Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Huber, Greg

Abstract

One of the most notable political shifts in American politics over the past fifty years has been the sorting of political and religious elites to produce the partisan “God Gap.” Among religious voters, evangelicals, especially White evangelicals, support Republican presidential candidates at higher levels than other religious voters. I argue that may partly be because of evangelical sermon content. In particular, I posit that, relative to Catholic and mainline Protestant sermons,evangelical Protestant sermons are more likely to consist of cultural and elite threats and that these threats consist of more sin, politicization on the ideological right, and mobilizing rhetoric. First, I analyze a random sample of sermons in southwestern Virginia, where I show that evangelical Protestant sermons consist of more cultural and elite threats. Next, I analyze a novel random sample of 450 U.S. sermons across 150 churches from throughout 2022 and find compelling evidence of a difference across traditions in the politically-relevant content. I then conduct a national survey experiment and find that sermons with cultural and elite threats targeting an out-group increase opposition toward policies protecting the rights of that group. Further survey experimentation on a novel sample of White evangelical churchgoers finds that this rhetoric is most mobilizing among Independent and Republican White evangelical churchgoers who regularly attend Bible studies. These findings suggest that the rhetoric of pastors plays a critical role in reinforcing central alliances in American politics.

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