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?
Sermon length
Pew Research Center Graphic
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.
The word “sermon” typically refers to the portion of a religious service in which a preacher offers commentary or guidance through a theological or religious lens. However, U.S. churches vary widely in the structure of their services and how much of those services they post online. Some post just the sermon. Others post the sermon and part of the service. Still others post the entire service. In many cases, the beginning and end of a sermon are not clearly labeled in the text, audio or video files on a congregation’s website. As a result, the automated tools used for this analysis cannot always isolate sermons from other elements of religious services with precision.
In this report, an “online sermon” refers to a portion of a religious service posted to a church website that contains a commentary from the pulpit but sometimes may include other parts of the service as well.
This process produced a database containing the transcribed texts of 49,719 sermons shared online by 6,431 churches and delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019, a period that included Easter. These churches are not representative of all houses of worship or even of all Christian churches in the U.S.; they make up just a small percentage of the estimated 350,000-plus religious congregations nationwide. Compared with U.S. congregations as a whole, the churches with sermons included in the dataset are more likely to be in urban areas and tend to have larger-than-average congregations (see the Methodology for full details).
The median sermon scraped from congregational websites is 37 minutes long. But there are striking differences in the typical length of a sermon in each of the four major Christian traditions analyzed in this report: Catholic, evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant and historically black Protestant.
Catholic sermons are the shortest, at a median of just 14 minutes, compared with 25 minutes for sermons in mainline Protestant congregations and 39 minutes in evangelical Protestant congregations. Historically black Protestant churches have the longest sermons by far: a median of 54 minutes, more than triple the length of the median Catholic homily posted online during the Easter study period.
This article is excerpted from a Pew Research Center report.