Congregations play an important role in shaping parishioners’ political attitudes. A key way that congregations transmit political messages is through sermons. This project analyzes an original collection of over 170,000 publicly posted sermons from Chicago, IL, assembled through the Chicago Congregations Project—the first approximate census of congregations in the city.
We use this data to address three primary research questions: how often do sermons feature discussions of political issues and calls for direct action, such as marching for or against public policies? To what extent do the messages that congregations deliver reinforce or bridge political divides? What congregational-level and neighborhood-level factors explain variation in sermons’ political themes?
This project will leverage speech-to-text and large language models to analyze both overt and subtle political messaging within complex religious discourse. We will further merge political measures of sermon text with community-level data to reveal how they interact with congregations’ local contexts.