Congregations are spiritual gatherings, but are they also places where people practice politics? They are, but there isn’t just one way to answer that question. Sometimes the politics happen in the pulpit. Sometimes the congregation engages in activism as a group. Sometimes individual members are engaged – both because of their congregations’ encouragement and in spite of differences. And sometimes congregations are places for education and debate.
When the issues are especially controversial, it’s important to think about where and how politics makes an appearance.
During our more than 70 focus group sessions with pastors in the Congregations and Polarization Project, we often asked about political involvement. When did congregations advocate, as a group, on cultural or political issues? Pastors—conservative, liberal, and moderate—told us that they rarely preached on controversial social or cultural issues and their congregations expected them to refrain from this.
Pastors in Black churches and in the most progressive white churches were the most likely to advocate on social policy, but even they hesitate to be too “political” from the pulpit. (This mirrors the findings of a major national survey of sermons, conducted in the fall of 2020.)
However, this reticence seems to have almost no correlation to the level of involvement in politics by congregational members as individual citizens. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I personally reached out to seven evangelical pastors from our focus groups. I asked them if the event, and its fallout, came up in their church.
All seven reported that they had very limited knowledge of Kirk. They had never watched him online. They did not really know what he stood for. But from social media and general conversation after his murder, they learned many of their members followed Kirk and thought his death was a seminal moment in US history. Some pastors felt pressure to mention his killing from the pulpit, but most kept this very general, such as prayer for an end to political violence.
In two of the seven cases, members contacted the pastors to ask if it was okay to talk about Kirk’s death in their adult education classes. Clearly those members thought the event was important, but they also did not feel like this was the sort of thing they usually talked about at church.
“Pastors in Black churches and in the most progressive white churches were the most likely to advocate on social policy, but even they hesitate to be too “political” from the pulpit. However, this reticence seems to have almost no correlation to the level of involvement in politics by congregational members as individual citizens. “
Why This Matters to Congregations
Most importantly, this framing teaches us that everyone should exercise caution when generalizing about what “conservative churches” or “liberal churches” are likely to do. Our sample of pastors may not be representative of all pastors, but claims about the political activity in churches, especially from the media, appear to be overgeneralizations. We just do not see much politicking from the pulpit.
There is a lesson here for pastors, too: Their members may make a larger distinction between their private views and the work of their congregations than the pastors do themselves. Many church members draw a clear line between what they talk about inside and outside their churches. Even if their church chooses not to advocate on hot political issues, the members may actively do so in individual capacities.
Researchers and pastors who want to know what a congregation’s members think should find ways to ask the right questions.
Focus groups and interviews can be helpful places to pose some questions, but in a large congregation, a survey may help. It is important to listen closely without too many assumptions about what we might hear.
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