With “Dios” or “DOS”[1], the turning point for the evangelical churches of Nicaragua

With “Dios” or “DOS”^[1], the turning point for the evangelical churches of Nicaragua

In La Prensa, Dec 28, 2025

The Evangelical-Sandinista pact of 2018 has ended up being a shot to the foot for some evangelical leaders: imprisonment, exile, confiscations and threats.

In November 2018, a few days from when the evangelical churches of Nicaragua would celebrate the international day of the Bible, pastor “Hernández” received a call from the secretary general of the Assemblies of God, pastor Roberto Rojas.

“We need to support the government and president Ortega or the devil will take us. We are going to issue a press release signed by all the pastors, and we are going to read it in the activities of November 23^rd,” he told him.

“Hernández”, exiled in the United States since the end of 2023, when the airline did not allow him to board his plane to return to Managua, agreed to sign the press release and read it in the activities of the two churches which he administered in Managua.

“Basically, we put ourselves on the side of Ortega and Murillo and attacked the Catholics. For nothing, because nothing changed, on the contrary, in my case and in the case of many more of us who were not Sandinista politicians, things actually got worse,” he said.

In 2020 when the coronavirus appeared in Nicaragua, he decided to close the doors of the two worship halls out of prudence and for his brothers and sisters in faith.

The decision contrasted with the order issued by the regime to the pastors: “We are going to open the churches and show the priests that in Nicaragua God is with us.” At least 40 infected pastors died.

“That is when the threats began, the Police showed up to open the padlocks and they nearly put me in jail for questioning, from then on I was left as they say marked,” he said from Los Angeles, where he lives in the home of his brother, also a pastor, who he visited in November 2023 when they attended together a Pentecostal congress.

Now part of the family remains in Managua and he, with one of his sons, has lived in forced exile in the United States for a little more than two years.

“Shame”

Hernández paid dearly for believing that swearing loyalty to Ortega-Murillo from the Gospel offered him protection, and now he “is ashamed”, he says, of seeing his former brothers in the faith defending Ortega-Murillo and denying religious persecution.

This past weekend, three organizations of evangelical churches of Nicaragua issued press releases where they backed the regime and rejected the denouncements of religious persecution in the country.

The Baptist Convention of Nicaragua, the Federation of Evangelical Churches of Nicaragua, and the Pentecostal Evangelical Conference of the Assemblies of God stated, separately, that there was no prohibition on the entry of Bibles into the national territory.

They stated, also, that “the full exercise of religious freedom” remains in Nicaragua, in open contradiction to the statements of national and international human rights organization, as well as verified news reports that indicate that the regime prohibited the entry of bibles into the country.

Relationship of institutional perks

The Nicaraguan journalist Israel González, an analyst of Christian issues, sees the relationship between the Sandinista regime and broad sectors of the evangelical churches as a phenomenon marked by institutional fragmentation, state incentives, and a theology that, in his view, limits the capacity to criticize political power.

According to González, the leaders of many evangelical churches have submitted themselves to the regime, in part due to the very structure of the evangelical world in Nicaragua.

With the existence of so many denominations with even contradictory doctrines among them, “this makes them weaker to have an independent approach to Orteguism,” he points out.

This dispersion, he explains, makes it difficult for the construction of a common position to the political and human rights crisis which the country is experiencing.

To this structural weakness is added, according to the analyst, a system of perks.

González states that “many evangelical denominations have received perks from the regime, be that in terms of subsidies, land or other types of incentives,” a relationship which, in his assessment, contributes to the fact that these churches remained aligned with or silent in the face of power.

This material support, he sustains, ends us being translated into dependency and political submission.

The journalist situates the nucleus of the problem in the evangelical churches of the Neo-Pentecostal branch, the majority in Nicaragua. In his understanding, these currents present a central characteristic: biblical fundamentalism.

González explains that the literal reading of certain passages of the Bible leads to stating that “the civil authorities are placed there by God,” an interpretation which conditions their way of understanding the political reality of Nicaragua.

From that perspective, he adds, there is no deep theological approach which might dialogue with the social context. “Their reading of the reality is not done from a serious theological approach,” he states.

To understand this behavior, González proposes an historical view. He recalls that these churches began to proliferate in the 1980s of the 20th century, in Nicaragua as well as in Latin America, in a specific geopolitical context.

According to his analysis, it deals with a process promoted from the United States with the objective of diminishing the influence of the Catholic Church and liberation theology, which at that moment offered a critical reading of the inequality and oppression from a theological and pastoral reflection.

In contrast to that current, he points out, the new churches promoted the so-called “theology of prosperity”, based on the promise of economic well-being in exchange for generous alms giving.

In the case of Nicaragua, these organizations knew how to take advantage of the historical hate of Sandinista forces toward the Catholic Church to join the ranks as religious allies of the FSLN.

Between 2018 and 2025, that relationship between the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo and the evangelical churches in Nicaragua went from complicit cooperation to open coercion.

What began as a pragmatic understanding with permits for events and trips, resources and donations and state propaganda in exchange for support or neutrality, ended up revealing itself as a political control mechanism which, over time, also turned against those who accepted the deal.

2018-2019: the beginning of the terror

The breaking point was Abril 2018. After the protests against the reform of the social security system, repressed with more than 300 deaths, according to the IACHR and the UN, the Catholic Church assumed a role of mediation and denouncement.

The state response was a sustained escalation against the clergy: churches under siege, expulsions, banishments, arrests and since 2022, massive confiscations of Catholic assets and property.

In parallel fashion, the regime activated a strategic turn toward evangelical sectors. The calculus was political and demographic: in 2022, 38% of the population identified as evangelicals, to 41% who identified as Catholic (CID-Gallup, November 2022).

Between 2019 and 2021, evangelical leaders participated in public vigils and events promoted by the party in power in the media network of the dictatorship.

On March 29, 2019 even Laureano Ortega Murillo appeared in the “Heal our Land” vigil, widely disseminated by State media.

Previously Ortega has already appeared before foreign pastors receiving blessings. Since then, the evangelical presence in public plazas has become recurrent and widely disseminated by the media of the regime.

2020-2022: selective benefits

The closeness was formalized with money and freedoms. Journalistic investigations documented that at least 94 evangelical entities received financing from the national budget in different years.

In addition, the regime granted authorizations for massive events in plazas, a privilege denied any other religious actor since 2018, and facilitated the importation of bibles and religious materials for the evangelicals.

The control was institutionalized in 2022 with the General Law for the Regulation and Control of Non-Profit Organizations.

The norm demanded detailed financial reports, alliances with state ministries and empowered the cancelation of legal status for “administrative non-compliance”. In other words, the collection of taxes for Catholic organizations as well as evangelicals.

To that was added a wave of indiscriminate closures: between 2018 and February 2025, the State cancelled 5,507 NGOs, of which 1,280 were religious (Catholic and Evangelicals).

Even though the Catholic Church was the target of most of the visible repression, the siege of the evangelicals was already under way: police surveillance, lists of members forced to report to the Police, restrictions on activities outside of churches, and informal warnings to pastors.

2023: the end of the illusion

On November 10 and 11, 2023, the evangelical ministry Mountain Gateway celebrated massive events in Managua with the participation of high-level officials of the dictatorship, including the mayor Reyna Rueda, police leaders and the presidential advisor Salvador Vanegas.

Public transportation was diverted from its traditional routes to transport participants to their events, according to official reports and widely reported by journalists at the service of the dictatorial family.

Forty-one days later, December 22, 2023, the Police announced the arrest of 11 members of the ministry, accused of money laundering.

In March 2024 courts controlled by the Executive branch sentenced them to 12 to 15 years of prison, imposed fines of $80 million dollars per person, and ordered the complete confiscation of their assets.

In September 2024 the eleven were released from jail and banished to Guatemala. The United States, among its multiple forms of pressure, forced the regime to return the confiscated properties or expel the country from CAFTA.

The destructive work of the FSLN continued it course. In August 2024 the dictatorship cancelled 3,500 NGOs, of which 169 were evangelical. Among them were historical organizations like the Nicaraguan Evangelical Alliance and the First Baptist Church of Managua.

That same year, independent reports counted more than 60 evangelical churches closed and 60 pastors forced into exile since 2018.

In December 2024 the same three large evangelical organizations who denied religious persecution in 2025 (The Federation of Evangelical Churches of Nicaragua, The Baptist Convention, and the Pentecostal Conference of the Assemblies of God) issued press releases stating that in the country “there is full religious freedom” and that there are no restrictions on the entry of bibles.

2025: Taxes on faith

In February 2025 a fiscal reform approved in August 2024 took full effect which taxed tithes to evangelical churches.

For the first time in recent history, all churches began to pay income taxes for offerings and tithes with rates of between 10-30% depending on the level of income.

This repeal of historic tax exemptions was added to the collection of property taxes applied since 2023.

The exiled pastor “Hernández” recalls that his church, founded in 2001, has avoided any critical pronouncements and he says that in the municipal and national elections they expressed support for the regime.

While he was travelling, Immigration denied his return to the country. In less than a month, the Police occupied the two places where worship was held and notified the cancelation of their legal status for “administrative offenses”. Their assets were confiscated.

He is not the only evangelical pastor with this problem: according to the organization known as the Nunca Más Nicaraguan Human Rights Collective, up to 60 evangelical pastors have been forced into exile and most have decided to remain silent about the injustice out of fear of reprisals against their families.

Those idyllic years

Israel González recalls specific episodes to illustrate the closeness between the evangelicals and Sandinistas.

He mentions having seen Daniel Ortega attend televised events in the 1980s, and underlines the fact that, now in February 2018, Ortega and Rosario Murillo participated in an event to present the Rubén Darío award to an evangelical pastor who had built a mega Church in the Jean Paul Genie highway in Managua.

Based on these prior events, the analyst describes a self-serving conviviality between the regime and certain evangelical leaders.

On the one hand, he explains, political power advanced in the destruction of the Catholic Church and the country; on the other hand, these pastors preach “the paradise of eternal life” and promise economic well-being  as long as they tithe, without a critical analysis of the immediate reality which is affecting the country.

The tithing of power

That relationship, he states, is sustained also thanks to state support and subsidies for the construction of churches or the maintenance of religious organizations, support which “obviously is translated into political submission.”

González in addition questions the official discourse which insists on the existence of religious liberty in Nicaragua.

He poses a direct question: if religious freedom really exists, why would a group of pastors have to publicly come out to say that they are allowed to hold worship services?

In his judgement, that argument is baseless, above all when different international organizations, including bodies of the UN and confessional organizations, the Vatican included, have documented religious persecution in the country.

In his analysis, the journalist synthesizes the logic of state control with a clear phrase: “As long as you talk about heaven there are no problems.” The conflict emerges, he says, when the Gospel is connected to the repressive reality which Nicaragua is experiencing.

“If you dare to criticize the regime, you will be arrested,” he warns, in reference to the cases of religious leaders (Catholic and Evangelical) who are imprisoned, exiled or silenced.

[1] DOS = Daniel Ortega Saavedra