Last month, in an interview to promote his new memoir, Barack Obama criticized the rising number of Latino voters who supported Donald Trump. “People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump,” Obama said in an interview with the Breakfast Club. “But there are a lot of Evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees, undocumented workers in cages, they think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion.”

Though Obama took a lot of predictable heat from conservatives, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Spanish-speaking voters, particularly in Florida and Texas, swung hard toward Trump, in many cases driven by Trump’s wholesale embrace of the Evangelical agenda. Many working-class Latinos, like their black and white counterparts, are observant and define themselves by their Christian faith.

As Republicans win a growing share of poorer voters, and as the Democrats bleed support in rural areas where churchgoing is more widespread, serious thinking is needed about the place of religious believers and belief on the Left. Especially for those hoping to see the emergence of another Bernie Sanders, someone capable of constructing a winning coalition across racial and religious lines, it is vital that these voters aren’t shrugged off or condescended to.