Megachurch Pastors and Political Messaging: Evidence from Social Media

• In Event: Elites and Religion: Offline and Online

Abstract

“Before Covid-19, I had a purple congregation,” one pastor I interviewed told me, “now, it’s solidly red.” Another pastor in a conservative part of Orange county, California relayed how he’d invited a Black colleague to speak to his overwhelmingly white and affluent congregation in the wake of George Floyd’s murder: “It provoked a lot of pushback. Six months later, a quarter of my congregation was gone.” Churches across the United States have faced unprecedented upheavals in the last several years, with major stressors including the politicization of the pandemic response and debates about systemic racial injustice that accompanied the BLM movement. Moreover, the shift to “online Church” in the immediate wake of the Covid-19 lockdowns caused an increase in “congregation shopping,” as it lowered the barriers to “visiting” new faith communities. Underscoring the role of the religious economy, congregants increasingly left their old churches for new ones when they did not agree with the pastoral message being advocated. There are now also fewer of them; a recent Barna Group study suggests churches lost about a third of their members during the pandemic, and many of these are unlikely to ever return to the pews. Three years after we first heard the term “Covid-19,” Christianity in the United States is more bifurcated than anytime else in recent memory.

In the face of continuing electoral polarization in the United States and churches that increasingly reflect partisan political divisions, the proposed paper builds on research that was initially begun in 2021, when I interviewed 133 megachurch (defined as having an average weekly attendance of >2,000 across one or multiple campuses) pastors on their attitudes towards Covid-19 and the government. Since that time much has happened, including the handing down of such seminal SCOTUS decisions as Dobbs and Bremerton. In light of this, I am updating the original research findings—which stressed that a major concern of theologically conservative pastors was the potential for governmental interference in the church, especially in light of most of them having received PPP funds—to examine the political messaging that Evangelical megachurch pastors engage in.

Specifically, this is a longitudinal study of Twitter and Facebook postings made by the pastors that I interviewed in 2021 as compared against a baseline of pastors from the roughly 1,800 congregations listed in the Hartford Seminary’s megachurch database. Of particular interest is examining how pastors’ political messaging has remained constant or changed since early 2020 in light of the above-noted stressors. Data are being compiled via web-scrapping techniques, and analyzed via automated content algorithms and sentiment-analysis techniques. My working hypothesis is that many faith leaders, regardless of their own personal stances, are responding to economic incentives in the religious marketplace, and tailoring their messages to comport to the political positions of their increasingly partisan congregations. At a point in time when many would argue the United States is at a critical inflection point in its history as the 2024 presidential elections approach, it is critical to understand what messaging is being delivered among Evangelical Christians, one of the most reliable socially conservative voting blocs.

Author

• George Soroka, Harvard University