From Pews to Politics exemplifies comparative politics scholarship at its best. Through a rare combination of conceptual acuity, methodological dexterity, and conscientious contextual grounding, the authors develop powerful insights into an old question: To what extent do religious ideas influence the content, mode, and degree of individuals’ political engagement? In other words, do religious teachings exert an independent influence on individual behavior, as Weber suggested in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, or does the content of religious teaching reflect rather than drive individual or group-level affinities, as in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life? This question is important, as Gwyneth H. McClendon and Rachel Beatty Riedl remind us, because we “live in a time when religion—in all of its forms, practices, experiences and content—is highly salient to most people in the world” (p. 231). Yet, this question is also vexing. Studying the causal effects of religious ideas is difficult because individuals may be predisposed to opt into particular religious traditions.
To address these challenges, McClendon and Riedl combine localized descriptive research with experiments, survey data analysis, focus groups, analysis of an original newspaper database, and brief case studies. They also wisely delimit the scope of their analysis to one of several component parts of the lived experience of religion, namely exposure to religious content delivered through sermons. This is distinct from other mechanisms through which religion may influence individual attitudes and behaviors, such as social networks, opportunities for skill-building, elite-level advocacy, or social service provision. Sermons, in particular, merit close attention because they convey “metaphysical instructions” to their listeners. By answering “deep questions about the causes of problems of this world, the possibilities for change, and the nature of human agency,” sermons plausibly inform citizens’ evaluations of their political context and their capacity to influence it (p. 5). Although sermons are not the only way in which religious content is conveyed, they are indeed central to the diffusion of religious ideas in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
This book offers a valuable template for research on the influence of sermons across diverse contexts but focuses empirically on variation in Christian religious content in sub-Saharan Africa. This allows the authors to advance descriptive understanding of Pentecostalism and other Christian traditions in the region. This is a major contribution in its own right, given the dearth of reliable data and systematic research on Christianity and African politics (Elizabeth Sperber and Erin Hern, “Pentecostal Identity and Citizen Engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa: New Evidence from Zambia,” Politics and Religion 11[4], 2018). McClendon and Riedl’s empirical focus is also substantively important: the percentage of sub-Saharan Africans who identified as Christian more than doubled between 1950 and 2010 (Luis Lugo and Alan Cooperman, Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, Pew Research Center, 2010). Independent and Pentecostal churches have grown especially quickly in some sub-Saharan states and it is now common for citizens to encounter diverse religious messages on television, via street preachers, and on social media. Kenya, where the authors focus their data collection, is characterized by religious pluralism and relatively fluid religious affiliation among Christians, who are in the majority.
In this context, the authors began by recording and analyzing the content of sermons delivered at randomly selected Mainline Protestant, Pentecostal, and Catholic churches in Nairobi. Evidence generated by this stage of research was critical because it was the first systematic evidence to substantiate the view that the region’s Pentecostal churches expound a relatively coherent set of ideas. This was not obvious ex ante. Pentecostal churches, after all, lack hierarchical bodies to promote uniformity and vary widely in the degree and type of training that pastors may or may not have. Similarly, before this work, we lacked systematically collected data to determine how similar or different the messaging of Mainline Protestant churches is from that of Catholic churches. McClendon and Riedl find that in Nairobi, churches from both denominations propounded extremely similar messages in sermons, which is consistent with the fact that they tend to cooperate on high-profile political and social matters across African contexts.
Specifically, McClendon and Riedl document uniformity on two important dimensions of Pentecostal sermons, on the one hand, and Mainline Protestant and Catholic sermons, on the other. Whereas Pentecostal sermons emphasized the power of individuals to make change in the world and located the sources of earthly problems within the individual, Mainline and Catholic sermons voiced skepticism about individuals’ ability to make change and more frequently located the sources of earthly problems in institutions and relationships outside of the individual. It follows that Pentecostals urged followers to enact change by maintaining strong faith, leading through their individual example, and working to ensure that national leaders embraced born-again Christianity. Conversely, Mainline Protestant and Catholic sermons emphasized the need to oppose greed and the abuse of power, especially in government institutions. Although the sermons heard in Kenya rarely mentioned explicitly political topics (e.g., candidates, parties, or policies), the authors show that variation in the presumed degree of individual agency (high for Pentecostals, low for Mainliners) and the disparate attribution of earthly problems to internal or external sources nevertheless affected individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors.
Building on this descriptive research, the authors deployed excerpts of local Pentecostal and Catholic/Mainline sermons as realistic treatments in a series of experimental studies in Nairobi. As expected, individuals randomly exposed to an audio recording of the Pentecostal message were more likely to approach political life as what the authors term “empowered players of the game.” They exhibited higher levels of self-efficacy and engagement in a text-message campaign and were less likely to criticize the government or challenge the status quo in their text messages. Additionally, when asked to put themselves in the role of politicians who make decisions about spending, Pentecostals—especially those exposed to the Pentecostal message—were significantly more likely to give generously to citizens, thereby “leading by example.” In focus groups, Pentecostals also emphasized internal transformation and intrinsic sources of good governance.
Evidence from experiments with Catholics and Mainline Protestants was also generally consistent with the authors’ categorization of these congregants as “reluctant reformers.” Exposure to the Mainline/Catholic sermon message corresponded with slightly lower overall levels of self-efficacy, lower participation in the text-message campaign, and a higher proclivity to voice criticism of government institutions. When asked to behave as politicians or citizens in a spending game, exposure to the Mainline/Catholic message raised participants’ expectations of government officials and increased their willingness to invest in structural constraints on leaders (sanctions). This is consistent with Mainliners’ emphasis on structural and extrinsic incentives for good governance in focus groups and their real-world investment in legislative advocacy, protest, and public criticism of government. Additionally, the authors find that participants in the experiments were more strongly affected by messages with which they were already familiar. In other words, a Pentecostal exposed to a Pentecostal sermon responded more than did an Anglican exposed to a Pentecostal sermon.
Analysis of cross-country survey data offers further support for the conceptual archetypes of individual Pentecostals as “empowered players of the game” and Mainline Protestants and Catholics as “reluctant reformers.” The authors also studied the duration of effects of exposure to religious sermons by exploiting variation in the day of the week on which existing cross-country surveys were conducted. This clever empirical strategy suggests that the influence of sermons wanes within days of Sunday services, but that individual participation in midweek religious services (e.g., bible study) effectively recharges it.
In the final empirical chapter, the authors switch levels of analysis to explore whether evidence of group-level behavior reflects their conceptual categorization of Pentecostals as “empowered players of the game” and Mainline Protestants and Catholics as “reluctant reformers.” To do so, they coded a sample of newspaper articles from anglophone African states and noted whether the article portrayed Pentecostals, Mainline Protestants, or Catholics as empowered players, reluctant reformers, or both. This analysis, along with brief case studies of church–state relations in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia, is offered as evidence that despite their organizational differences and variation in church–state relations over time, Catholics and Mainline Protestants consistently acted at the national level as “reluctant reformers,” while Pentecostals consistently acted as “empowered players.”
This last contention is the most likely to spark debate. What does it mean to categorize all Catholic and Mainline Protestant political engagement in Uganda, Kenya, and Zambia since the 1980s as “reluctant reform,” despite variation in the degree to which Catholic and Mainline churches facilitated third-wave democratization in certain times and places (Monica D. Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy S. Shah, God's Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics, 2011)? Others may question how “reluctance,” which McClendon and Riedl conceptualize at the individual level in terms of self-efficacy, relates to competing explanations for variation in churches’ political engagement at the institutional level. For instance, scholars have explained variation in the roles played by different churches in national politics by focusing on changes in Catholic social doctrine, religious competition, or the relationship between religious and national identities rather than individuals' self-efficacy (c.f., Anna Grzymała-Busse, Nations Under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy, 2015). Do such ideational and institutional theories challenge McClendon and Riedl’s concept of “reluctant reformer” or complement it? Scholars are also likely to challenge the idea (prevalent as it may be) that Pentecostalism has a single origin in the United States (p. 46). Instead, African historians trace a parallel development of Pentecostal roots in early African Christian revival movements (Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction, 2008).
Moving forward, scholars might ask how the existence of Charismatic members of the Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches relate to the conceptual categories that McClendon and Riedl establish. According to the World Christian Database (https://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/, 2015), nearly one in three Catholics is Charismatic in Ghana and South Africa, and one in four is Charismatic in Kenya and Nigeria. Scholars should carry forward insights from McClendon and Riedl’s study of African Pentecostals, non-Charismatic Catholics and non-Charismatic Protestants to study Charismatic Catholics and Protestants as well as Evangelicals in greater detail.
