While the majority of Americans favor a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants, support is noticeably lower among Republicans.

“The results are yet another reminder that Republican lawmakers face a fractured base,” Washington Post reports.

A new Gallup study finds significant differences not only in religiosity between Latino Protestants and Catholics in the United States, but in how much each group is losing adherents to the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated.

On Thursday, the board of the National Association of Evangelicals endorsed without dissent a resolution that urges comprehensive immigration reform by the U.S. government. The resolution summarizes the biblical principles that should guide the needed change, but it stops short of endorsing any specific policy proposal. Read the Religion News Service coverage elsewhere on our site, and the resolution itself.

Presenters for the Capitol Hill press conference that followed the vote on the resolution included NAE president Leith Anderson (who reminded those present that Jesus was a refugee), national director of the Vineyard USA Berten Waggoner, president of Elim Fellowship Ronald Burgio, and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) Samuel Rodriguez.

The NHCLC serves 15 million Hispanic Christians and is an affiliate organization of the National Association of Evangelicals.

I asked Sam a copy of his press conference statement to share with CT's readers:

For all of the debate surrounding the Senate immigration bill, pro and con, you might think the bill had some chance of solving America's illegal immigration issue. Not so much, says an editorial in this week's edition of The Economist.

Among other problems, The Economist points out, rightly, that no one outside of the airline industry benefits from the bill's "tortuous and vindictive" stipulation that would require illegal immigrants to return home for an interview as part of the legalization process. Combine that with a points system that favors highly skilled immigrants and a guest worker program scaled down to 200,000 annually, and you have a new system guaranteed to get little buy-in from the illegal immigrants it seeks to bring out of the shadows.

Of course, the bill does include a host of security initiatives. This is likely to please many evangelicals, who have polled consistently higher than the general population in opposing a path to legalization. Personally, I suspect we're on the wrong side on this issue -- I agree with The Economist's leader, which says that deporting 12 million illegal immigrants is "impossible, economically illiterate, and morally wrong." But that's beside the point. The real problem is that in the midst of the compromise and give-and-take that all legislation must endure in order to get passed, America may get stuck with a bill that accomplishes nothing.

Christians will continue to disagree on immigration, no doubt. But perhaps we can agree on the need to rework the current Senate bill into something that has stands a chance of success.

I just received an email from Arlene Sanchez Walsh, associate professor of Latino church studies at Haggard School of Theology (Azusa Pacific University). Like me, she doubts Pew's conclusion that otherwise acculturated Latinos may resist worshiping with non-Latinos. As she writes:

The study claims that Latinos are staying in ethnic churches and contributing to a unique ethnic resilience in American religious life. They don't account for generational differences, though. They do mention that even English-speaking Latinos prefer to be in ethnic churches, but when you see the nationality breakdown, Latinos with very deep roots in the U.S. -- such as Puerto Ricans and Mexicans -- rank pretty low compared to newer immigrants (Dominicans, Central Americans, etc.) among whom generational changes have not been as long lasting. Though Pew states that ethnic churches are not merely products of immigration or residental housing patterns, the numbers I mentioned above would give rise to the common-sense reality that Latino immigrants, especially of the first and second generation, prefer Spanish Mass and tend to live in areas that are Latino. You have to look at third and fourth generations to get at a larger picture of acculturation.

Arlene's point is significant, especially during the current national debate on immigration reform, in which some claim that Hispanics represent a cultural threat because they refuse to learn English and integrate into American society. While a surface look at Pew's findings on Hispanic churches could support such a view, as Arlene points out, a deeper look seems to reveal a pattern of gradual acculturation much like that of previous immigrant groups. Time will tell, but we should be careful about reading nativist fears into the Pew study.

For observers of the Latino religious community, this morning's study released by the Pew Hispanic Project will hold few surprises. The survey of 4,600 U.S. Latinos found, among other things, that:

* Renewalist Christianity (including both Pentecostal and charismatic beliefs and practices) is more common among Latinos than non-Latinos.

* More than half of Latino Roman Catholics identify themselves as charismatics, a fact that is already changing the face of U.S. Catholicism and could have even greater impact as the country's Hispanic population continues to boom. (Already, about a third of U.S. Catholics are Hispanic.)

* Nearly two-thirds of Latinos worship in ethnic congregations, though not always in Spanish-speaking congregations.

* Latinos' political affiliation is up for grabs (with Protestants tending to be Republicans and Catholics tending to be Democrats) but most agree that religious values guide their political views and that politicians should express faith more often and openly, not less.

As I said, nothing too shocking. Pew emphasizes Latinos' commitment to charismatic faith and tendency to worship in ethnic enclaves as its most significant findings. No doubt both can be explained partly through demographics: About 62 percent of Hispanic adults in the U.S. are foreign-born. The strength of renewalist faith among Latino immigrants clearly reflects the explosive growth of Pentecostalism in Latin America and elsewhere throughout the global South (watch for our July cover story for more on this point). On the other hand, the tendency of Hispanics to worship with other Hispanics may change quite a bit as the Latino population assimilates. If Latino experience mirrors that of other immigrant groups, second- and third-generation Latinos will almost certainly find the home country-orientation of their parents' and grandparents' churches to be an uncomfortable fit.

I've asked a couple of Latino Christian leaders for their thoughts on the study, so we'll likely have more to post later.