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Acting for God? Types and Motivations of Clergy PoliticalActivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2018

Rebecca A. Glazier
Rebecca A. Glazier*
Affiliation:
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to:Rebecca A. Glazier, School of Public Affairs,University of Arkansas at LittleRock, Little Rock,AR. E-mail: raglazier@ualr.edu
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Abstract

Clergy members are often important political actors. Yet, scholarsrarely distinguish among different types of clergy politicalactivities. Here, I argue for three disaggregated categories ofclergy political activity: personal, general congregation level, andelection-specific congregation level. Data from two sources—theCooperative Clergy Study and the Little Rock CongregationsStudy—demonstrate that important differences exist across thesecategories, with the majority of model variables significantlyinfluencing different clergy political activities indifferent directions. For instance, a conservativeideology and affiliation with a Black Protestant church bothnegatively influence personal political activities, like donating toa campaign, while also positively influencing election-relatedpolitical activities in the congregation, like distributing voterguides. Similarly, providential religious beliefs increase generalcongregation-level political activities, while decreasing personaland electoral activities. These relationships are obscured whenpolitical activity is considered in the aggregate, suggesting thatclergy political activities are nuanced; different activities aredriven by different motivations.

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Type
Article
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 760 - 797
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank M. Kent Jennings, Greg Shufeldt,Corwin Smidt, and Jacob Neiheisel for comments on previousversions of this article. The data from the Cooperative ClergyStudy were collected through a cooperative effort led by theHenry Institute at Calvin College and were accessed through theAssociation of Religion Data Archives. The data from the LittleRock Congregations Study were collected with the support of anAlma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Awan Civic Education researchgrant, administered by the American Political ScienceAssociation's Centennial Center for Political Science and PublicAffairs. Data are available from the author upon request.

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