The Colombian evangelical parties Colombia Justa Libres and MIRA endorsed Abelardo de la Espriella ahead of the June runoff. They did so from the pulpits of megachurches in Bogotá and Cartagena, where a pastor introduced him in near-biblical terms as the leader Colombia needed. He won the presidency by roughly 250,000 votes. At his August 7 swearing-in, an evangelical pastor led the assembly in prayer alongside a Catholic priest and a rabbi.
Near-biblical terms is the diplomatic way of saying the pulpit performed a coronation — the register of the anointed, applied to a candidate for office, in the house of God.
Colombia’s 1991 Constitution Article 19 establishes a secular state and guarantees the free exercise of religion. The Estatuto de Oposición (Ley 1909 de 2018) governs the rights and duties of opposition political movements, not the partisan endorsement of candidates by religious organizations whose tax-exempt status depends on their remaining non-political. The architecture was designed to keep sanctuaries and ballots in separate rooms. The architecture has not been enforced.
The prophets would name what is happening here. Jeremiah stood at the gate of the temple and delivered the sermon that every generation of religious leaders needs to hear and none wants to: “Do not trust in deceptive words and say, ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!’” (Jeremiah 7:4, NIV). Three repetitions: the chant of institutional safety, the rhetorical claim that having the right building, the right name, the right tradition means God is on your side regardless of what you do. Jeremiah’s answer was blunt. The temple would be destroyed. Not because the liturgy failed. Because the leaders who chanted “the temple of the Lord” used that chant to cover injustice, and God was not fooled.
Amos runs the same indictment in plainer words. “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me” (Amos 5:21, NIV). The Hebrew carries the force of a stench that turns the stomach. God is saying the worship is revolting when it is decoupled from justice. Isaiah tightens the screw: “Your hands are full of blood!” (Isaiah 1:15, NIV). The sacrifices were correct. The incense was the right blend. And God said the worship was an abomination when it covered the harm.
These texts do not describe empty worship in the abstract. They describe a specific operation: leaders who use the apparatus of religion to bless power while the people those leaders claim to serve bear the cost. The operation has not changed in twenty-seven centuries. The congregations change. The language changes. The political circumstances change. The machinery of using God’s name to consecrate human power is the same machine in ancient Judah and in modern Bogotá.
The temptation text is the sharpest of all. The devil led Jesus up to a high place and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and offered them: “I will give you all their authority and splendor… If you worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered from Deuteronomy: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only” (Luke 4:5–8; cf. Matthew 4:8–10). The operation’s reading treats the kingdoms of the world as the prize worth organizing for — the congress, the presidency, the seat at the inauguration — and the machinery that delivers them as the Lord’s work. The text’s plain reading is the opposite. In the text, the offer of the kingdoms is the tempter’s inventory; the refusal of the offer is the act of the Son of God. The distance between those two readings is the whole distance between a church and a campaign operation.
Hosea, in the eighth century before Christ, put the same indictment on the record: “They set up kings without my consent; they choose leaders without my approval” (Hosea 8:4). Read it in plain English. Israel kept appointing rulers and arranging alliances — with Egypt, with Assyria, with whichever power was strong that season — and then dressed the arrangements in religious confidence. The prophet’s charge is not that they had a politics; every people has a politics. The charge is that they had a politics and called it God’s. You did not hear Hosea 8:4 preached at the megachurch in Cartagena. You heard its opposite, in near-biblical terms.
And here is the historical-pattern beat, because the legalism is always younger than the text it claims to derive from. The explosive growth of evangelical and Pentecostal churches in Latin America accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s, in working-class and rural communities where small congregations could take root almost anywhere. Pastors often came from the communities they served. That is the real story — the genuine pastoral work, the communities that built churches because the churches served them. That story is real, and it is precisely what the political capture is destroying.
This is not a Colombian story. Brazil’s Bancada Evangélica — the Evangelical Parliamentary Front — counts roughly 244 federal deputies and senators and is one of the most influential blocs in the country’s congress. Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign was the test case of the alliance, with evangelical backing concentrated through the bancada; the cabinet credential was Damares Alves’s appointment as Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights. Costa Rica’s evangelical political movement ran Fabricio Alvarado of the Partido Nueva República into a 2018 presidential runoff, where the campaign fused Pentecostal pulpit and ballot line and the candidate finished first in the first round before losing the runoff. Country after country, the pulpit is being converted into a campaign office.
The underlying conditions have given the operation an opening. Credit the analysis its nuance: evangelical voters are no more a single movement than Catholics are, and religion alone does not explain the regional realignment. Crime, economic frustration, and the institutional trust erosion that has hollowed out established parties carry much of the weight. Pew Research Center surveys show Catholic identification declining in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, and in Chile roughly a third of adults surveyed in 2024 are religiously unaffiliated. Pluralism is not the gospel’s enemy. The danger is not that the field has new players. The danger is that the newest players brought the oldest sin — the altar conscripted for a coalition.
The collar is different in Bogotá. The move is the one my own tradition perfected at home — the prophecy that God has raised up a particular leader, the teaching that a nation that elects the right coalition has been delivered, the dominion doctrine that tells believers to take the heights of culture and then certifies the climbers as the Lord’s anointed. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, in Taking America Back for God, have documented what that movement is: the co-opting of Christian language and iconography to cloak political ends. The pattern travels.
And let the same standard cut both ways, because the texts are not tribal. When parts of the Catholic left, in the years of liberation theology, tied the church’s cause to a political coalition, the altar was conscripted the same way — a coalition blessed, its confidence dressed as the gospel. The corruption is never the political direction. The corruption is the attachment. A pulpit that certifies any coalition — mine or theirs, left or right — has stopped reading Scripture and started reading polls.
I know the people in those pews. I sat with the women who fed the neighborhood, prayed over the sick, and tithed out of pensions, and who trusted the man in the pulpit with their whole hearts. The woman who hears her pastor — the man who prayed at her mother’s deathbed — say that a candidate is the leader the nation needed is not an operative. She is a believer being spent. The congregation does not invent coronations. Coronations are performed over them. The indictment belongs to the ones who spent her: the parties that traded the blessing for the coalition, the pastors who performed the near-biblical introduction, the strategists who count a sanctuary’s trust as votes.
The test Jesus left is on the page: by their fruit you will know them (Matthew 7:16); I was hungry and you fed me, a stranger and you welcomed me, sick and you came to me (Matthew 25:35–36). That measure does not move when a new coalition moves in.
The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. The constitution says sanctuary and ballot belong in separate rooms. The tax code says religious organizations that endorse candidates lose what the state has given them. The Bible says God is not impressed by the chant and has never been. The only people still listening to the chant are the ones being counted by it.