Religion in Contentious Times: Climate Change, Abortion Rights, and War

Abstract

Religion remains a potent force in our modern society, influencing people's lives and guiding their answers to existential questions in an ever-evolving world. The enduring nature of religion lies in its ability to be shaped by, as much as it shapes, the society it inhabits. This dissertation presents three empirical studies highlighting the role of religion, both from an institutional and individual perspective, in addressing three pressing contemporary issues: climate change, abortion rights, and war. The findings illustrate the adaptability and fluidity of religion in response to local contexts and current events. The first two papers provide a systematic study of how religious leaders, as "street-level bureaucrats" of religious institutions, craft sermons based on the demographic, sociological, and geographical factors of their communities, as well as concurrent events. What clergy choose to address in their sermons is not random. Instead, sermon topics are a product of their authors' beliefs, perceptions of their congregations' needs, and central norms and rules. Both papers use an original and unique dataset of 220,000 weekly sermons collected from 3,000 congregations across the United States. The content of the sermons provides insight into how, where, and when clergy engage politically- and socially-charged topics such as climate change and abortion rights. In a religiously pluralistic society, where individuals can choose where to seek spiritual guidance, the messages they hear during their weekly meetings are arguably a large determinant in what shapes their choice of congregation. Thus, choosing topics to include in weekly sermons are of great strategic importance to clergy. The first paper "Hear Ye, Hear Ye: When and Where Religious Leaders Preach on Climate Change" explores this process by studying how congregations address the contentious issue of climate change in their weekly meetings. As climate change and its consequences are increasingly framed as a moral issue, the religious interpretation of the human connection to the environment has varied tremendously across religious bodies as has the frequency with which clergy engage with this topic. Using text analysis tools, a dictionary-based approach and text classification with Large Language Models (LLMs), I find that both demographic characteristics of the congregations' surrounding neighborhood and environmental factors help explain this variation. Across different models and subsets, the political ideology of the local neighborhood is a persistent factor in how frequently climate-related discourse appears in weekly sermons. Evidence from these analyses also shows that the level of income and the racial composition of the neighborhood, as well as the level of air pollution in the surrounding area of a given congregation, are also strong determinants of climate change discourse in congregations. Thus, the findings suggest that the salience of an issue in a given local context drive how clergy perceive the needs and wants of their communities and address their congregations accordingly, which highlights religion's ability to cater to its flocks. The second paper titled "Holy Words, Contentious Topic: Analysis of Political Speech on Abortion Rights in Religious Sermons" tracks the same process on another contentious issue -- abortion rights. This paper also engages with the perceived wants and needs of the local neighborhood and exogenous factors related to abortion rights, but it includes an additional set of determinants. Specifically, it includes the hierarchy of a given congregation based on its denomination (centralized versus decentralized) and the size of the supportive network of the congregation (number of congregations from the same denomination that are relatively close in space to one another). These two additional factors account for clergy's incentives and resourcefulness and connection of congregations in engaging with contentious topics. Utilizing difference-in-difference study design and leveraging the US Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, I find that in states where the decision had considerable socio-legal implications for communities, congregations address abortion more, but they only do so in communities where the denominational position on abortion rights aligns with the perceived ideological position of the congregation's surrounding neighborhood. This effect is amplified if the congregation is embedded within a supportive network and when clergy are dependent on the local community rather than centralized religious bodies in securing their positions. The findings in this paper align with the findings from the first one in that, in both cases, the frequency of the topics of interest was driven largely by the local context. In the third paper of this dissertation "The (Not So) Sacred Image of Russia: Survey Experiment on Popular Support of Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine War", I shift from a focus on sermons and the clergy's role in shaping and/or adapting to congregant perceptions to explore religion's role as a source of long-term identity and how that identity may manifest itself in forming opinion of contemporary events. One's religious identity is formed through a process of socialization that involves larger social (religious) groups influencing underlying values, preferences, and behavior. To what extent this identity formation affects the reaction to important political and social events is a topic of interest to scholars. I address this topic with a survey experiment in the context of the contentious Russia-Ukraine war, specifically within Bulgaria -- a society historically and nationally tied to one major religion, Christian Orthodoxy, and one that has had a complex and involved relationship with Russia. I investigate the significance of affiliating with the Christian Orthodox faith in shaping in-group attitudes when the Russia-Ukraine war is framed as a cultural-religious war with Russia as the Christian Orthodox protector on one side, and Western-backed Ukraine on the other. I find that respondents' attitudes toward the war are not driven by their religious affiliation, nor the intensity of their religious identity, beliefs or behavior, but rather by the level of information they receive regarding the war as well as their fears of being drawn into the war. These findings suggest that concurrent events and information mitigate the extent to which religion can influence preferences and attitudes in a given society. In our modern society, where religion competes with the advances of science and technology, and the forces of secular and rational thought, the socio-political relevance of religion depends on its ability to adapt. As evidence from this dissertation shows, religious institutions are flexible with respect to the needs and desires of their constituencies, but religious identity isn't always salient in all contexts. This indicates the complex nature that religious belief and religious institutions play in human behavior, a topic of inquiry that will continue to intrigue scholars in decades to come. Competing to retain and attract members, religious institutions respond to community demands, prompting individuals to continually seek comfort and guidance from the pews. By doing so, they not only maintain their relevance in individuals' personal realm but also sustain themselves as institutional pillars, even in an age where many see them as obsolete. As a social identifier and embodiment of values and beliefs, religion's power is constrained by our information-rich, globalized world. However, when religion adapts to modern challenges, it showcases its most resilient nature. This dissertation highlights these mechanisms by considering three contentious issues in a comparative context.