While the Roman Catholic Church, mainline Protestants, Jews and Muslims have backed the emerging immigrants' rights movement, the situation has proved more complex for some conservative Protestants.
Struggling to balance compassion with respect for law and order — and dealing with an increasing number of Hispanics in their churches — evangelicals have lacked the united front they have presented on matters such as abortion and gay marriage, with some groups notably quiet.
"Evangelical leaders are concerned that our voice be a biblical voice that does not send the wrong signal to the growing Latino community," said the Rev. Richard Cizik, Washington spokesman for the National Association of Evangelicals
Cizik was one of several officials from evangelical organizations who were briefed Tuesday on
President Bush's plans by top adviser Karl Rove — the idea being to gather support and head off opposition. Other groups represented included the Concerned Women for America, Institute on Religion and Democracy, National Religious Broadcasters and Southern Baptist Convention.
Tanya Erzen of http://www.talk2action.org, which monitors and criticizes the conservative Christian movement, said the issue is tricky for evangelicals because they want to mobilize Hispanics behind their favored social causes, and know that many of the street demonstrators are "members of evangelical churches that represent a key constituency."
A report to the NAE board's March meeting said more evangelical converts come from Hispanic communities than from any other sector in America. Cizik counts 600,000 Hispanic converts from Catholicism living in the United States.
Pew Research Center polling this year showed nearly two-thirds of white evangelicals thought immigrants threaten "traditional American customs and values" and are a burden on "our jobs, housing and health care," well above the percentages for white Catholics, mainline Protestants and the U.S. population in general.
The Evangelicals are in a pickle here. The want to court the Hispanic Catholics behind their pet causes of abortion and gay marriage, but their own extreme law-and-order stance of Minutemen watching the border and concrete fences to keep the illegals out, will actually go against the desires of the Hispanic community for an amnesty program for long-term illegal immigrants to become legal residents in the U.S. And what is more, the Evangelical church leadership's concerns for this balancing act of courting Hispanics, actually goes against their congregation's white evangelicals political views of illegal immigration threatens jobs, housing health care, and traditional values, as reported by the Pew Research Center. They are in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation since it is likely that the most radical of Evangelical leaders were also decrying that illegal immigration would threaten "traditional American values and society" for years.
What goes around, comes around.
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