While Ted Cruz proudly proclaims he is an Evangelical Christian, his campaign takes pains to hide the truth that Cruz and his pastor father, Rafael Cruz are Pentecostal Christians, a fact further hidden by having Ted and Heidi Cruz’s belong to the congregation of First Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist church in Houston, as their home church. Both Cruz’s parents, his father Rafael a Cuban-born immigrant, and his mother Eleanor, born in Wilmington, Delaware, grew up in Catholic families. Both were among the millions of that left the Catholic Church since the 1960s to embrace Pentecostalism, a Christian movement estimated to make up 4.4 percent of the U.S. population, accounting for some 13 percent of evangelical churches in the United States. Holy Spirit’s “Purifying Fire” The name “Pentecostal” derives from the feast of the Pentecost, typically celebrated fifty days after Easter, and identified in the Acts of the Apostles 2:1-31 as the day when the Holy Spirit descended in “purifying fire” upon the Apostles of Jesus Christ, inspiring them to go forth from hiding in fear to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Pentecostals believe the Apostles of Jesus were aided by the Holy Spirit’s “gift of tongues,” in what Pentecostals consider as “baptism by the Holy Spirit,” deriving from 1 Corinthians 12:14, that gave the Apostles the ability to speak in a “God-enabled prayer language” that Pentecostals believe even today allows the unintelligible human utterances of an Pentecostal evangelist to be understood by foreigners who do not speak the Pentecostal evangelist’s language. Heidi Nelson Cruz, Ted’s wife, is the daughter of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries, explaining why she spent part of her childhood traveling with her parents to places like Kenya. “Speaking in Tongues” Religion reporter Sarah Pulliam Bailey, writing in the Washington Post on March 25, 2015, was of the first to recognize Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign logo and the purifying tongue-of-fire logo used commonly to identify Pentecostal churches.

Source: Ted Cruz: Closet Pentecostal | East Orlando Post