Text Analysis of Religious Sermons
100 million Americans go to church each week to hear a sermon. Sermons have shaped the social and moral order of Western society and continue to influence people's lives in profound ways. Yet sermons change. How are they changing? And what do these dynamics tell us about the cultural evolution of religion in America? To answer these questions, I used natural language processing methods to analyze over 24,000 sermons from across the United States.
Sermons reveal trends in the evolution of religion in America.
Billet, M.I., Götz, F.M., Gvirtz, A., & Norenzayan, A. (In Prep). The Many Faces of the Church: A Portrait of American Christianity in 20,624 Sermons.