The Many Faces of the Church: A Portrait of American Christianity in 20,624 Sermons

Religious sermons are a powerful cultural vehicle that reach about one third ofAmericans every week at church. Sermons convey a religion’s teachings, worldviews,and moral codes, yet little is known about the contents of American sermons and howthey vary across churches, denominations, and geographic space. We analyzed 20,624sermons delivered between 2019-2020 across 3,143 American counties and 6 Christiandenominations using a tripartite approach. First, topic modeling provided a descriptiveprofile of the textual, topical, and liturgical components of sermons, highlighting thedominant role of moral instruction, including advice on living a rich life. Second, variancedecomposition indicated that sermon content varied widely across individual churchesand denominations, but less so across geographical space. As such, denominationswere most distinctive in their liturgical components (e.g., Catholic Mass versuscharismatic preaching), but were highly similar in their prioritization of specific morals,values, and emotions. Third, cross-validated elastic net models demonstrated thatsermon content predicted substantial out-of-sample variance in regional political, social,health, and economic outcomes, such as voting behavior, firearm fatalities, and lifeexpectancy. These associations were robust to a series of robustness checks,suggesting that sermons contain unique information about local socio-political context.This is the most comprehensive study of sermons to date and provides a portrait of themany faces of the American church.