How the Catholic Church, Trumpian politics and climate change intertwine in Latin America

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(Michael Molinski is a senior economist at Trendline Economics. He’s worked for Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Wells Fargo, and previously as a foreign correspondent and editor for Bloomberg News and MarketWatch.)

PALISADES, New York (Callaway Climate Insights) — I attended mass last Sunday in one of the Catholic churches near my house in suburban New York, and what I listened to was a sermon that urged people to “rise up against the evil forces” and not let them force them into cowering behind closed doors.

It sounded as if I was transported back in time to Central America, where as a war correspondent during the Contra War in Nicaragua I often heard priests incite the masses to revolution, rising against tyranny, and echoing the message from the “liberation theologists.” But this was America. This month!

The priest went on to say that it is their right to rise up, saying these same evil forces were preventing people from taking to the streets to proclaim their beliefs. He linked his sermon to what is happening now in America after the recent presidential election.

So what takeaways can we get from this message? Can we learn from the experience of Latin America? And what about what’s happening now in Latin America? Will the unrest in America spill over to Latin America? And how are the Catholic Church, President-elect Donald Trump’s politics and climate change intertwined in Latin America?

Those are some bold questions. Let’s start with the facts.

Catholicism is on the decline in Latin America

As President Joe Biden this month became the first acting U.S. president to visit the Amazon, it was abundantly clear that the United States is not Latin America.

Unrest in Latin America has been commonplace for decades. Latin America is also more Catholic than the U.S. True, Latin America has undergone a shift so that 54% of the population identify themselves as Catholic, compared to 69% 10 years ago, according to the Pew Research Center. Protestants and evangelical religions have gained.

But at more than half of the population, Latin America is still predominantly Catholic, compared to about 22% of the public in the United States. And some of those Latino Catholics still relate to one or more of the African-based religions like Candomblé, Santeria or Umbanda.

How, then, do Latin American Catholics differ in terms of their beliefs and politics? Historically, Latin American Catholics believe in socialism and social causes, and tend to vote for left-wing candidates, which is why most Latin American governments are liberal or left leaning.

And yet, Latin American Catholics are less likely to believe in human-caused climate change as compared to evangelical Christians and those with no religious denomination, according to a study published in April 2024 in the magazine Nature.

As a result, the anti-climate change statements by Trump hit home to many Latinos, both in Latin America and in the United States.

Most Latin Americans believe that extreme weather should be addressed

In Latin America, extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods and droughts have a more dire effect on people’s lives than they do in the U.S. More than 90% of Latin Americans “believe climate change impacts their everyday lives,” according to a study published this year by the European Investment Bank. And 88% are in favor of stricter government measures obliging people to adopt climate-friendly behavior.

Another key difference between the U.S. and Latin America is that most countries South of the Border have multiparty elections. Brazil has 30 political parties. Mexico, which for decades was ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), now has seven solid political parties.

Having multiple parties sometimes makes it difficult for those parties to build a lasting framework. However, from the perspective of the voting public, it gives them more of a choice, unlike the current two-party system in the U.S.

Those are the facts. So how do we use those facts and figures to make projections? If we look at the correlation between the U.S. stock market and Latin American stocks, we can see that the stock markets have become increasingly more linked. In other words, when stocks go up, they move more closely in the same direction, and vice-versa.

In terms of politics, Latin American voters have historically short attention spans. When Trump was first elected, several countries swayed to the right at first, most notably former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. But four years later he was replaced by another left-leaning President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

As for the people of the United States “rising up against the evil forces” à la Latin America? My vote is, it’s not likely. The American public can’t even seem to decide which evil forces they would be rising up against.