Do Churchgoers Want To Hear More Politics From the Pews?
(ANALYSIS) What exactly happens at a religious service? That’s a really interesting and pertinent question for the kind of work we do as social scientists who study religion.
There are a few resources that dig into that question like the National Congregations Study, but it’s very rare to see a more mainstream longitudinal instrument like the General Social Survey ask people what actually happens when they go to church. It’s just too niche for a survey that is really focused on looking at broad trends in American society.
Asking folks whether they sing while accompanied by a guitar or a pipe organ is interesting to sociologists of religion, but likely less intriguing to the average American.
What’s also a bit of a black box is what kind of messages are actually being conveyed during Sunday worship. There have been some analyses of sermon texts that were posted on online repositories like Sermon Central.
For instance, Boussalis, Coan and Holman analyzed 110,000 sermons to find that most pastors engage in political topics from the pulpit. Another bit of analysis by the same research team (plus Guhin) concluded that evangelical pastors rarely preached on topics like racial justice or poverty.
And I would be remiss to not mention that myself and Miles Williams published a piece where we analyzed the preaching style of men and women using 900 sermons we acquired from an online database.
All that research is incredibly important, and I would applaud any scholars who continue to go down that road of analysis, but there’s another side to this coin — how much of that political speech actually gets successfully transmitted to folks in the pews? And are those regular attenders actually receptive to hearing those kinds of politically charged messages?
This research from Scheitle and Cornell found that there’s often a significant mismatch between what the clergy say that they are speaking about and what is actually received by the congregants.
In August of 2022, PRRI fielded a survey (that’s hosted on the ARDA) that asked folks a bunch of questions about what they are actually hearing at their local church and how they think about the political identity of their congregation.
Let’s start with this question that was only asked to people who were regularly attending church: “How often does the clergy at your church ever talk about …”
Well, I think the biggest takeaway from this graph is that very few houses of worship are talking about political issues on a regular basis. In this data, just 2% of folks said that their pastor talked about Donald Trump or voter fraud often.
In contrast, 70% said that they never heard such topics discussed from the pulpit, and another 20% say it was rarely brought up. The idea that most churches were speaking for or against Donald Trump is just not supported by this data.
Now, that’s not to say that pastors were completely apolitical from the pulpit. In the entire sample of churchgoers, 43% said that they talked about abortion at least sometimes, and it was 44% who spoke about racism at a regular interval.
But clearly the most touched upon issue was poverty and inequality. In this data, 20% of people said that their clergy spoke about it often, and 46% said it was brought up sometimes.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.