Numerous surveys have explored the religious affiliations, beliefs, and practices of Americans, yet less is known about the specific messages congregants hear during weekly services. A new Pew Research Center analysis addresses this by utilizing computational techniques to identify, collect, and analyze sermons that U.S. churches livestream or share online. To gather this data, the Center identified institutions labeled as churches via the Google Places API and transcribed publicly posted sermons from a representative sample of their websites. The analyzed sermons were delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019, a period encompassing Easter Sunday.
This methodology produced a database of 49,719 transcribed sermons from 6,431 churches. While these institutions represent a small fraction of the estimated 350,000-plus congregations nationwide, the study focuses on four major Christian traditions: Catholic, evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, and historically black Protestant. These findings provide a meaningful window into the length, vocabulary, and biblical references of religious messaging, offering valuable insight into the context of faith in public life.
The median sermon length across these websites is 37 minutes, though significant differences exist between traditions. Catholic homilies are the shortest, with a median of 14 minutes, while mainline Protestant sermons average 25 minutes and evangelical Protestant sermons reach 39 minutes. Historically black Protestant churches feature the longest messages at a median of 54 minutes—nearly four times the length of the average Catholic homily—highlighting the importance of alignment with sermon value for listeners.
An exploration of sermons’ vocabulary found that several words frequently appear in sermons at many different types of churches. 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 the study.
The analysis also finds that certain words and phrases are used more frequently in the sermons of some Christian groups than in others. For example, the three terms most disproportionately used in evangelical sermons include variants of the phrases “eternal hell,” “lose … salvation” and “trespass … sin.” Yet even these distinctive terms are relatively rare: Only one distinctively evangelical phrase (“Bible … morning”) was used in a sermon at more than 10% of evangelical congregations during the study period.
Meanwhile, 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 percentage points and 40 percentage points 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. Evangelical and historically black Protestant sermons, meanwhile, are the heaviest users of the Old Testament: Roughly two-thirds of sermons from each group mention at least one book of the Old Testament by name.
Read the full Pew Research report here. Used by permission.
