Team profile by Trent Ollerenshaw, Gabriel Varela, Anna Holleman and Erin Johnston

Politics and Polarization in Mainline Protestant Congregations, a 2022-2023 Bass Connections team, examined whether and how political polarization has impacted Mainline Protestant clergy and congregations since the onset of COVID-19. Recent data from the National Survey of Religious Leaders shows while conservative Protestant congregations are highly polarized (80% of members and clergy lean Republican), Mainline Protestants are split along partisan lines and Mainline clergy, on average, report being more liberal than their congregations. 

Our team was divided into three sub-teams. Using three different methodological approaches and sources of data (interviews, sermons and survey data, respectively), these teams have deepened our understanding of how clergy think about the relationship between politics and religion, the extent to which clergy discuss salient political and social issues from the pulpit, and the impact polarization and political conflict is having on clergy well-being.

The Interview Analysis subteam spent this year honing their skills in qualitative data analysis, including coding, memo writing and structural and thematic analysis. Focusing on interviews from 34 United Methodist pastors in North Carolina, students investigated if and how pastors incorporate political speech and action into their ministry, how they handle political conflicts in their congregations and communities and how they connect the political and the theological. Students found that pastors vary significantly in their thoughts about the role of politics in the pastorate. For example, pastors typically conformed to one of two groups, exemplified by these seemingly oppositional quotes: “I feel like the gospel is inherently political” and “I don’t preach politics. … I preach Jesus.” 

The Interview Analysis sub-team found that pastors typically conformed to one of these two opinions, communicating either that their faith made confronting politics unavoidable, or that confronting politics was a distraction from their faith. However, regardless of pastors’ stated preference on including politics in their ministerial activities, the team found that almost all pastors did, in fact, incorporate political language or action into their ministry in some way. Further, the team found that all pastors — regardless of if they felt that political action and speech were appropriate in ministry — were affected by political polarization in their congregations and communities, whether that be around issues of LGBTQ inclusion, race, abortion, COVID protocols or other issues. 

This is human work, and keeping the research human is so important. I hadn't done qualitative research before. Learning from experienced qualitative researchers who are also deeply empathic taught me what that actually looks like. I think the research we did showed a very human-concerned perspective and that I'm really proud of. –Megan Forbes, master of public policy student

The Sermon Analysis subteam used quantitative text data analysis methods to explore if and how political polarization is represented in Sunday sermons, and how pastors navigate political tension when contentious social and political issues become salient. This team collected one year (March 1st, 2020 to February 28th, 2021) of sermons from 375 United Methodist congregations in North Carolina, including an oversample of 75 majority-Black congregations. These sermons were linked to pastor-level survey data from the Clergy Health Initiative and congregation-level information from the United Methodist Church. 

Team members developed individual and joint research question(s), identified variables, and created word sets that correspond to salient issues and political events during this period. Research topics included analyses of pastors’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, the police murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matters protests, depolarizing language in the runup to the 2020 presidential elections and in the aftermath of the January 6th, 2021 riots, and mentions of electoral politics and action-oriented language related to voting and other forms of political participation. 

Preliminary analyses suggest there is sometimes, but not always, heterogeneity in pastors’ responses to these issues and events as functions of pastors’ political leanings and congregational settings. Looking ahead, the sermon team intends to further explore these and other important research topics using supervised machine learning methods for text classification and analysis. Ultimately, this team hopes to identify viable pastoral responses to polarization and political tensions towards bolstering the United Methodist Church as a source of social trust and as a site for bridging divides across increasingly polarized political lines.  

The Survey and Network Analysis subteam studied pastors’ experience of political polarization in congregations, and to whom they turn for social support, using a panel survey of pastors working in North Carolina. Focusing on the 2021 cross-section of the survey, the team developed skills around exploring and cleaning survey data including extensive R programming, matching and merging datasets from different sources and gaining familiarity with best practices in data storage and management to ensure reproducibility. 

These efforts resulted in a survey of 1019 pastors across North Carolina, including information about pastors' political perceptions, the location and census information associated with their primary congregation and 2,766 relationships to other pastors to whom they turn for social support. With this trove of information, the team jointly developed a series of research questions relating to pastors’ experience of political polarization and its potential impact on mental health. Team members learned how to produce exploratory bivariate analysis and multivariate regression using R. In addition, the team developed skills in social network analysis and visualization. 

Preliminary findings suggest that pastors experience a significant amount of political conflict in their congregations and that this experience is more concentrated among liberal pastors. Early career pastors, regardless of political leaning, report difficulties with handling political conflict, a feeling strongly associated with negative mental health outcomes. When pastors seek out social support from colleagues, they usually turn to the elders in their regional UMC conferences but not necessarily to others within their political party. The team continues to work toward expanding their research to previous years in the survey, with the task of illustrating the changing role of political polarization on pastors’ well-being.

Politics and Polarization in Mainline Protestant Congregations

Poster by Erin Johnston, Chris Johnston, David Eagle, Jen Headley, Anna Holleman, Megan Forbes, Sejal Mayer-Patel, Millie Caughey, Gabriel Varela, Dav King, Oliver Hess, Trent Ollerenshaw, James Liao, Haley Toresdahl, Jackie Irvin and Tahmara Ouedrago