Evangelicals speak out against Alabama immigration law

November 15, 2011

Hispanic evangelical leaders are calling on their brethren in Alabama to speak out more loudly against the state's punishing new immigration law. Speaking at a meeting of religious leaders in Birmingham last week, Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the California-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said that local pastors were failing to appeal to their congregations effectively.
"The pastors are failing, within the evangelical movement, in contextualizing the message to their members to call the elected officials at the local and federal level, and encourage an immigration reform that is not amnesty, but is not Alabama either," said Rodriguez, whose group represents some 16 million churchgoers. "We have to find something in the middle that has a biblical balance."

He said that the discrimination being faced by the state's Hispanic population - both legal and illegal - is "a repeat of the chapter lived by African-Americans."

Carlos Campo, the president of Virginia's Regent University, which was founded by high-profile evangelical, Pat Robertson, said that while 45 per cent of people in Alabama identify themselves as evangelicals, they are not speaking with a unified voice.

"Justice and mercy should go hand in hand," he stated. "And I think we have to challenge the evangelical church to come to the forefront and be more unified that we've been."