangelical leaders left encouraged after the discussion scheduled for 30 minutes stretched to an hour and a half, said Adam Estle, who attended.
Estle is a lay leader at the Orangewood Nazarene Church in Phoenix and is the immigration- program director at LifeBridge Community Alliance, a church-affiliated program that provides services to immigrants.
Franks declined to be interviewed about the meeting.
But he told The Arizona Republic last month in Washington that one of his foremost immigration concerns, besides securing the border, is figuring out a fair way to deal with the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.
Like many conservative House Republicans, he emphasized a preference for allowing undocumented immigrants to gain legal status over a direct path to citizenship. And he said legalization must not crowd out immigrants already in line for green cards.
If Congress lets illegal immigrants gain legal status or citizenship too quickly, Franks said, that will undermine those who have been trying to come to the United States the legal way.
The bill pending in the Senate says undocumented immigrants can’t get green cards until all immigrants who have been waiting to come here legally have received theirs first.
“My deepest desire is to do the thing that is first and foremost just,” Franks said after exiting a Judiciary Committee hearing. “What if we move to a path to legalization? How do we reconcile that with justice and fairness with those that come here legally?
“If we get that right, the rest, to me, would be easy.”
Republic reporter Rebekah L. Sanders contributed to this article.
No comments:
Post a Comment