Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8bljj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-27T16:46:45.710Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.

References

Aaldering, Loes, and Van Der Pas, Daphne. 2018. “Gender Bias in Leader Stereotypes During Campaign and Routine Times.” British Journal of Political Science 1–21.Google Scholar
Albertson, Bethany. 2015. “Dog-whistle Politics: Multivocal Communication and Religious Appeals.” Political Behavior 37(1): 3–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, Palmer, Maxwell, and Lee, Amanda. 2015. “Precinct-Level Election Data, 2002–2012.” doi: 1902.1/21919.Google Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Schaffner, Brian. 2013. “CCES Common Content, 2012”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HQEVPK, Harvard Dataverse, V9,UNF:5:Eg5SQysFZaPiXc8tEbmmRA== [fileUNF].Google Scholar
Barberá, Pablo, and Rivero, Gonzalo. 2015. “Understanding the Political Representativeness of Twitter Users.” Social Science Computer Review 33(6): 712–729.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benoit, Kenneth, Drew Conway, Benjamin E. Lauderdale, Michael Laver, and Slava Mikhaylov. 2016. “Crowd-sourced Text Analysis.” American Political Science Review 110(2): 278–295.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boussalis, Constantine, and Coan, Travis G.. 2016. “Text-mining the Signals of Climate Change Doubt.” Global Environmental Change 36: 89–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boussalis, Constantine, Coan, Travis, and Holman, Mirya R. 2018. “Climate Change Communication From Cities in the USA.” Climatic Change 149(2): 173–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brewer, Mark, Kersh, Rogan, and Eric Petersen, R.. 2003. “Assessing Conventional Wisdom About Religion and Politics.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42(1): 125–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calfano, Brian, and Oldmixon, Elizabeth A.. 2018. “The Influence of Institutional Salience on Political Attitudes and Activism among Catholic Priests in the United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57(3): 634–643.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calfano, Brian, Oldmixon, Elizabeth A., and Gray, Mark. 2013. “Strategically Prophetic Priests: An Analysis of Competing Principal Influence on Clergy Political Action.” Review of Religious Research 56(1): 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cassese, Erin, and Holman, Mirya R.. 2017. “Religion, Gendered Authority, and Identity in American Politics.” Politics and Religion 10(1): 31–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deckman, Melissa. 2002. “Holy ABCs! The Impact of Religion on Attitudes About Education Policies.” Social Science Quarterly 83(2): 472–487.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deckman, Melissa, Crawford, Sue, and Olson, Laura. 2008. “The Politics of Gay Rights and the Gender Gap.” Politics and Religion 1(03): 384–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Djupe, Paul, and Friesen, Amanda. 2018. “Moralizing to the Choir: The Moral Foundations of American Clergy.” Social Science Quarterly 99(2): 665–682.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Djupe, Paul A., and Gilbert, Christopher P.. 2002. “The Political Voice of Clergy.” The Journal of Politics 64(2): 596–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Djupe, Paul A., and Gilbert, Christopher P.. 2003. The Prophetic Pulpit: Clergy, Churches, and Communities in American Politics. London: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Djupe, Paul A., and Neiheisel, Jacob R.. 2008. “Clergy Deliberation on Gay Rights and Homosexuality.” Polity 40(4): 411–435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Djupe, Paul, and Olson, Laura. 2010. “Diffusion of Environmental Concerns in Congregations Across U.S. States.” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 10(3): 270–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Djupe, Paul A., and Smith, Amy Erica. 2019. “Experimentation in the Study of Religion and Politics.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Endres, Dominik Maria, and Schindelin, J. E.. 2003. “A new Metric for Probability Distributions.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 49(7): 1858–1860.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, Heather, Cordova, Victoria, and Sipole, Savannah. 2014. “Twitter Style: An Analysis of How House Candidates Used Twitter in Their 2012 Campaigns.” PS: Political Science & Politics 47(2): 454–462.Google Scholar
Farris, Emily M., and Holman, Mirya R. 2014. “Social Capital and Solving the Puzzle of Black Women's Political Participation.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 2(3):331–349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friesen, Amanda, and Djupe, Paul. 2017. “Conscientious Women: The Dispositional Conditions of Institutional Treatment on Civic Involvement.” Politics & Gender 13(1): 57–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glazier, Rebecca. 2015. “Bridging Religion and Politics: The Impact of Providential Religious Beliefs on Political Activity.” Politics & Religion 2015(3): 458–487.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grammich, Clifford, Hadaway, Kirk, Houseal, Richard, Jones, Dale E., Krindatch, Alexei, Stanley, Richie, and Taylor, Richard H.. 2012. 2010 U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations & Membership Study. Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.Google Scholar
Greene, Zachary, and O'Brien, Diana. 2016. “Diverse Parties, Diverse Agendas? Female Politicians and the Parliamentary Party's Role in Platform Formation.” European Journal of Political Research 55(3): 435–453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grimmer, Justin. 2013. Representational Style in Congress: What Legislators Say and Why it Matters. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grimmer, Justin, and Stewart, Brandon. 2013. “Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts.” Political Analysis 21(3): 267–297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guth, James, John C. Green, Corwin E. Smidt, Lyman A. Kellstedt, and Margaret M. Poloma. 1997. The Bully Pulpit The Politics of Protestant Clergy. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.Google Scholar
Guth, James, Linda Beail, Greg Crow, Beverly Gaddy, Brent Nelsen, James Penning, and Jeff Walz. 2003. “The Political Activity of Evangelical Clergy in the Election of 2000: A Case Study of Five Denominations.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42(4): 501–514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holman, Mirya R. 2015. Women in Politics in the American City. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Holman, Mirya R., and Shockley, Kristin. 2017. “Messages from Above: Conflict and Convergence of Messages to the Catholic Voter from the Catholic Church Hierarchy.” Politics and Religion 10(4): 840–861.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Japkowicz, Nathalie, and Stephen, Shaju. 2002. “The Class Imbalance Problem: A Systematic Study.” Intelligent Data Analysis 6(5): 429–449.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jelen, Ted G. 1993. “The Political Consequences of Religious Group Attitudes.” The Journal of Politics 55(1): 178–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leip, D. Ed. 1999. Dave Leip's Atlas of the US Presidential Elections. Available at https://uselectionatlas.org/.Google Scholar
Liu, Tie-Yan, Yiming Yang, Hao Wan, Hua-Jun Zeng, Zheng Chen, and Wei-Ying Ma. 2005. “Support Vector Machines Classification with a Very Large-Scale Taxonomy.” ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 7(1): 36–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Margolis, Michele. 2016. “Cognitive Dissonance, Elections, and Religion: How Partisanship and the Political Landscape Shape Religious Behaviors.” Public Opinion Quarterly 80(3): 717–740.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Margolis, Michele. 2018. “How Politics Affects Religion: Partisanship, Socialization, and Religiosity in America.” The Journal of Politics 80(1): 30–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muddiman, Ashley, McGregor, Shannon, and Stroud, Natalie. 2019. “(Re) Claiming Our Expertise: Parsing Large Text Corpora With Manually Validated and Organic Dictionaries.” Political Communication 36(2):214–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ng, Andrew, and Jordan, Michael. 2002. “On Discriminative vs. Generative Classifiers.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 841–848.Google Scholar
Ondercin, Heather 2017. “Who is Responsible for the Gender gap? The Dynamics of Men's and Women's Democratic Macropartisanship, 1950–2012.” Political Research Quarterly 70(4): 749–761.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Papke, Leslie E., and Wooldridge, Jeffrey M. 1996. “Econometric Methods for Fractional Response Variables with an Application to 401(k) Plan Participation Rates.” Journal of Applied Econometrics 11(6):619–632.3.0.CO;2-1>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Presser, Stanley, and Stinson, Linda. 1998. “Data Collection Mode and Social Desirability Bias in Self-Reported Religious Attendance.” American Sociological Review 63(1): 137–145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quinn, Kevin M., Monroe, Burt L., Colaresi, Michael, Crespin, Michael H., and Radev, Dragomir R.. 2010. “How to Analyze Political Attention with Minimal Assumptions and Costs.” American Journal of Political Science 54(1):209–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, Timothy N., Chambers, America, Smyth, Padhraic, and Steyvers, Mark. 2012. “Statistical Topic Models for Multi-Label Document Classification.” Machine Learning 88(1): 157–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Santos, Adella, McGuckin, Nancy, Nakamoto, Hikari Yukiko, Gray, Danielle, and Liss, Susan. 2011. “Summary of Travel Trends: 2009 National Household Travel Survey.” No. FHWA-PL-ll-022.Google Scholar
Scheitle, Christopher, and Cornell, Nicole. 2015. “Hearing Clergy Speak About Social and Political Issues: Examining the Effects of Religious Tradition and Personal Interest.” Social Science Quarterly 96(1): 148–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smidt, Corwin. 2016. Pastors and Public Life: The Changing Face of American Protestant Clergy. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sumner, Jane Lawrence. 2018. “The Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT): A Web-Based Tool for Estimating Gender Balance in Syllabi and Bibliographies.” PS: Political Science & Politics 51(2): 396–400.Google Scholar
Thomas, Jeremy, and Whitehead, Andrew. 2015. “Evangelical Elites’ Anti-Homosexuality Narratives as a Resistance Strategy Against Attribution Effects.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 54(2): 345–362.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
United States Census Bureau. 2010. 2010 Census U.S. Census Bureau.Google Scholar
Wilcox, Clyde, and Larson, Carin. 2006. Onward Christian Soldiers: The Religious Right in American Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Woolfalk, Katherine. 2013. “Essays on Social Contexts and Individual Politics: The Political Influence of Religious Institutions and Ethno-Racial Neighborhood Contexts.” Ph.D. thesis.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Boussalis et al. supplementary material

Boussalis et al. supplementary material

Download Boussalis et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 537.5 KB