Will Spain become a Protestant country?

“Spain has ceased to be Catholic,” said the soon-to-be-exiled Republican president Manuel Azana in 1931. The Civil War and dictatorship which followed made this statement premature, but in modern times the influence of religion on Spanish society has been waning. However, now this is changing in a way few would have ever expected. The state which led the fight against the Reformation might finally be succumbing to it: Spain is slowly turning Protestant.

Those searching for Spain’s religious revival will have to swap the spires of Burgos and Sevilla for the industrial estates of Barcelona. Here, worshippers waiting to enter their church queue past the adjoining massage parlour and nail bar on the outskirts of the Catalan city. This is far from the tourist-thronged Sagrada Familia or the Gothic Cathedral in the Ciutat Vella. In Barcelona there are now 208 Evangelical places of worship compared to 225 Catholic ones. In Madrid there is a similar movement, with a new Protestant church opening every four days. Things are changing in the nation famous for “The Catholic Kings” and the “Camino”.

The source of this Reformation in Spanish religious practices is not the unruly Dutch of the 16th century but Latin America of the 21st. In the last decade there has been a huge influx from the Americas into Spain. In Catalonia, one of the hotbeds of evangelical growth, 26 per cent of workers were born abroad, and the vast majority of these hail from South and Central America.

Pedro Sanchez’s government has brought immigration levels to new heights. His amnesty for illegal migrants will give around a million people working “without papers” a path to citizenship. Further, the Democratic Memory Law of 2024 opened the doors to another 2 million people receiving a Spanish passport. Already 10 million people live in Spain who were not born there; most of them are Latin American.

Immigration from the Americas has been promoted across the political spectrum in Spain. Madrid Mayor, the conservative Isabel Diaz Ayuso, praised Latin American arrivals as they “worshipped the same faith, had the same roots, and have the same culture.” The nation’s Protestant wave shows reality is far more complex.

Spain is undergoing an ever-faster process of Americanisation

The phenomenon is inseparable from the rise of pentecostal and evangelical churches in the Americas. In countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, around 40 per cent of the population is now evangelical; in Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela it is between 20 per cent and 30 per cent. Many of Spain’s new churches are transplants from established groups across the Atlantic. What first came to South America through U.S. missionaries is now firmly implanted and spreading in Iberia. The power of these churches is that they act as a centre for new arrivals, promising mutual aid and connections in what is a new land for the congregation. While the vast majority still identify as Catholic, a fervent Protestant minority is in the ascendancy.

Spain is undergoing an ever-faster process of Americanisation. The rise of Latin American evangelicalism is just another facet of the transformation produced by huge immigration from the western hemisphere. This goes beyond political boundaries, as Spain’s new Protestants are more closely tied to the right than the left. The transatlantic state of modern Spain was typified by the centre-right Partido Popular staging an event with evangelical Colombian pastor Yedira Maestre to collect signatures for a petition against the pardoning of Catalan separatists.

This confusion runs through Spain’s right. The hard-right Vox’s anti-immigration rhetoric used to be tempered by olive branches to the “Iberosphere” and Latin Americans’ shared heritage. As millions of people have come from South and Central America, things have begun to change. Now Vox representatives in Madrid’s assembly scorn the use of public housing by Nelson or Walter — Latin American-coded names — in the same breath as Abdul or Kamal.

Everything is not quite what it seems. While the Pope has told his advisors he is deeply concerned by the Spanish far right, the immigrants the Catholic Church advocates for are often Protestant conservatives. Iglesia Lagoinha, a group associated with former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, now has a presence in Barcelona, where services are conducted in Portuguese.

While Pedro Sanchez has been latched onto by progressives as the face of European strategic autonomy, his immigration policy has dragged Spain halfway across the Atlantic. The “Nueva Espana” he is creating will be attached to the Americas in ways Europeans can’t yet imagine. Although Spain’s Prime Minister is earning anti-imperial credentials around the globe, his legacy will be of a mestizaje which irrevocably ties Spain and Europe to the western hemisphere.

The doomed Scottish colonial mission to Darien was opposed by the Spanish largely due to the fear that the Scots would spread Protestantism to their Catholic colonies. Though that enterprise failed, hundreds of years later this process has reversed. Many try to portray a civilisational battle between western Christianity and eastern Islam, but such categories will soon be out of date. The French used to say Africa starts at the Pyrenees; now it’s far harder to define.