Opinion column
From the bed of atheism to the presidential pulpit: how faith arrived just as the evangelical vote stopped being free
On August 7, 2026, a man who spent decades as an atheist declared himself a devout believer at the precise instant he needed the evangelical vote. Not in front of the confessional: in front of the nation. Abelardo de la Espriella is, since this August, what his friends call a “religious activist.” His detractors, less pious, call him something else. And the question we should all be asking is not whether God exists, but whether faith discovers a man exactly when the man needs its votes.
The most punctual convert in history
There are conversions that move you and conversions that arrive with a stopwatch. De la Espriella’s is of the second kind: too perfect in its timing to be a coincidence. For years he was the declared atheist, the stern lawyer of the dirtiest cases in the country. Around 2020 he discovered God and, in his own words, “had a process.” A process so timely that it culminated exactly when Colombia faced its tightest presidential election and the evangelical bloc had become the ally that decided elections from the sacristy.
You do not need to be a chronic skeptic to notice the pattern: when the evangelical vote was in play, the convert was reborn. Faith did not come to him as a light on the road to Damascus. It came to him as a poll.
The cabinet according to the pastors
And the newly minted fervor showed in the appointments. Let us look at the cabinet as if it were a heavenly lottery:
- Viviane Morales, the senator who wanted to tell same-sex couples they could not adopt, is now the absolute owner of the Ministry of Education. Gender perspective in the classroom was left, along with the ministry that protected it, on the way to liquidation.
- A Catholic friar runs SENA. A friar. In a secular state. And almost no one blinks.
- Alejandro Ordóñez, the inquisitor who spends his life fighting other people’s sins, is ambassador to the OAS — precisely the inter-American system this same government wants to leave. Sending the hunter of the human rights system to the human rights system is, to say the least, cinematic.
It is not that the government is allied with the Christian right: it is that the Christian right is governing. The official coalition includes the evangelical parties Colombia Justa Libres and MIRA, and the discourse of the “secular state” was left behind, like God at the money-changers’ table, waiting to be thrown out.
The captive vote and eternal loyalty
This is where faith gets practical. The Colombian evangelical bloc built an electoral machinery that no technocracy can match: pastors who mobilize hundreds of thousands of disciplined faithful, congregants trained to vote as a block, and a prosperity doctrine that turns faith into an investment.
And the machinery does not distribute virtue, but favors. At the head of the UNP — the entity in charge of protecting lives — De la Espriella placed a man involved in a scandal of alleged sexual abuse, close to a mayor investigated for corruption, who handed out more than three hundred jobs in four months. A mere detail: the future Minister of Justice is the lawyer of that same suspect mayor. It does not matter. In the kingdom of the captive vote, loyalty reigns over virtue. And the man who collected money while claiming to “protect lives” promised, perhaps without laughing, that he will “clean up corruption.” The past, of course, starts tomorrow.
The freedoms that leave, without saying goodbye
The recent history of religious right-wingers in power does not invite hope. In Poland, the Christian party almost completely banned abortion and declared “LGBT-free zones.” In Hungary, Christian nationalism captured the courts, the press, and academia. In Brazil, the evangelical alliance with Bolsonaro ended in a pandemic managed with denialism and the assault on state institutions in Brasilia.
Colombia will not, unfortunately, be the exception. The new government has already liquidated the Ministry of Equality, eliminated the Human Rights Council and the High Commissioner for Peace, and announced that it will leave the UN, the OAS and the IACHR — those “left-wing political directories.” That is how a country that once said peace was worth it says goodbye.
Closing
So here we are: the atheist who preached to an entire country, today president of a government “set apart for Jesus.” The same pastors who for years saw him as the lawyer of the darkest cases now bless him as their chosen one. The faithful who denounced the corruption of politicians now applaud the appointment-by-quota.
It is no coincidence that the best-known atheist in Colombian law discovered God exactly in the year the evangelical vote was the ticket to the Casa de Nariño. Faith can be sincere, of course. But when conversion coincides with convenience, skepticism is not a lack of faith: it is the only reasonable prudence.
Abelardo was an atheist when atheism cost him no votes. Today he is a Christian when Christianity gives him the country. And the question that lingers, like incense smoke in an empty church, is the eternal one: if tomorrow the vote were elsewhere, how long would the new fervor take to evaporate?
Meanwhile, the money-changers’ tables have been set up again. This time, not in the temple: in the palace. And the only prayer worth making is to ask that, unlike what happened in Hungary, Poland or Brazil, someone remembers to overturn them in time.
History has a peculiar way of repeating itself. And God — let us say, out of respect for the new president — does not usually work miracles with those who fail to learn from it.
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