The Political Ramifications of Sermon Rhetoric among White U.S. Protestants and White Catholics

White evangelical Protestants support Republican Party presidential candidates at rates much higher than White Catholics and White mainline Protestants. I argue that local evangelical Protestant sermon content plays an important role in reinforcing this coalition. To explore this, I develop and analyze a novel random sample of 450 U.S. sermons from throughout 2022. Relative to Catholic and mainline Protestant sermons, evangelical Protestant sermons consist of cultural and elite threats that more closely map to Republican rhetoric. Using a series of survey experiments, I find that exposure to a sermon with a cultural and elite threat targeting an out-group decreases support for policies that would protect the targeted group’s rights. Moreover, this rhetoric is highly mobilizing for White evangelical churchgoers who identify as Independents and Republicans and who regularly attend Bible studies. These findings suggest that local evangelical sermon rhetoric plays an important role in reinforcing one of the most influential voting blocs in American politics.