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Political Speech in Religious Sermons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2020

Constantine Boussalis ,
Travis G. Coan  and
Mirya R. Holman Open the ORCID record for Mirya R. Holman [Opens in a new window]
Constantine Boussalis
Affiliation:
Trinity College Dublin
Travis G. Coan
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
Mirya R. Holman*
Affiliation:
Tulane University
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Mirya R. Holman, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. E-mail: mholman@tulane.edu
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Abstract

Religious leaders and congregants alike report high levels of political discussions in their churches. Yet, direct observations of political topics in a wide set of religious settings are rare. We examine the nature of political speech by clergy with a novel dataset of over 110,000 sermons. Using a computational text analysis approach and multiple forms of validation, we find political content in more than a third of religious sermons and that seven of 10 pastors discuss political topics at some point. Common topics include the economy, war, homosexuality, welfare, and abortion. We then use a geographic data to link the sermons to demographic and political information around the church and to information about the church and pastor to evaluate the variation of political content in sermons. We find that most pastors—across location and denomination—engage around political topics, confirming the intertwined nature of religion and politics in the United States.

Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 241 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

*

We benefited from generous comments from Erin Cassese, Ray Block, Roland Kappe, and Slava Mikhaylov. Thomas Leeper and Arthur Spirling provided great advice about transparency and replication of our data. We are particularly thankful for positive and helpful comments from reviewers at Politics & Religion. This paper was previously presented at the 2016 European Political Science Association meeting, the Amsterdam Text Analysis Conference, and the University College Dublin SPIRe Seminar Series. All errors remain our own. All data and replication materials for this paper can be found at https://github.com/traviscoan/politics_in_sermons. Travis G. Coan's contribution was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council [ES/N012283/1] Methodological Innovation grant.

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