The Politics of 130,000 American Religious Leaders: A New Methodological Approach

We compile an original database of 130,000 American clergy across 40 denominations, which we link to public voter registration data. We then link these data to mass surveys and a survey of pastors' own churches. This paper has two purposes. First, it introduces a new methodology for learning about religious communities by scraping information from denominational find-a-church websites . Second, the paper presents several short analyses that focus on the political affiliations of pastors and how they relate to congregants. We demonstrate that denominational affiliation is highly informative of a pastor's party registration but not a congregant's. Yet, the weak relationship for congregants masks a stronger underlying relationship between denominational affiliation and issue positions. We also demonstrate that many congregants, particularly in conservative churches, are politically unaligned with their pastor.