In the wake of Mitt Romney's defeat and the historically low support he received from Hispanics it is high time that attention be given not only to Karl Rove, but to "the Hispanic Karl Rove", the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez. The benediction for the opening night of the Republican
National Convention was given by Rodriguez, an Assemblies of God
leader and the President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Council
(NHCLC). Given that Rodriguez has been known for years as the “Hispanic Karl
Rove of evangelicals” it was hardly shocking that Romney chose him for this
symbolic task. This July Rodriguez declared that Romney had made a “180-degree
turn” in his relationship with Hispanics after a primary in which he had staked
out a position to the right of his key competitors. Of Puerto Rican descent,
the 42-year old Rodriguez represents, as the Chicago Tribune put it in 2008, “a new generation
of evangelical kingmakers on the political scene.” Due to his status as a prominent Hispanic
Evangelical and his advocacy for a “compassionate” approach to immigration,
Rodriguez has developed a reputation as a progressive-friendly evangelical
leader. This reputation, and the privileged access he has enjoyed to the White
House during Barack Obama’s first term, is surprising given his outspoken
commitments to right-wing causes and organizations. More surprising, and
troubling, are the grounds on which he argues for immigration reform, appealing
to conservative Christians’ suspicion of Muslims and fear of Christian decline.
Rodriguez has been a prominent conservative activist
throughout Obama’s presidency. In
2009 Rodriguez co-founded the Oak Initiative, a right-wing Christian advocacy
group, and served until 2011 as its executive vice president. Rodriguez has
described the Oak Initiative as a “Christian Tea Party,” and in 2010 he rallied
the group with his claim that the Obama administration “has taken over the auto
industry, the banking industry, the health industry, soon the energy industry.
We have never been in this place before. Our founding fathers are turning in
their graves. This is big government on steroids.” Like many conservative
groups, the Oak Initiative made strident opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA)
a central part of its mission. It produced a popular video in opposition to the
ACA, which featured the controversial former Pentagon advisor Lt. Gen. William
G. Boykin explaining that the ACA moved America simultaneously toward Nazism
and Communism and was “laying the groundwork” for a Nazi-esque “constabulary
force that will control the population in America.” Under Rodriguez’s
leadership the Oak Initiative also distinguished itself as a virulently
anti-Muslim organization committed to the notion that Obama is helping to
advance an Islamic agenda in America.
In addition to his foundational role in the formation of the
Oak Initiative, Rodriguez in 2010 became part of a five-person team leading the
Affordable Power Alliance (APA). The APA has played a key role in resisting
Obama administration environmental policies that they say would hurt the
interests of business. The APA has made a name for itself by claiming that new
EPA restrictions amounted to a “war on the poor” and declaring that “the civil rights
challenge of our time is to stop extreme environmental policies that drive up
the cost of energy.” Nowhere has the effect of the APA been more evident than
in its attacks on the EPA’s efforts to decrease mercury poisoning, a regulatory
effort that has received widespread report from USCCB and a host of other
religious organizations. The APA views this regulation, and the religious
groups that support it, as part of a misguided environmental movement that ends
up “condemning
legions of Third World children to death from real diseases” because of its
impact on the global economy.
As his right wing stances solidified Rodriguez began to
headline events important to conservatives in general and the religious right
in particular. In 2011, Rodriguez promoted and spoke at Texas Governor Rick
Perry’s controversial prayer gathering “The Response” and delivered the
benediction at the Ronald Reagan award dinner at the CPAC annual convention. He
is on the steering committee of the Freedom Federation, an umbrella organization
of key conservative Christian groups founded in 2009 to, among other things, “secure the individual right to own,
possess, and use firearms as central to the preservation of peace and liberty.”
And he has joined the coalition of Christians opposing the HHS Mandate, writing
in the Washington Post that “the end
of our religious freedom in this country has begun.”
Yet, while Rodriguez has been at the forefront of an array
of religious right initiatives, he has also managed to maintain a counter-image
as a kind of “new evangelical,” one open to progressive political action and
worthy of considerable access to the Obama White House. Rodriguez was one of a
small number of religious leaders who led a private prayer service on the
morning of Obama’s inauguration. In July 2010, Rodriguez was one of a group of
leaders of Hispanic organizations who met with Obama to discuss a push for
immigration reform. That same year Rodriguez served on the President’s Advisory
Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which published a report
on “Fatherhood and Healthy Families.” In July 2011, even as he continued as a
leader of the “Christian Tea Party” he had helped to found, Rodriguez visited
the White House with Jim Wallis and ten other progressive religious leaders
representing the “Circle of Protection” coalition, formed to resist Tea Party
efforts to balance the budget by cutting aid to “the poor and suffering,” as
Rodriguez put it at the time. He returned to the White House with a delegation
from the National Association of Evangelicals to meet with the president later
in 2011. In the spring of 2012 Rodriguez shared the podium with Michelle Obama
at a Florida rally for her “Let’s Move” campaign. To this day, the Faith
Outreach Director of the Democratic National Committee, the Rev. Derrick
Harkins, serves on the Board of Advisors to Rodriguez’s NHCLC.
Rodriguez’s ability to simultaneously stoke the fires of
anti-Obama extremism and maintain access to the White House mystifies observers
of the Religious Right. He owes his
paradoxical image to his unique position on immigration reform, the issue that
brought him to national prominence during the George W. Bush administration.
Beginning in 2006, Rodriguez’s public advocacy for the needs of undocumented
Hispanics centered on convincing white evangelicals, whom Rodriguez accused of promoting
“racial profiling, discrimination,” and ethnic hostility, to support
immigration reform. Sydney Blumenthal credited Rodriguez with helping to defeat
a Republican congressional plan calling for the potential deportation of 12
million Hispanics, a plan Rodriguez called an example of “political expediency, xenophobia and extremism” that
“defeated reason, compromise and reconciliation.” Democrats like Nancy
Pelosi and Ted Kennedy welcomed Rodriguez to high-profile meetings on
immigration reform, and many religious progressives rushed to embrace a
theologically conservative Hispanic who seemed to share their values.
Thus was born the image of Samuel Rodriguez, post-partisan
evangelical and bridge to the burgeoning Hispanic Protestant community. Major
media outlets like Newsweek, CNN, and
the Wall Street Journal named him as
a major Hispanic leader. He became a regular contributor at the Washington Post’s On Faith website and
was featured on Bill Moyers Journal. In all cases Rodriguez was
presented as a politically moderate, theologically conservative
Pentecostal/evangelical whose opinions about the emerging Latino vote could be
trusted. In some cases, as in a 2009 report on CNN, media outlets went so far
as to describe him as the leader of
millions of Hispanic evangelical. Individuals and institutions seeking to unite
progressives and moderates seized on Rodriguez as an embodiment of the goal. In
2007 he was one of seven evangelical founders of the Come Let Us Reason
Together movement, which sought common ground on culture-war issues. He also
formed a bond with the progressive evangelical leader Jim Wallis: he has
lectured at Wallis’s Georgetown University class, he serves as a contributing
editor for Wallis’s Sojourners
magazine, and Wallis wrote a foreword for Rodriguez’s 2009 book Path of Miracles. Mainstream
evangelicals have followed Wallis’s lead and embraced Rodriguez and his NHCLC
as a key entry point to Hispanic Protestants. Rodriguez serves on the boards of
an array of major moderate evangelical and Pentecostal organizations, including
Christianity Today, Gordon Conwell
Seminary, and the Assemblies of God, and his NHCLC is the official sister
organization to the National Association of Evangelicals.
Rodriguez’s conflicting positions and dueling alliances have
never been fully acknowledged in national media. When he signed a major
statement by evangelical Christians in support of the EPA’s policy to increase
regulation of mercury while at the same time heading up the American Power
Alliance, which was decrying these regulations as part of a “war on the poor,”
news reports focused only on his support of the progressive petition. This lack
of scrutiny may be due to the fact that, while Rodriguez has staked out a
number of policy positions far to the right of most Hispanics, on the need for
comprehensive immigration reform he has generally pushed for policies clearly
consistent with the desires of the Hispanic community and largely in keeping
with his post-partisan image.
It is this essential issue, however, that raises the most
troubling questions about Rodriguez’s positions and arguments. While religious
and mainstream media have ignored his reasoning, an abundance of public
documents and videos shows that Rodriguez’s pro-Hispanic-immigration activism
draws explicitly on anti-Muslim ideology and the promise of a renewed Christian
America. While he makes use of arguments focused on human rights and biblical
compassion to justify his call for immigration reform, those concepts do not for
him preclude arguments that denigrate Islam, promote the salvation of Christian
America, or emphasize competition with Catholics.
When Rodriguez speaks to conservatives his appeal for immigration reform centers around
three suppositions. First, he argues that support
for Hispanic immigration will prevent the United States from becoming what
Europe is becoming—a Muslim continent. By emphasizing the threat of a Muslim
Europe, Rodriguez taps into a vein of conservative thought that has come to
prominence post-9/11. He has spoken about the threat that he believes Europe
faces from its growing Muslim communities, and the Oak Initiative continuously
plays up the supposed threat to America from stealth efforts to impose sharia
law. “There is a crisis in Europe,” he said in 2009, because “Europe is now the
emerging Islamic continent in the world. It is not post religious. It is
growing in religion but it is not Christianity. It is Islam. It is the Muslim
faith. And in America we are blessed that the immigrants that are coming here
still believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and have a strong Christian faith
commitment.... I look at this community emerging in America as a firewall
against…an assault on our biblical worldview.”
In public appearances, Rodriguez’s prayerful rhetoric
occasionally gives way to crude caricaturing of Islam. In a 2010 sermon, Rodriguez repeated an aggressively Christian
prayer he said he had offered at an interfaith rally for immigration reform.
Boasting about his refusal to “compromise truth” in that “politically correct
environment,” he explained that a Muslim imam had been asked to offer a prayer
before Rodriguez. He described the Imam’s prayer this way: “I come in the name
of Allah, Allah and the Prophet Mohammad, blah, blah, blah, pass the
ammunition, all that good stuff.”
Second, Rodriguez claims, support for Hispanic immigration
will be the salvation of Christianity in America. He speaks in near-messianic
terms of the impact Hispanic spirituality will have on America if it is allowed
to flourish. In a recent appearance with Pat Robertson on The 700 Club, Rodriguez said, “We are two syllables—‘His’ ‘panic.’
We are His, capital ‘H.’ We may very well be God’s ‘panic’ to the kingdom of
darkness in the name of Jesus in America…. At the end of the day the Hispanic
electorate may be the salvation of the conservative movement and the Christian
Church in America.” An article by Lisa Miller in the Washington Post, “Why Are Evangelicals Supporting Immigration
Reform?” quoted Rodriguez explaining that, in convincing the leadership of
Focus on the Family to sign a pro-immigration-reform statement, “I spoke about
the need. I talked about the possibility of deporting the very salvation of the
evangelical community in the twenty-first century.”
Third, Rodriguez argues that support for Hispanic
immigration will help Hispanic evangelical and Pentecostal churches gain
converts from Catholicism. For example, The Washington
Post’s Miller wrote that Evangelicals had not worked directly with
Catholics in forming a statement on the need for immigration reform “because
competition for Hispanic souls in America is so fierce,” adding that Rodriguez
told her, “We call it strategic recruitment.”
Samuel Rodriguez is a prominent figure in Hispanic
Christianity, in the debate over immigration reform, and in the Religious
Right. Given his central role in Mitt Romney’s abysmal efforts to
secure important Hispanic support it is time that he faces careful scrutiny in
religious and political circles. While Rodriguez’s success in encouraging
right-wing voters and politicians to consider immigration reform is on some
level promising it should not be interpreted as representative of a broader
progressive or moderate policy agenda and it should not be misconstrued as
evidence of a commitment to religious pluralism. In fact, this may be the most
distressing part of Rodriguez’s rising profile. By linking the cause of
Hispanic rights to the denigration of Muslims he has exchanged one form of
prejudice for another, and done so in explicitly Christian terms. While
blending social justice for Hispanics with a type of religious supremacism
has helped Rodriguez advance his standing among conservatives it is a recipe for
further decay of Christian social witness and continued Republican ineptitude among the vast majority of Hispanics in America.
