Maria Hernandez didn't mean to cause a rift in her family. The 31-year-old daughter of Mexican immigrants left the Catholic Church after attending a Pentecostal prayer meeting in Los Angeles where she experienced a "filling of the Holy Spirit." Although her parents view speaking in tongues as "voodoo nonsense," Hernandez says she now knows a depth of faith she never experienced in Catholicism. 

Jose Solis attends Sunday morning mass at Padre Sierra Catholic Church along with his parents and grandparents, but he also takes part in the parish’s evening charismatic service. Alvarez participates in a weekday Bible study and believes that he was healed of his addiction by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Hernandez and Solis exemplify the latest trends in Latino Christianity found by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center. The study examines the growth of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity among Latinos, paying special attention to Catholics who retain their identification with the church, along with those who convert to evangelical churches.

The Pew report was based on a telephone survey of 4,016 Latinos age 18 and older conducted last summer and fall.

“The major findings in this study leave little doubt that a detailed understanding of religious faith among Latinos is essential to fully appreciating the evolving nature of religion in the United States," says Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum.

One major discovery is that Latinos identify with charismatic or Pentecostal Christianity at significantly higher rates than non-Hispanics. The report uses "renewalist Christianity" to describe the charismatic tendency of Latinos and as an umbrella term for Christians who attend Pentecostal and charismatic churches. Renewalism stresses the direct presence of the Spirit in believers' lives as evidenced by speaking in tongues, miraculous healings and divine revelations.

Among the more than two-thirds of Latinos who are Catholic, 54 percent are charismatic or Pentecostal, as compared with one in 10 non-Hispanic Catholics. “This suggests that the renewalist movement, with its emphasis on an intense personal experience with God and on the role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers, is an important and distinctive characteristic of Hispanic Catholicism,” says Lugo.

Samuel Rodriguez, an ordained Assemblies of God pastor and president of the California-based National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, points out that the “spirit-filled ethos embraces emotions and experiential moments of faith, and ... that is the DNA of the Latino culture."

According to Roberto Ramos, president/CEO and co-founder of Latinvox, a full service Hispanic advertising agency based in New York, many of the Hispanics who elect to remain with the Catholic Church are redefining their parishes—“giving them a Latino makeover, if you will, by amalgamating traditional tenets with belief in the supernatural, such as miraculous healings.”