Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Preachers, Politics And The Pulpit: The Influence Of Church Structure On How Clergy Approach Political Topics And How Congregations Receive Their Messages, Michael Bender

Honors Theses

Inspired by the Catholic Church’s nationwide resistance to President Obama’s contraceptive mandate in the summer of 2012, this honors thesis paper attempts to discover a link between church polity (or church structure) and whether political messages are more or less likely to be preached by clergy from the pulpit and accepted by their congregants. Given that churches are places where attendees are exposed to political messages, this paper hypothesizes that structurally centralized Christian denominations are more likely to have preached on the contraceptive mandate than decentralized denominations. Accordingly, it is assumed that Catholics are more likely to have heard about …