Political Speech in Religious Sermons

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 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.