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Socioeconomic Status and Religious Beliefs Among U.S. Latinos: Evidence from the 2006 Hispanic Religion Survey

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

This study examines how socioeconomic status is related to beliefs about the prosperity gospel and miracles among U.S. Latinos. Further, it investigates how religious involvement moderates this relationship. In analyses of data from the 2006 Hispanic Religion Survey (N = 3143), we find that higher levels of education and income are independently associated with lower likelihood of endorsing the prosperity gospel. However, the negative association between education and the likelihood of holding prosperity gospel beliefs is weaker among those Latinos who read scriptures frequently. In addition, although neither education nor income is directly related to miracle beliefs, their influence does depend on the frequency of scripture reading. For example, income is positively associated with the odds of endorsing miracle beliefs only among Latinos who regularly read scripture; by contrast, income is negatively associated with those same odds when scripture reading is infrequent. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories about the ways that different dimensions of social stratification are related to religious beliefs .

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Notes

  1. U.S. Latinos are marked by internal diversity with regard to religion and SES. For instance, Mexican Americans are the most disadvantaged subgroup within the Latino population in terms of income and educational achievement; Puerto Ricans tend to have very low SES (even compared to Mexican Americans in some data); Dominicans are also low in SES rankings, as are many (but not all) Central Americans. Cuban Americans are by far the highest in average SES. South Americans are heterogeneous as a group, but their average SES is probably higher than many other segments of the Latino population. Conservative Protestantism (and specifically Pentecostalism) is higher among Central Americans (especially from Guatemala, but also El Salvador) and Puerto Ricans as compared with Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans.

  2. Historically, it is difficult to precisely identify when the prosperity gospel beliefs become popular in Latino churches in the United States. However, it is observed that beginning in 1970 s, Latinos have started to leave their denominations for prosperity-preaching churches (Sánchez-Walsh 2011). By the mid-1980 s, Latino immigrant prosperity churches reframed prosperity gospel theology as having a special message for newly immigrated or second-generation Latino communities and encouraged them to cling to their cultural and linguistic heritage. Further, given that Latinos tend to find the messages of the prosperity gospel appealing, 22 percent of prosperity megachurches have Spanish-speaking ministries as part of their outreach efforts (Bowler 2013).

  3. As one of the reviewers mentioned, it would be worth analyzing how SES is related to the “material success” aspect of the prosperity gospel and the “health and sickness” aspect of the prosperity gospel separately. However, due to the data limitation, we were not able to push the analyses further in that direction.

  4. The percentage of those who report “do not know” (“DK” hereafter) to the question about prosperity gospel beliefs is 2.64 % whereas the percentage of DK for belief in miracles is 3.40 %. To address the concern that DK might be distinct from either those who agree or disagree, we estimated logistic regression models absent of this category. We found that the results from these analyses are fully consistent with the findings from the original models.

  5. Our analyses do not include control variables that failed to reach statistical significance such as employment, having a bank account, home ownership, and living in rural areas. Thus, they are eliminated from the tables.

  6. Primary language is used as a proxy measure of acculturation. In preliminary analyses not shown here, we noted that Latinos whose primary language is Spanish are more likely to place greater importance on religion and embrace religious beliefs than Latinos whose primary language is English or bilingual. In particular, those who are Spanish dominant overwhelmingly agree (83 %) that God will grant financial success and good health to believers, whereas among those who are English dominant or bilingual less than a two-thirds (63 %) agree. Therefore, we retain the single dummy variable to examine differences among these people in our analyses.

  7. In separate analyses (not shown here) we sought to assess how the relationship between SES and prosperity gospel beliefs varies by national origin. However, clear and significant patterns did not surface in the analyses. Moreover, given the relatively large sample size, we could test three-way contingencies between SES, religious involvement, and national origin (national origin group * SES * religious involvement). Yet, we could not detect any significant and meaningful patterns. Therefore, we decided to control for national origin to simply examine main effects of these Latino national origin subgroups on religious beliefs.

  8. Pentecostals are defined as “Protestants who belong to Pentecostal denominations, such as the Assembly of Christian Churches, Assemblies of God or the Pentecostal Church of God.” (Pew Hispanic Center and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life 2007).

  9. As Allison (2001) cautions, it is not appropriate to impute values that are not missing at random. Thus, we decided not to employ multiple imputation in handling missing data.

  10. We explored how prosperity gospel beliefs are distributed across religious denominations among U.S. Latinos. We found that majorities of Pentecostals (88.9 %), evangelicals (76.3 %), and Catholics (75.6 %) embrace prosperity gospel beliefs, whereas slightly more than half of other Christians (66.1 %) and mainline Protestants (57.1 %) say that God will grant wealth and good health to believers who have enough faith. What is noteworthy here is that Catholics are nearly as likely as evangelicals to believe in prosperity gospel. This is surprising given the orthodox tradition of Catholics that focuses on the virtue of suffering and poverty rather than material prosperity, social justice rather than individual upward mobility (Sniegocki 2009). However, these orthodox teachings of the Church do not prevent Latino Catholics from adhering to the prosperity gospel, partly because most lay Catholics in the U.S. do not follow many aspects of the Church’s teaching (Dillon 1996). In addition, U.S. Latinos develop popular Catholicism that preserves pre-Tridentine, premodern religious worldview that the material world is permeated with the spiritual (Espín 1994). Moreover, in the 1960 s and 1970 s the charismatic renewal movement made a spectacular entrance into a number of Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches in the United States, which emphasized the experience of the working of the Holy Spirit such as supernatural healing and speaking in tongues (Burgess 2002). As a carrier of prosperity gospel, this charismatic renewal movement quickly spread in Latin America and gained popularity among U.S. Latino Catholics. Collectively, these factors give explanations of why there are significant numbers of Latino Catholic adherents of the prosperity gospel in the United States.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Purdue University, 700W. State St, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Jong Hyun Jung

  2. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Scott Schieman

  3. University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Christopher G. Ellison

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  1. Jong Hyun Jung
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Correspondence to Jong Hyun Jung.

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Jung, J.H., Schieman, S. & Ellison, C.G. Socioeconomic Status and Religious Beliefs Among U.S. Latinos: Evidence from the 2006 Hispanic Religion Survey. Rev Relig Res 58, 469–493 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-016-0265-2

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