Abortion remains a contentious issue among U.S. Christians. But when millions of churchgoers file into the pews each week, what do they really hear? A new Pew Research Center analysis finds that just 4% of sermons shared on U.S. church websites in the spring of 2019 discussed abortion even once – and when they did, it was rarely mentioned repeatedly. Still, pastors who broached the topic were nearly unanimous in their opposition.
Although they are relatively rare, these mentions of abortion add up over time: Christian churches that shared their sermons online posted an average of nine sermons each during the eight-week study period – and roughly one-in-five of those congregations (19%) heard at least one sermon that mentioned abortion. To arrive at these conclusions, the Center analyzed nearly 50,000 sermons shared online or livestreamed by more than 6,000 U.S. churches and delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019 – a period that included Easter.
While the database is not representative of all U.S. Christian sermons, it offers a window into what many Americans hear each week from the pulpit. (See this report for details about how the analysis was conducted.)
How we did this
The findings suggest that roughly one-in-five congregations in the evangelical Protestant, historically black Protestant and Catholic traditions heard at least one message that touched on abortion during the study period. Meanwhile, only one-in-ten mainline Protestant congregations heard about abortion during the same period.
Sermons that mention abortion rarely focus entirely on the topic. When sermons are broken into smaller segments of 250 words (the median sermon runs 5,502 words), three-quarters of all sermons that mention abortion do so in just one segment. As a result, only 1% of all sermons across the whole database discuss abortion in more than one segment.
Congregations with fewer members tend to hear more references to abortion than those with larger memberships. For instance, 13% of mainline Protestant congregations with 200 or fewer members heard at least one reference to abortion over the eight-week study period. But that share falls to 8% among mainline Protestant congregations with more than 200 members.
In online sermons that do reference abortion, the pastors’ perspectives are almost unanimously in opposition to the practice. When researchers individually examined 60 sermons that discussed abortion, only four seemed to support access to abortion services. As a result, sermons that express a positive view of abortion rights were too rare to identify across the whole database.
Across religious traditions, clergy use distinctive terms in sermons that discuss abortion
Clergy in each major Christian tradition tend to use certain words disproportionately in sermons that mention abortion, compared with sermons by clergy in the same tradition that do not mention the topic. For instance, evangelical sermons that mention abortion are more likely than those that do not to include words like “womb,” “heartbeat” and “pornography.”
Pastors in the historically black Protestant tradition tend to use distinctive words and phrases like “pregnancy” and “child [of] Jesus” in sermons that touch on abortion. Catholic pastors use phrases such as “pro-life,” “good Catholic” and “church teaching” in these sermons, while mainline Protestant sermons that mention the subject disproportionately use the term “evangelical(s).” (Words and phrases in this analysis were converted to their roots, and common words such as “your,” “and” or “but” were excluded.)
One evangelical pastor argued in favor of a focus on life both before and after birth, saying, “I like what somebody said recently: ‘from the womb to the tomb.’ It’s not just enough to care about children in the womb, but to care about all life all the way to the grave.”
Meanwhile, a mainline Protestant pastor argued that religious leaders had shied away from speaking against what he perceived as social ills: “Why go to church? They don’t really condemn anything. … Should we take a strong stand against sin, against abortion, against the gay agenda, against divorce, against the love of money, against pornography, against drugs, against hate?”
Sermons that discuss abortion also are more likely to mention specific books of the Old Testament (also known as the Hebrew Bible) by name, even as they reference the New Testament (Christian biblical texts originally written in Greek) at roughly the same rate as other sermons. Indeed, 72% of all sermons that mention abortion reference a book of the Old Testament, compared with 60% of sermons overall.
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Few U.S. sermons mention abortion, though discussion varies by religious affiliation and congregation size - Pew Research Center
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