Colombia’s new president was elected from the pulpit, and the poor will pay the bill.
On Aug. 7, Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as president of Colombia, and the ceremony showed what had built him. An evangelical pastor led the assembly in prayer alongside a Catholic priest and a rabbi. The man who had preached from the pulpits of Bogotá and Cartagena took the oath of office. He had won the June runoff by roughly 250,000 votes, with the explicit endorsement of the country’s two main evangelical parties — Colombia Justa Libres and MIRA — after a pastor introduced him in near-biblical terms as the leader Colombia needed. The gospel had been a campaign tool. The churches had been a campaign office. The arrangement worked.
The empirical record is plain. The Evangelical Parliamentary Front in Brazil — the Bancada Evangélica — now numbers roughly 244 federal deputies and senators and has become one of the most influential blocs in the country’s congress, shaping the debates over abortion, sexuality, education, and religious liberty. Recent Pew surveys show that Catholic identification has declined substantially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia; in Chile, roughly one-third of adults surveyed in 2024 were religiously unaffiliated. The old religious monopoly is ending, and what is replacing it is not a unified evangelical consensus but a contested pluralism — Catholics, evangelicals, seculars, each pulling at the same body politic. The trust that is breaking across the region’s institutions is the political form of the same transaction: ordinary people turned into numbers, and the numbers handed to whoever shows up with the most votes and the least shame.
The priests who sailed with Columbus in 1493 brought the Gospel. They also brought the encomienda. Bartolomé de las Casas defended the Indigenous; other friars defended the system that consumed them. The Catholic Church in Latin America was, from its first century, both the voice that named the cruelty and the institution that benefited from it. That contradiction never fully healed. In the twentieth century it took a particular shape: the wealthy countries of the North built their theology around property; the poor countries of the South, where the Catholic Church still had its mass base, asked what the Gospel said about land reform and wages. The Medellín conference of 1968, when the Latin American bishops received Vatican II for their continent, tried to answer. They called it the preferential option for the poor. They meant it. Many of them died for it.
Then the Vatican, under Pope Benedict XVI, disciplined the theologians who had tried to live out what Medellín had named. Jon Sobrino, the Jesuit survivor of the UCA massacre, was censured in 2006 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — not by the Salvadoran army, but by the doctrinal office of his own Church, in Rome. Óscar Romero — who had stood in the pulpit of his cathedral on the night before he was shot and said, “In the name of God, I beseech you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression” — was killed through the heart while celebrating Mass on March 24, 1980. The institutional Church that beatified him thirty-five years after the bullets, in 2015, and canonized him three years later, is the same institutional Church that, for most of those thirty-five years, treated his theology as dangerous.
I want to say this plainly, because the tradition I come from has no standing to point fingers from a height. The Catholic Church has bought and sold pulpits for power longer than the evangelical movement has existed. We made our concordats with the generals of the nineteenth century. We made our accommodations with the caudillos of the twentieth. We discovered, in the long aftermath of Vatican II, that when the Church became useful to the political left, it was also vulnerable to the political left. The same apparatus that served the bishops of liberation theology served the bishops of the reaction. The gospel was a campaign tool in our hands before it was a campaign tool in theirs. The knowing does not cure the trade; it only means the pointing finger has three of its own pointing back.
The prophets called this what it is. Jeremiah, watching the priests of Jerusalem heal the wound of his people lightly, saying Peace, peace, when there is no peace — that is the verse. Isaiah, watching the courts of his own day call evil good and good evil — that is the verse. The Hebrew prophets did not write about religion; they wrote about what religion becomes when it forgets what it is for. And what it becomes, when it forgets, is a campaign office. Jesus said it in Matthew 23: the tithing of mint and dill while the weightier matters of justice and mercy are neglected. The words apply because the texts apply. They apply because the Gospel applies. The words do not get less true because the politician wearing the stole this month is Colombian and evangelical rather than American and Catholic.
I want to be precise about what I am criticizing. I am not criticizing the evangelical grandmother who found Christ in a storefront church in Tegucigalpa. I am not criticizing the Pentecostal deacon who feeds two hundred families a week from his church’s kitchen. The work of those communities — much of it invisible to the politics reporters — is the work Christ described in Matthew 25: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner. I will not join the conservative Catholic pile-on that treats every evangelical convert as a fallen-away soul.
What I am criticizing is the operation that takes those genuine communities of faith and turns them into a delivery mechanism for a political candidate. The pastor who introduces the presidential hopeful in near-biblical terms is doing what the scribes and Pharisees did when they made the temple a marketplace. He is taking sacred language and laundering a political transaction with it. He is telling his congregation that to vote for this man is to do God’s will. That is not preaching. That is mobilization dressed in a stole.
Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, said it from the pulpit of his cathedral on the night before they killed him. A church that does not provoke any crisis, a gospel that does not unsettle, a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — what gospel is that? That is the substance of what he preached. He was a pastor who read the gospel and did what it said. The men who killed him did so because Romero would not make the gospel a campaign tool for the military government. The Colombian presidential candidate, the Brazilian congressional bloc, the evangelical pastor who introduced the man as the leader the country needed — none of them have to do what Romero did. They only have to stop doing what they are doing.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi who marched with Martin Luther King at Selma and said afterward that his legs were praying, wrote that few are guilty, but all are responsible. The politician who uses the prophet’s voice for his own ambition is the one who has made the prophet’s voice into a campaign tool. The pastor who hands over the pulpit for the politician’s agenda is the one who has made the church into a campaign office. The voter who exchanges the dignity of the pews for the next election cycle’s promises is the one who has made the gospel into a get-out-the-vote operation. And the bishop who stays silent while the altars are turned into ballot boxes is one of the responsible.
The good news is that the gospel survives being used. The good news is that the church survives being instrumentalized. And the seculars — the third current rising alongside the Catholics and the evangelicals, especially among the young and the urban — are not a footnote to this contest. They are evidence of what happens when the churches spend a generation selling what was given to them. They walked out.
And here is the part that costs me to write: the Catholic Church in Latin America — including the parts of it I love, including the parish in El Paso where my grandmother lit candles every Saturday, including the base communities that kept the Gospel alive through the dirty wars, including Pope Leo XIV’s American-born papacy and whatever it may yet mean — the Catholic Church created the vacuum that the new political religious operations are filling. We had the people. We had the neighborhoods. We had the moral vocabulary. For five centuries we had the monopoly. And we used much of that monopoly to serve the landowners and the generals and the banks, and to discipline the priests who told us we were wrong. The people who left our pews were not wrong to leave. They were often right. They read the same Gospel we read. They just believed it more than we did.
So what now? I do not think the answer is for the bishops to denounce the evangelicals from Rome, or to write another document about the New Evangelization that nobody in the neighborhood will read. The answer is the one the prophets named and Romero lived and the UCA Jesuits died for. It is the answer that costs something. It means the Church must go back to the option for the poor — not as a slogan but as a budget line, not as a conference document but as who gets fed first when the food runs out. It means the priest in the parish must know the names of the children who didn’t show up to catechism this year and must find out why. It means the diocese must stop taking its cues from the wealthy donors and start taking them from the mothers who clean the wealthy donors’ houses.
There is a verse from Jeremiah that I have been carrying for weeks. “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” The wound in Latin America is real. The peace being sold — from whichever pulpit is selling it this week — is not.
The pulpits in Latin America — Catholic, evangelical, and the secular ones too — can keep delivering voters to politicians. Or they can start delivering the Gospel to the poor. The poor will pay the bill either way; the question is what currency the bill comes in. The new president will keep the promises he made to the men who delivered him the pulpits. The wages that don’t rise, the schools that stay underfunded, the rivers that get sold to the mines, the migrants who get sent back over the border — those will be paid by the same families who used to fill our pews on Sunday. The poor know the difference. They always have.
The door of return is open. It is always open. The pastor in Bogotá who introduced the new president can repent. The Catholic bishop who stayed silent during the dirty wars, and the Catholic bishop who is staying silent now, can repent. The voter who heard the Gospel and walked away from a Church that did not live it can come home — but only if the Church becomes the kind of place worth coming home to. The gospel is not a campaign tool. The church is not a campaign office. The people in the pews are people. The door is open.