David Beltran
David Beltran
DSA member
David Beltran, 28, is an organizer-in-training at SEIU, he was born in Colombia and grew up in Miami, where he now lives. For most of his teenage years, he attended a charismatic, evangelical megachurch in Miami. While he now disagrees with much of what that megachurch preached, he readily acknowledges that it was quite diverse in terms of race, income, and immigration status—unlike many socialist spaces in the U.S.
Beltrán has observed that many of the working-class people that he meets as an organizer, such as Hispanic female childcare workers in California, naturally bring up—without prompting—their faith in Jesus as an explanation for how they can get through the challenges of their job. He says, “A lot of working-class people already have a certain comfort [with Christianity] and can speak that language in a way they can’t speak critical theory and Marxist analysis. The black church is the best example of how folks have taken Christianity and used it as a tool to liberate people. Christianity is a great vehicle through which we can do multiracial, working-class organizing.”
Beltrán certainly did not grow up in a household that was comfortable with communism or Marxism. He says that after revolutionary communist guerillas killed his great-grandfather during Colombia’s civil war in the 1960s, his parents instilled in him and his siblings a strong conservatism and virulent anti-communism. In college, he came out as both gay and LGBT-affirming, breaking with conservative Christianity. He went on to intern with Sojourners, a progressive Christian organization in Washington, D.C. “I wanted to become a good progressive Christian,” he said.
The Pulse nightclub shooting and Trump’s election—all in 2016—shattered his belief in “gradual incremental change.” He started researching to understand why people voted for Trump, and concluded that the main culprit was capitalism, particularly the ways in which white working class has been left behind and “race had been weaponized by the bourgeoisie to divide the working class.”
In 2018, he moved back to Miami as a full-fledged socialist and began organizing through his local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. Like Joyce, Beltran draws upon individualistic versus communal themes in explaining his movement away from liberal politics and towards radical politics. “Neoliberalism—a construct that justifies capitalism—is contradictory to a full understanding of the gospel,” he said, defining “neoliberalism” as the individualistic idea that “we are not each other’s keepers, and that the only lens to examine societal problems is through the individual.”
As an organizer now, Beltrán looks back on his time spent in his evangelical youth group, knocking on doors to share the gospel and following up with people one-on-one, as training for what he does now. “Instead of telling people about Jesus, I tell them about socialism,” he said. “Political education is for me what Bible study was in my youth group.”.[1]