Some seven million Latinos now worship in fundamentalist Protestant churches like East Palo Alto's 400-member Iglesia Apostolica. Increasingly at odds with their non-Hispanic conservative Christian brethren, the evangelicos view the paramount "family values" issue as immigrant rights. PNS editor Mary Jo McConahay has reported from Central America and Mexico since the early 1980s. This is the first of two parts on the growing political activism of Latino evangelicos.

EAST PALO ALTO -- As the well-dressed worshippers sing, clap and jump in celebratory prayer at a Spanish language fundamentalist church here, it is difficult to pick out the professionals who work at nearby Stanford University from the recently arrived undocumented aliens from Mexico and Central America.

In this election year Latino evangelicos -- the fastest growing sector of U.S. Protestantism -- are a wild card on the religious right. Religiously conservative, they are nevertheless apt to consider bedrock Christian right issues such as abortion and homosexuality less critical than a candidate's stand on immigrants' rights and access to health care, housing and education.

"We can talk about a common experience in liturgy and the gospel with our Anglo brothers in faith, but we lead very different lives," says Daniel Ramirez, an ordained minister and member of the Iglesia Apostolica congregation here.

For the religious right, the evangelicos are increasingly difficult to ignore: numbering 100,000 in the 1970s, they have grown to more than 7 million today. They are concentrated in states with big Hispanic populations -- and big electoral votes -- including California, New York, and Texas. Once the Roman Catholic Church claimed to speak for all U.S. Hispanics; today almost one quarter of American Hispanics identify themselves as Protestants, the vast majority as evangelicos.

Like other fundamentalists, worshippers at Iglesia Apostolica promote abstinence from cigarettes and alcohol, may buy books and videos from the Christian Coalition, and appear among the 2.2 million mailing list of radio evangelist James Dobson's Focus on Family. Such organizations are now rewriting Spanish language material once geared for missionaries abroad to court native-born or immigrant Hispanics. But most conservative Christian organizations, like the influential Christian Coalition, took no stand on California's anti-immigrant Proposition 187 or similar legislative proposals. To many Latino Christians, this silence is tantamount to supporting a racist-inspired backlash against Hispanics nationwide.

"If God is with us, who is against us?" intones the preacher in Spanish. Despite a tradition of isolating themselves from temporal affairs, more and more of the congregants at Iglesia Apostolica now insist they cannot "remain deaf" to the concerns of new arrivals, whether they carry documentation papers or not. For Latino evangelicos, immigration is the primary "family values" issue, prompting more and more to enter the political fray.

"Many of us who grew up in the church and went to college have evolved to see that you have to become political to deal with government," says Henry Palma, a 29-year-old bank accountant from Walnut, Ca. who "absolutely" feels linked to new immigrants, "as if we were all family in some way." Palma is Republican National Hispanic Assembly vice chairman for Southern California and director of its state-wide voter registration drive.

Increasingly, Spanish language Christian newspapers and TV stations run editorials exhorting the faithful who qualify to apply for U.S. citizenship. The goal, in the words of southern California-based El Orador is "to help all who are illegal in this country, so that through your vote you can elect persons with Christian principles, or at least who demonstrate more humanity."

Immigration is not the only issue that sets Latino evangelicos apart from the agenda of the Christian Right. "Local concerns including housing and employment -- the problems of the central cities -- may hit Latinos of any faith hard, and confronting them is creating liberal tendencies even among religious conservatives," says Segundo Pantoja of the Program for Analysis of Religion Among Latinos (PARAL) at the City University of New York.

Catholic Latinos continue to dominate such well known community organizations as United Neighborhoods Organization (UNO) of Los Angeles, and Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) of San Antonio. But today Pentecostal ministers are joining forces with their liberal Catholic counterparts in inner-city advocacy organizations from San Francisco to Philadelphia.

"Increasingly, the word is 'I go to my church and you go to yours, but when it comes to getting housing we'll get together,"' observes PARAL's director, Anthony Stevens-Arroyo.

The theological implications of such ecumenical efforts are attracting the attention of scholars and writers. "You're talking about a third reformation in Christianity, where sharing a common culture -- La Raza -- may be taking precedence over differences between sects," says Stanford religion professor Rudy Busto.

As Latino evangelicos insist their issues be heard in a wider world, their activism is causing painful dilemmas for non-Hispanics in local churches where congregations are mixed.

"Ten years ago, we started reaching out to Latinos as the neighborhood became increasingly Hispanic," recalls Gerry Dueck, pastor of cross-cultural ministries at Bethel Church in San Francisco. "But I would deny my faith if I condoned issues around illegal immigration. If you say lying is justified at one point, it's justified anywhere, and that's not acceptable."

A recent Sunday service at Bethel began with the Battle Hymn of the Republic. When the choir master invited Spanish-speaking congregants to sing a hymn in Spanish, only Anglo singers at the altar did so, smiling in embarrassed effort. After the service some Latino worshippers said they felt the church was hypocritical for reaching out to them while failing to protest the post-187 backlash against immigrants.

Back at Iglesia Apostolica, Dan Ramirez recalls a woman who asks fellow congregants to pray for loved ones crossing the border -- illegally of course. "I ask myself, 'Does this woman expect angels to be dispatched to protect someone acting against the law?' She does, and if we are to keep our prophetic edge, we must listen and respond."