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Religious language has long been part of American political life—but what influences when and how it’s used? A new study by Schar School of Policy and Government PhD candidate Julianna J. Thomson and Alena Smith, a PhD candidate at Stanford University, examines how congressional leaders may shape the religious rhetoric used by other members, both on the House floor and in the messages they send back home.
Published in July by Cambridge University Press, “Sacred Speech: Analyzing the Influence of Congressional Leadership on Religious Rhetoric” explores the subtle yet significant ways congressional speech changes when new leadership takes the helm—especially when that leader is vocal about their faith.
New Leadership, New Language
The researchers zeroed in on a pivotal moment: when Mike Johnson, a Republican who speaks frequently about his religion, became Speaker of the House in 2023. They compared what lawmakers were saying before and after he took the gavel, especially looking at differences between Republicans and Democrats.
What they found: After Johnson became Speaker, Republican members started including a lot more religious language in their newsletters to voters. But their speeches on the House floor? Those didn’t change much.
The takeaway, say the researchers, is that leadership matters. Even if it doesn’t change what’s said in official debates, it can shift how politicians talk to the public—especially when religion is part of the message.
“I hope our work speaks to a few different audiences,” Thomson said. “For scholars of American politics, it offers insight into the evolving role of religion in public life. For researchers in the religion and politics subfield, it shows how computational and statistical methods can be used to analyze patterns in elite speech and study abstract concepts, like faith.”
As for the voting public and political constituents, “we hope this project highlights the language elected officials use to frame their values and policy goals,” she said.
“If you live in the United States, you’re represented by a legislator, and it matters how that person communicates with you and speaks on your behalf in Washington.”
Thomson and Smith submitted their findings to the London School of Economics’ United States Politics and Policy (USAPP) platform. Their essay was accepted and can be found at this website. A similar essay can be found at the blog Religion in Public at this website.
Where It All Began
The idea for the study stemmed from a conversation between Thomson and Smith at a graduate student workshop in 2023 at the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture.
“We discovered our shared interests in religion and American politics,” said Thomson, who is originally from Ontario, Canada. “Later that year, when Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House, we immediately began talking about how striking it was to see someone with such a clear, public articulation of faith step into one of the most powerful political roles in the country.
“We had both been following the drama surrounding the election of a new Speaker and saw an opportunity to examine how religious rhetoric was being used in Congress and more broadly, how the new leadership might shape patterns of political communication.”
The authors relied on publicly available datasets, the Congressional Record, and the Polarization Research Lab’s speech database, in addition to computational text analysis —primarily in Python and R, Thomson said—to track and categorize different forms of religious language.
“These are skills Alena and I both developed during our PhD coursework,” she said, adding “a special shoutout to [Schar School Associate Professor] Laurie Schintler’s Big Data class, which helped me build a strong foundation in this kind of work.”
“Sacred Speech” is Thomson’s first published peer-reviewed study, “a personal milestone I’m proud of,” she said. “It also represents a true coauthored collaboration. Alena and I worked closely on every part of the process, and it was genuinely fun to build the project together.”
Thomson is the most recent beneficiary of the Daniel Druckman Fellowship, a stipend awarded to eligible graduate students made possible by the generosity of Schar School Professor Emeritus Druckman.
“The Druckman Fellowship has been incredibly important for my academic career,” said Thomson. “Not only does it allow me to extend my dissertation research on religious rhetoric into a journal article, but it also gives me the opportunity to travel to conferences and share my work with broader scholarly and public audiences.”
That kind of support, she said “makes a real difference for PhD students and younger scholars.”
As debates over the role of faith in politics grow increasingly polarized, Thomson and Smith’s work offers a timely and data-driven lens into how leadership influences the language of governance.
“Sacred Speech” not only deepens our understanding of religious rhetoric in congressional communication but also reminds us that the words leaders choose can shape public perception, voter alignment, and ultimately, democratic discourse. In a time when political language is more scrutinized than ever, this study demonstrates the power of scholarly research to reveal the subtle, yet profound, ways representation and rhetoric intersect in American public life.