Connecting Faith to Protecting the Poor
ow do you respond when the line for the soup kitchen starts snaking around the corner? What do you do when ICE detains a beloved church guitar player?
When parishioners have questions, they often turn to their local pastors for guidance. But when pastors have questions about the second Trump administration’s rippling impact on their congregations, many turn to the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, for support.
Salguero, who also leads the Assemblies of God congregation in Orlando, Fla., says he has always seen his activism as an extension of his preaching.
“I don’t think you have the moral authority to speak into people’s lives on Sunday if you don’t care what happens to them from Monday through Saturday,” he says.
In recent months, thousands of pastors have joined Salguero for monthly sessions to help them understand President Trump’s executive orders and cuts to the social safety net. He’s connected hundreds of congregation members nationwide with legal support in the face of increased raids on churches by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Salguero also is speaking out, even at the risk of alienating some conservative members of his coalition.
He held a workshop on USAID at the National Prayer Breakfast and led an 11th-hour lobbying effort that helped preserve some immigrants’ access to SNAP benefits as part of the House version of the congressional “big beautiful bill.” He speaks on the administration’s impact on poor communities, immigrants, and single mothers to just about any media outfit that will have him on, including right-wing and religious outlets.
You have to love them all without minimizing your commitment that the gospel calls you to the most vulnerable.
“I’m coming at this as a pastor, not as a partisan,” he emphasizes, noting that evangelical churches serve plenty of people who voted for Trump, others who voted for Harris, and still others “who were so disgruntled, they voted for nobody.”
“You have to love them all without minimizing your commitment that the gospel calls you to the most vulnerable,” he says, which disqualifies ideologies that put, say, party first before community or America first before all else.
“‘Me first’ is not a Christian attitude. ‘Me first’ is not in the Gospels,” he says. “I don’t know where we’re getting that, but that’s not a Christian mandate. The Christian mandate is to love your neighbor as yourself.”
