Marcos Witt, the Pop Star Bringing Latino Evangelicals to the Pews

The sanctuary of Northside church in Charlotte, N.C., is built for joyous adoration. Enormous speakers hang from its domed ceiling, along with an elaborate system of colored lights. Its semicircular stage has wide, carpeted steps that lead down on all sides to rows and rows of wine red pews, which hold about 2,700 people. The evening I visited last February, they filled to capacity with Latino families who had come to see the evangelical superstar Marcos Witt.

While the crowd gathered, Pastor Witt addressed his team in a greenroom cluttered with filing cabinets. “Guys, this is night No. 30,” Witt said. Thirty meant they were halfway through his América Ora y Adora (America Prays and Adores) tour, which began in spring 2022. His sister, who is also a pastor, pulled out a little bottle of “anointing oil,” which she rolled onto the wrists of every member of the group: the musicians, the pastor-singers, the sound and video techs and Miriam Witt, his wife of 37 years. The blend of olive oil and fragrance served as a reminder of their purpose: not just to perform music and satisfy fans but to call upon the Holy Spirit and bring people closer to God.

A few minutes after 7, they stepped onstage and plunged into the first song, “Hemos Venido a Buscarte” (“We’ve Come to Seek You”), an unreleased song that sounds a little like early U2. “Jesus, I’ve come to seek you/Jesus, I’ve come to hear you,” Witt and the other pastors crooned in Spanish over a thrumming combination of synth sounds and drums.

Onstage, Witt dresses like a man dodging attention: dark pants and dark long-sleeve shirts, his only ornaments a bead bracelet, a wedding ring and tortoiseshell glasses. But his attitude is playful and confident. “You wanted to come hear Marcos Witt,” he said, after a few songs. “Relax. Yes, we’re going to sing from the oldies and from the new ones.” But they were also going to pray. “Jesus Christ is still on the throne,” he told them. “Tonight we’re going to focus on him.”

Most Americans have never heard of Marcos Witt, but he estimates that over the past 40 years he has sold roughly 27 million copies of his albums worldwide. (Most of these sales were through nontraditional venues, like churches, that do not report numbers to tracking agencies.) He has sold out arenas in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Santiago, São Paulo, San Salvador, Miami and Los Angeles. He has won six Latin Grammy Awards, including one last year for his 34th solo album, “Viviré” (“I Will Live”). For his fans, he is more than a singer-songwriter. He is a conduit to the divine. “My music carries the breath of God,” he told me. “Through our songs, God is hugging on people.”

In the 1980s, Witt revolutionized evangelical worship in Spanish by infusing praise songs with disco and new-wave stylings to appeal to a younger generation. In 1994, he founded the first of dozens of schools all over Latin America to train other musical worship leaders. In the 2000s, he built one of the largest Spanish-language evangelical congregations in the United States at Lakewood Church in Houston. At the same time, he inspired the next generation of Christian musical artists with his Latin Grammy wins. “He brought to the forefront that it was possible to do this overtly Christian music, música de alabanza, and still have it sound well produced and have it sound cool,” Leila Cobo, chief Latin content officer at Billboard magazine, explained. “He’s not making rinky-dink music on a little organ.”

His breakout album from 1988, “Adoremos!” (“Let’s Adore!”), and its follow-ups “Proyecto Alabanza Adoración” (“Project Praise and Worship,” 1990) and “Tú y Yo” (“You and Me,” 1991) attracted younger Latin Americans by setting Scripture-inspired lyrics to the accompaniment of keyboards, electric guitars and drums. Many older pastors accused Witt of Satanism when these albums came out. The drum set, they said, was an instrument of the devil, and no godly music could sound anything like Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel. But younger Latin Americans flocked to his concerts, filling stadiums. They were smitten not only by his pop and rock stylings but also by his way of addressing God.

During his years at Bible college in Texas, Witt soaked himself in the works of a musical ministry movement known as Praise and Worship, whose origins can be traced to Pentecostals in Canada during the 1940s. Before Praise and Worship, the Rev. Michael Herron, one of Witt’s mentors, explained to me, the tone of most church songs was vaguely historical: They were about God, about Christ, about the crucifixion. Praise and Worship songs sounded more like love letters. “They were sung personally to the Lord,” Pastor Herron says. In this way, Witt’s lyrics nudge people to foster their own direct relationship with the divine. Comparing Witt’s music to “that wind” that blew through the Pentecost, Daniel de León Sr., pastor of Templo Calvario in Santa Ana, Calif., says, “It stirred the church from the bottom up.”

Witt, 61, may no longer be the most popular Christian worship artist among younger Latinos and Latin Americans — that laurel seems to belong to the group Miel San Marcos — but he is still determined to bring people to Christ. The América Ora y Adora (A.O.A.) tour is his latest effort. All its music and prayer happens in Spanish. In our conversations, he compared the tour to the unit that powers up a jet airplane before it takes off. “The Latino church is the jet,” he emphasized. Witt knows its strengths and weaknesses. He has been working with Spanish-speaking evangelicals all his life. A.O.A. is designed to energize their congregations.

The Latino Protestant community in the United States, which is largely Pentecostal or charismatic, has never been more influential than it is today. It is also navigating strong winds that will affect its future: the secularization of Latino youth, the politicization of congregations, the rivalries among pastors and the hungry interest of Anglo evangelicals, who may aid or co-opt its growing power.

That night in North Carolina, Witt introduced the audience to the Rev. Rusty Price, who learned Spanish while working as a missionary in Cuba and founded Camino Church in Charlotte, a major sponsor of A.O.A.’s tour through the state. “I want to thank all the immigrants for coming to my country,” Price said, and the audience whooped with delight. “God has sent you here to save the United States.”

Jonathan Mark Witt Holder was a missionary kid: born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised as Marcos in Durango, Mexico. His Anglo American Pentecostal parents devoted their lives to helping evangelical churches in Mexico. For most of his childhood, Witt believed that his vocation was different, which is why he became a classically trained pianist and a dramatic tenor. In his early years, he felt torn between two worlds: one that cherished music and another that cherished Christ. One afternoon when he was 17, he resolved the conflict by dedicating all his musical capacity to the Lord. “From that day to this,” he told me, “it was all about, How can I use music to let people know about the love of Christ?” Witt never performs songs about anything else.

After bringing the Praise and Worship movement to Latin America during his 20s and 30s, Witt moved to Houston with his wife and their four children, in part because the airport was a hub for flights to South America. In Texas, Witt signed a contract with Lakewood Church to lead a congregation there in Spanish. When the megachurch’s pastor Joel Osteen approached Witt in 2002, roughly 500 people were donning headphones every Sunday to listen to Osteen’s service in simultaneous translation. By the time Witt left 10 years later, Lakewood’s Spanish-language service drew an in-person attendance of approximately 6,000 people every Sunday.

Lakewood became a model for Anglo evangelicals interested in attracting Spanish speakers to their churches. It was especially well positioned to welcome Latinos because it had already moved, years earlier, closer to Pentecostalism. Founded as Lakewood Baptist Church, it left the denomination decades ago, after Osteen’s father embraced faith healing. The shift was part of a larger national trend. Over the past half-century, as charismatic worship became more common in the United States, practices like speaking in tongues and faith healing have met with greater acceptance, and the number of nondenominational Protestants in the United States has grown. In recent years they surpassed the number of mainline Protestants.

Lakewood needed more than doctrinal sympathy, however, to win more Spanish-speaking Christians. For all its size, the Hispanic evangelical community in the United States is quite fragmented. “Here, there are a lot of 50-member churches, and there is no power,” Witt said in a 2013 interview. “We cannot even agree enough to have a cup of coffee.” The rivalries, he told me, can be “mind-numbing.”

Some of the divisions are national. In most neighborhood churches, if the pastors are from El Salvador, so is their congregation. Ditto if they’re from Guatemala, Argentina or other Latin American countries. As an Anglo raised in Mexico, Witt has a more fluid national identity, and the decades he spent touring Central and South America with local Christians gave him more experience in the region than most Latin Americans. At Lakewood, he leveraged that advantage. “I would use examples of food from different countries, and people would crack up: Oh, my gosh, he knows our food!” He also deliberately adopted a more uniform Spanish, erasing many of his Mexican telltales.

Latino evangelicals argue over the right way to be baptized, or whether congregations should be organized into groups of 12 disciples, or which aspects of Scripture they should emphasize. For Witt, however, the only measure that counts is whether you have been bathed in the blood of Christ and embraced Jesus as your personal savior. “I’m not about proselytizing people,” he says. “So you’re Catholic? That’s fine, but I need you to know Jesus. You’re a Baptist? Great, but you need to know Jesus. So you’re a Mormon? Fantastic; you need to know Jesus. So I’m more about people knowing who Jesus is than what brand or denomination or religion.”

This inclusive approach has made Witt popular at a time when American evangelism is fending off a demographic threat. Christians’ share of the population has been shrinking over the past two decades. The changes are especially stark among millennials. Last year, Pew Research Center issued a report noting that if current trends continue, by 2070 the United States may no longer be a majority-Christian nation.

Given these patterns, it makes sense that Anglo institutions like Lakewood have begun wooing Spanish speakers. If they make inroads among Hispanics — the fastest-growing group of evangelicals — they have a better chance of ensuring their own relevance in the future.

“We’re going to do away with monochromatic American evangelicalism,” the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, told me. “In the next 20 years, if the Lord tarries, you’re going to see less and less of all-white churches and all-Black churches. You’re going to see a lot of more beautiful churches that look like a Skittles bag. And I think that’s a byproduct of the Latino community.”

Many Anglo megachurches already host Spanish-language congregations, but not all their efforts are as equitable as Lakewood’s. Osteen gave Witt the same sanctuary that he used, as well as the leeway to preach whatever he wished. But at Templo Calvario, Pastor de León has been receiving calls from Latino pastors who say that their congregations are treated like second-class guests in an Anglo house. Often, he says, Anglo pastors instruct their Spanish-speaking colleagues to parrot the content of their sermons. “This has been a problem we’ve had all over the United States,” de León says.

For Latinos like him, the inequality feels especially galling because their pastoral tradition dates back to the early days of Pentecostalism. The first Latino Pentecostal pastors were ordained in 1909 at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles by one of the movement’s founders, the Rev. William J. Seymour. Templo Calvario was founded by Latinos in 1925 — and has seeded hundreds of other churches. “God has raised our churches, just like the Anglos’,” de León says. “We have always pushed to do our own thing.”

In May, América Ora y Adora arrived in Kansas, and Maria Magdalena Rado de Espinoza, 64, traveled more than an hour to City Center Church with her 21-year-old granddaughter to see Witt, whom Rado listened to as a teenager in Peru. Back then, in the 1980s, her Pentecostal group held its meetings in the middle of a park on the outskirts of Lima because they had no church of their own. Strangers called them “crazies” and hurled rocks at them while they prayed. But Witt’s music brought young people to God, she said. On Saturday nights, her group blared it on a cassette player, and other teenagers stopped by to find out what was happening, because their worship sounded like a party.

Berenice Merlos, 40, took her seat in the sanctuary with her husband and her four children. Merlos started listening to Witt with her grandmother when she was about 5. The little girl and the old woman held hands in an apartment in a rough neighborhood of Mexico City, singing “Te Amo” (“I Love You”) and “Tu Misericordia” (“Your Mercy”). “It was a moment of very intimate worship, between her and I and God,” Merlos says. Later, when she was 10, Merlos and her family saw Witt in concert. Together they sat way at the top of a Mexico City arena. When the crowd sang “Poderoso” (“Powerful”), she watched thousands of people below her lift their right hands as they praised the power of God. It was breathtaking. Witt’s music gave Merlos a way to verbalize what she saw happening, the way God moved the arena and renewed her family. The only thing that allowed her father to escape alcoholism and drug addiction, Merlos says, was God’s mighty hand.

These days a smaller share of Latinos are embracing God the way Merlos and Rado did. Even though the number of evangelicals keeps rising as the size of the Latino population climbs, the portion of Latinos who identify as evangelical has stabilized over the past decade at around 15 percent. At the same time, Pew Research has found, the percentage of Latinos who identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” has steadily grown. In 2010, these more secular Latinos made up only 10 percent of the Hispanic population; in 2022, they were nearly a third.

Even so, Latino evangelicals have become an increasingly coveted voting bloc in swing states like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia — in part because they have proved themselves more interested in voting than Latinos who are Catholic or more secular.

It’s also because they seem open to persuasion from both parties. According to a Pew Research survey conducted last August, a quarter of Latino evangelicals believe that Donald Trump should run for president again in 2024. But Pew has also found that Latino evangelicals are just as likely to say that Democrats represent their interests as that Republicans do. Sixty-nine percent believe that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Yet 70 percent believe it’s more important to control gun ownership than to protect the right to bear arms.

Perhaps no issue better reveals the group’s nuances than economic inequality. “If you define economic justice via the lens of socialism, communism, the majority of evangelicals, according to Pew, would be opposed,” Rodriguez notes. “If you say, Are Latino evangelicals fully committed to addressing poverty in the name of Jesus? Absolutely — and absolutely with three exclamation points.”

For many Latino evangelicals, drug rehabilitation, criminal justice and combating racism are top issues, right behind preserving life and religious liberty. The differences between their priorities and those of their Anglo counterparts come from experience. “When there was white urban flight, the Latino Pentecostals stayed in the city,” the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, says. Their pastors walked alongside refugees, drug addicts and prisoners, as well as working-class families, small-business owners and, in rural areas, farmworkers. For pastors, Salguero says, the most important question is: How does this policy affect the people we serve?

This question thrust Witt into national politics after he began pastoring at Lakewood. There he witnessed firsthand the plight of undocumented immigrants in America. Every week he encountered someone whose parent or child or loved one was recently deported. Latinos were so frightened of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that if they saw uniformed officers outside the church, they often left. Witt regularly welcomed those who did enter the sanctuary with a version of: We’re so happy to have you here. By the way, the police out there, they’re just to direct traffic. That’s not ICE. “We had to say that for months before word got out where people weren’t doing the U-turns when they’d see a cop,” he recalls.

Shocked and outraged, Witt joined Esperanza, a faith-based organization in Philadelphia, in their efforts to reform federal immigration policy. The group’s president, the Rev. Luis Cortés Jr., told me that in the early 2000s, no other Anglo evangelical leader associated with a megachurch would speak out publicly in favor of immigration reform. But Witt lobbied politicians in Texas and on Capitol Hill, traveling to Washington almost every two months at his own expense. He was present at the White House in 2004 when President George W. Bush announced a proposal to revamp immigration policies.

But after Senator Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008, the same year that Witt endorsed Senator John McCain for president, Witt stepped back from politics. He said that the Democratic win had nothing to do with it. The real break came in 2006, he insisted, after Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, promised Witt over the phone that he would do everything in his power to fight for a comprehensive immigration-reform bill. Then he voted against it. “I was so angry and disappointed, I think I spent three days in bed,” Witt says. “I went, like, into this depression.” About a week later, he told Miriam that he was done with Washington. (A spokeswoman for Cornyn denied that the senator would have promised to support an immigration bill that he ended up voting against.)

“This impasse that we’ve been living now for decades and decades is absolutely mind-boggling,” Witt says. “How they can live with themselves, making the promises and not doing a thing?” The hypocrisy drove him away.

So as other Spanish-speaking evangelicals grew increasingly politicized, the Witts turned deliberately apolitical. “Nothing ever that I know of in the Bible says, Oh, you got to believe this or be with this party,” Miriam says. “That’s just not there. There’s grace for all.”

“There are people very close to me who, ideologically, are very far from me,” Witt says. “I love them with my whole heart because they’re my family. And I’ll never stop loving them no matter what their ideology is.”

His only activism now is combating secularization. At every A.O.A. event, he invites attendees under 25 to approach the stage and commit themselves to Christ. The first time he did it, he was stunned to witness roughly half his audience step forward. His core fans may be older, but mothers and grandmothers bring him their young.

In Kansas, Rado and Merlos were each delighted to watch their children take their places before the stage. Merlos’s eldest, 15-year-old Mizrahim, was the first of several whom Witt singled out. “What’s your name?” Witt asked. When the boy answered, Witt replied, “God is going to use you.”

On the morning after the A.O.A. event at City Center Church, Witt held a conference for Christian leaders in the church’s smaller sanctuary. Some 75 people gathered there. When Witt arrived, the mood in the room was noticeably detached. These men and women, most of them middle-aged, led their own congregations and had their own ideas about worship. They sat in clumps, sorted by churches, many with their arms crossed.

Witt stood alone behind a keyboard and began improvising a selection of old hymns. At first, he would break from singing frequently with in-jokes about the hymnal they all used in church when they were young. I’m like you, the subtext read, I was brought up just like you. Within 10 minutes, he had them on their feet singing. Moments later, he started his song “Temprano Te Buscaré” (“Early I’ll Search for You”), and Merlos, who is a pastor in Kansas, fell to her knees in the front row, offering her hands to God. By the time the audience sat down again, wariness had given way to warmth. “That’s the power of worship,” Witt explained to me later. “When I get out and sing a few songs that they all identify with, bam! They come together.”

Witt’s gifts as a worship leader made the room more receptive when he switched roles and began interviewing a parade of A.O.A. sponsors: the development organization Living Water International, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the ministry-management app Gloo. A.O.A. needs these sponsors to subsidize its free tickets because the average voluntary donation to its events is only $3. The tour has broken even only because Witt performs free.

By necessity, many of the pastors and leaders in the room that morning embraced the same approach; they worked day jobs and shepherded their flocks essentially as volunteers. Latino evangelicals, on average, simply donate less money to their churches, which makes it tough for smaller churches to stay afloat.

This is one reason some pastors in Kansas embraced the advantages of leading Spanish-language congregations from within Anglo megachurches: They no longer worried about rent. The Rev. Enrique Uria — who grew a Spanish-language congregation to 600 members from 180 for the Family Church in McAllen, Texas, and now is pastor of another congregation for Hope Chapel in Kansas City, Kan. — pointed out another key motivation: Second-generation Latinos often abandon their parents’ churches.

“We’re losing many of the young Hispanics,” he says. “And the ones who stay leave for a church in English, because their friends are there.” If you build a contemporary Spanish service within an English-language church, he argues, you have a better chance of holding on to your teenagers and 20-somethings.

Witt himself tries to host A.O.A. events at Anglo megachurches for two reasons. They have fantastic sound systems, and rival Latino churches tend to view them as neutral ground. If A.O.A. happens at the biggest Hispanic church in a given city, he says, then the pastors of that city’s many small and medium-size churches often feel slighted and instruct their congregations to stay away.

Even in Kansas, several pastors told their congregants not to attend A.O.A. at City Center Church. Some may have been afraid of losing their followers to its Spanish-language congregation, which the pastors Tommy and Janeth Torres started in 2019. Others may simply have opposed the way that the Torreses conduct services. “We broke the mold,” Tommy told me. He grew up attending old-school churches, the kind with three-hour services that don’t allow women to attend wearing pants. But at City Center, their service lasts no more than 90 minutes; they use a fog machine, and women can wear what they want. The Torreses, who began as youth pastors, want to reach millennials where they are. They host small groups not just for married couples but also for single mothers, divorced women and blended families.

These are the kinds of innovations that Witt likes to support. “Stop trying to correct how your brother does his ministry,” he told the pastors that morning. “You already have your own.” Jesus, he reminded them, said you can’t pour new wine into old wineskins; the old leather breaks, and the new wine spills. “Are you already an old leather?” he asked. The boomers and Gen X-ers in the room laughed uncomfortably. Witt chuckled, too, but he wouldn’t let them go. “Eh? It’s something one has to ask oneself,” he pushed. “If you live in constant indignation, how can the new wine flow through your life?”

When Witt was the young rebel and older pastors set his cassettes and CDs on fire, he vowed to support the young Christians who came up behind him. Now he pushed the older pastors to stay young as well: to minister with joy and humor, to stop fighting with one another and to rejoice in the souls they saved, no matter how many or few they were. “Maybe you already saw that pastor whom everyone says is crazy,” he said. “Go to that pastor and bless that pastor.”

Before every A.O.A. event, Witt prays for God to give him the discernment to understand the needs of the people who come. Some places are jubilant, others weepy. Charlotte was euphoric. Kansas was reserved. He wants to be used for the Holy Spirit’s own ends. “I’m going to get out onstage and get as small as I can so God can get as big as he can,” he told me. When it works, the pastors, the songs and the prayers touch people’s deepest needs for healing, for community, for love. That Saturday morning, I watched the transmutation again when Witt instructed the leaders to pray for one another. They formed new circles of three or four around the room. Onstage, Witt sang one of his greatest songs, “Tu Fidelidad” (“Your Faithfulness”), written by Miguel Cassina. The sweet, aching ballad embraced the pastors, but now they ignored Witt. Heads bent together, they were busy with their own work. If the jet of the Latino evangelical church takes off, they will be its fuel.

Maridelis Morales Rosado is a documentary photographer and photo editor, born in Puerto Rico and based in New York City. Her practice explores themes of culture, identity and sense of place.