Racial Politics and Polarization in the United Methodist Church

• In Event: Intersectionality and Social Movements

Abstract

In 2020, race and racial injustice grew to dominate national discourses after the police murder of George Floyd and other Black Americans. Although religious leaders often express reluctance to address social issues perceived as “political” and “polarizing”, discussions around race became essentially unavoidable in the wake of 2020’s mass racial justice protests. Employing text-as-data approaches with a novel dataset linking surveys of over 1,000 United Methodist pastors and over 30,000 sermons they gave in 2020, this project answers three broad questions related to race and religion in the United States. First, to what extent did pastors discuss race in sermons during 2020, particularly following high-profile police killings of Black Americans? Second, what, if anything, did pastors encourage their congregants to do in response to these illustrative examples of persistent and systemic racial injustice (e.g., join local BLM protests, engage in cross-racial dialogue, bring in DEI trainers, etc.)? And third, how do differences in pastoral speech about race in both quantity and content vary as functions of pastor-level traits (e.g., race, age, partisanship), congregation-level traits (e.g., congregation size, racial makeup, proximity to BLM protests), and their interactions?

Authors

• Trent Ollerenshaw, Duke University

• Christopher David Johnston, Duke University