¿Evangélico o Evangelical? Getting Clarity on a Confusing Question

I love a good footnote. And today I read one that clarifies why the distinction between “evangélico” y “evangelical” es complicado.

In his essay “Stepchildren of the Empire: The Formation and Reformation of a Latino Evangélico Identity,” Juan F. Martínez sheds light on the many meanings of “evangélico.” I quote his first footnote at length.

A note on the subtitle’s key term: The term evangélico has had multiple meanings in Spanish. It was used as synonymous to Protestant in much of the Spanish-speaking world throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the term evangelical began to define a movement, evangelical missionaries took the term with them and translated it as evangélico, thereby redefining the term in Spanish. This has created the multiplicity of usages for the term evangélico and the lack of a common term to label Protestants in Spanish. For example, José Míguez Bonino speaks of four faces of Latin American Protestantism: Ecumenical, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Ethnic (Faces of Latin American Protestantism [Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1997]). Others continue to use the term evangélico in a broader sense, recognizing not only that most of the people who call themselves evangélicos would be identified as evangelicals but also that there are people who consider themselves evangélicos but not evangelical. This complexity continues in the United States, though the tendency of many to use evangélico as a translation of evangelical is changing the term. Its usage in the future will probably be affected by whether Latino and Latin American-based Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal groups use it to describe themselves and whether or not U.S. evangelicals accept these groups as evangelicals.

Four concluding observations. First, notice how missionaries—typically Anglo missionaries from the U.S.—injected an Anglo-based sense of “evangelical” into Spanish-speaking communities. Second, notice that this injected sense does little to capture the common historic sense evangélico had in Spanish-speaking communities. Third, many in the U.S., including Latin@s, presume that evangélico could only mean “evangelical” in one of its many English senses. The thought that it often meant and means “Protestant” rarely enters the minds of folks in the U.S. Lastly, some Latin@s in the U.S. identify as evangélico/a but not “evangelical” to avoid associating with the English sense of “evangelical” that is equivalent to something like “Republican party supporter.” Robert Chao Romero is a prominent representative of this move. I make it, too.