Many surveys have asked Americans about their religious affiliations, beliefs and practices, including what religious group they belong to – if any – and how often they attend services at a church or other house of worship. But less is known about what churchgoing Americans hear during religious services. Frequent churchgoers may have a good sense of what kind of sermons to expect from their own clergy: how long they usually last, how much they dwell on biblical texts, whether the messages lean toward fire and brimstone or toward love and self-acceptance. But what are other Americans hearing from the pulpits in their congregations?

A new Pew Research Center analysis begins to explore this question by harnessing computational techniques to identify, collect and analyze the sermons that U.S. churches livestream or share on their websites each week. To gather the data used in this report, the Center built computational tools that identified every institution labeled as a church in the Google Places application programming interface (API), collected and transcribed all the sermons publicly posted on a representative sample of their websites during an eight-week period, and analyzed the content of the sermons in a few relatively simple ways. For practical reasons, this exploration is limited to Christian churches and does not describe sermons delivered in synagogues, mosques or other non-Christian congregations...read more