The Digital Pulpit: A
Nationwide Analysis of
Online Sermons
One of the best parts about having numerous houses of worship
in a given community is the variety available to the people in the
area, even those who identify as the same faith. No two churches are
exactly the same, and every senior pastor runs his or her church in a
unique way.
Until now, just how much these individual churches vary from
each other has largely been a mystery, especially when it comes
to the content and delivery of sermons. Many surveys have asked
Americans about their religious affiliations, beliefs and practices,
and how often they attend services at a church. However, less is
known about what churchgoing Americans hear while attending
those religious services.
Frequent churchgoers may have a good sense of what kind of
sermons to expect from their own clergy: how long they usually last,
how much they dwell on biblical texts, whether the messages lean
toward fire and brimstone or toward love and self-acceptance. But what
are other Americans hearing from the pulpits in their congregations?
A new Pew Research Center analysis has started to provide some
answers for this question by using computational techniques
to identify, collect and analyze the sermons that U.S. churches
livestream or share on their websites each week.
Using a complex computational process that utilized application
programming interface (API), transcriptions and other analysis
methods, researchers collected data on more than 49,000 sermons
delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019 and shared online by
6,431 churches.
The report notes that these churches are not representative of all
Christian churches in the U.S.; they make up just a small percentage
of the estimated 350,000-plus religious congregations nationwide.
Compared with U.S. congregations as a whole, the churches with
sermons included in the dataset are more likely to be in urban areas
and tend to have larger-than-average congregations.
The median sermon scraped from congregational websites is 37
minutes long. But there are striking differences in the typical length
of a sermon in each of the four major Christian traditions analyzed
in this report: Catholic, evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant
and historically black Protestant.
Here are some highlights of the findings:
Catholic sermons are the shortest, at a median of just 14
minutes, compared with 25 minutes for sermons in mainline
Protestant congregations and 39 minutes in evangelical Protestant
congregations. Historically black Protestant churches have the
longest sermons by far: a median of 54 minutes, more than triple
the length of the median Catholic homily posted online during the
Easter study period.
Researchers also conducted a basic exploration of sermons’
vocabulary. Several words frequently appear in sermons at many
different types of churches — for instance, words such as “know,”
“God” and “Jesus” were used in sermons at 98% or more of churches
in all four major Christian traditions included in this analysis.
Christian traditions share common language, but also possess
their own distinctive phrases. This computational text analysis also
found many words and phrases that are used more frequently in the
sermons of some Christian groups than others.
For instance, the distinctive words (or sequences of words) that
28
CHURCH EXECUTIVE | JAN / FEB 2020
often appear in sermons delivered at historically black Protestant
congregations include “powerful hand” and “hallelujah … come,”
which appears online in actual sentences such as “Hallelujah! Come
on … let your praises loose!”
Meanwhile, the distinctive vocabulary of Catholic sermons
includes “homily” (which is what Catholics typically call a sermon)
as well as “diocese” and “Eucharist.”
An analysis of which books of the Bible are cited by name suggests
that preachers nationwide, across all major Christian traditions, are
more likely to refer to books from the New Testament (90% of all
online sermons do so) than the Old Testament (61%).
This pattern is especially pronounced in mainline Protestant
and Catholic sermons: These two groups are, respectively, 39% and
According to the study analysis, American Christian sermons are more likely to
refer to books from the New Testament than from the Old Testament.
40% more likely to mention a book of the New Testament than to
mention a book of the Old Testament by name in any given sermon.
This may reflect the fact that most ministers in the mainline
Protestant and Catholic traditions preach on the day’s Gospel
reading, which is always from the New Testament.
References to books of the Bible also vary over time. For instance,
the share of all sermons that mention a book of the Old Testament by
name declined by 13% on the week of Easter Sunday (to 49% from
62% the previous week) and then rebounded the following week.
Books from the New Testament are more commonly cited than
books from the Old Testament across every Christian group. At least
one book from the New Testament is named in 90% of all sermons,
while a book of the Old Testament is cited in 61% of sermons.
For the full report with the methodology and analysis of these
findings, visit https://www.pewforum.org/2019/12/16/the-digital-
pulpit-a-nationwide-analysis-of-online-sermons.