Anita Huízar-Hernández, Ph.D., is a 2024-2025 PRRI Public Fellow and Associate Director of the Hispanic Research Center and Associate Professor in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the historical roots of Latino religious, political, and cultural expression.
According to the 2024 PRRI American Values Atlas, which provides a comprehensive picture of support for Christian nationalism in all 50 states, a minority of Americans qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (20%). Those numbers shift dramatically, however, when taking into consideration other factors including partisanship, media habits, age, education level, religious affiliation, and racial identity.
In the case of Hispanic Americans, the way these factors intersect to predict affinity for or aversion to Christian nationalism is highly complex and challenges certain assumptions regarding Hispanic American racial and religious identity. This Spotlight Analysis explores how religious affiliation and racial identity intersect with support for Christian nationalist ideology among Hispanic Americans.
Hispanic Protestants are notably more likely to qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents and Sympathizers (57%) than Hispanic Catholics (26%) and religiously unaffiliated Hispanics (9%). This is not surprising; in 2023, PRRI found that “Identifying as evangelical or born-again is positively correlated with holding Christian nationalist views.”[1] In 2024, the only religious group that expresses stronger support for Christian nationalist views is white evangelical Protestants, with 65% qualifying as either Adherents or Sympathizers.
Those numbers are more nuanced when also accounting for racial identity. For example, Hispanic Protestants who identify as white are notably more likely to hold Christian nationalist views (58%) than those who identify as nonwhite (43%).[2] Hispanic Catholics, however, show the reverse pattern. Nonwhite Hispanic Catholics are more likely to identify with Christian nationalism (36%) than white Hispanic Catholics (25%).
These racial breakdowns are especially significant given that Hispanic Americans are increasingly likely to identify as white. In 2013, 65% of all Hispanic Americans identified as white as compared with 88% in 2024. When broken down by religious affiliation, we see that whereas Hispanic Protestants and Catholics used to mirror one another when it came to claiming a white identity (68% of Protestants and 67% of Catholics in 2013), today a larger percentage of Hispanic Catholics (92%) identify as white than Hispanic Protestants (87%).[3]
To understand these shifts in racial identity, we need further research into what self-identifying as white means to Hispanic Americans. We have long known that Hispanic Americans’ relationship to whiteness in the U.S. is contextual, as the dominant U.S. culture has legally categorized Hispanic Americans as white while often culturally marginalizing Hispanic Americans as nonwhite. We know less about how Hispanic Americans define whiteness for themselves. What the numbers above reveal is that whiteness does not automatically predict one stable set of values for Hispanic Americans but is rather dependent on the way whiteness informs and is informed by other identities, such as religious affiliation. While self-identifying as white has long been associated with assimilationist tendencies among Hispanic Americans, these numbers suggest that what Hispanic Americans are assimilating to remains an open question.
Additionally, the fact that a nonwhite racial identity in some cases indicates a higher proclivity for Christian nationalism may suggest that for some Hispanic Christians, their relationship to Christian nationalism is likely external to the U.S. The U.S. is not the only country in the hemisphere with a Christian nationalist political movement. Many Hispanic Americans may have some level of familiarity with Christian nationalist ideals in their home countries and may in fact identify more strongly with those movements and their ideologies than the strain of Christian nationalism that exists in the U.S. My own research on the migration patterns of Mexican Cristeros, Catholic political activists who opposed Mexico’s secularization in the early twentieth century, suggests that people migrate with Christian nationalist views that then inform their immigrant identities.
Taking these findings together, whiteness has an opposite correlation to Christian nationalism for Hispanic Protestants than Hispanic Catholics. To understand this difference, we need to reexamine our assumptions about what both whiteness and Christian nationalism mean to Hispanic Americans. As the prolonged postmortem of the 2024 U.S. presidential election continues, the “Latino vote” remains a central topic of conversation. However, as so many have been quick to point out, Hispanic American voters are no monolith. To truly understand Hispanic American heterogeneity, we need to go beyond one-dimensional racial and religious subcategories to instead consider how the interplay among the many different identities that Hispanic Americans inhabit intersect with and inform one another.
[1] Unlike white Protestants, the Hispanic Protestant sample size is not large enough to separate mainline Protestants from evangelical/born-again Protestants.
[2] Though the number of cases for nonwhite Hispanic Protestants is 91, the difference with white Hispanic Protestants is statistically significant at p. value <0.05.
[3] The difference between Hispanic Catholics and Hispanic Protestants who identify as white is significant at a p-value <0.055.