Political Speech in Religious Sermons
Boussalis, C; Coan, TG; Holman, MR
Date: 9 July 2020
Journal
Politics and Religion
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Religious leaders and congregants alike report high levels of political discussions in their
churches. Yet, few opportunities emerge to directly observe political discussions in a wide set of
religious settings. We examine the nature of these political discussions with a novel dataset of
over 110,000 sermons. Using a computational ...
Religious leaders and congregants alike report high levels of political discussions in their
churches. Yet, few opportunities emerge to directly observe political discussions in a wide set of
religious settings. We examine the nature of these political discussions with a novel dataset of
over 110,000 sermons. Using a computational text analysis approach and multiple forms of
validation, we find political discussions in more than a third of religious sermons and that seven
of ten pastors discuss political topics at some point. Common topics include the economy, war,
homosexuality, welfare, and abortion. We then use a geographic process to link the sermon
data to demographic and political information around the church as well as information about
the church and pastor to evaluate variation of political discussion in sermons. We find that
most pastors—across location and denomination—discuss most political topics, confirming the
intertwined nature of religion and politics in the United States.
Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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