In my research, I use an array of quantitative methods to better understand how religious leaders and organizations are changing over time — both in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the current political environment. My work has been published in outlets such Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Review of Religious Research, and Politics & Religion. Below I highlight some current projects and recent publications. For more info on my research, you can look at my CV or my Google Scholar page.
UMC Disaffiliation. In 2024, the United Methodist Church (then the largest Mainline Protestant denomination in the United States) experienced a schism over differences of opinion on human sexuality. By investigating administrative records, I identified clergy and congregations leaving the denomination and matched them with survey data to study how this division mapped onto existing political and religious divides in America. Initial results are published in a report I co-authored with David Eagle, and an article following up on this report is forthcoming in Sociology of Religion. I am currently working on a manuscript (along with Joseph Quinn and Gabriel Varela) which uses network analysis techniques to explore how the support relationships UMC clergy had prior to the schism influenced their decision to leave. Early results from this project were presented at the 2024 American Sociological Association meeting in Montreal and the 2025 Sunbelt conference in Paris.
The Opinions of Evangelical Leaders in the Age of Trump. Using web-scraping tools, I collected online articles on prominent evangelical news websites from 2012 to 2021 to examine discourse around immigration, Islam, and abortion both prior to and following the rise of Trump to political prominence. I use text analysis techniques to identify patterns in how evangelical opinion leaders discussed these topics and how those discussions have changed over time. I discussed some of my early findings on abortion in a think-piece published by the Kenan Institute in 2021, where I argue that abortion — not immigration — was the key issue among evangelicals as Trump rose to prominence. In a paper published in Socius, I use these data to examine how evangelical opinion leaders discuss immigration and Islam. In particular, I find that such discussions have typically been in the context of fear and foreignness — even before Trump rose to prominence.
The Politics of Clergy. Religious leaders often engage in political activism in their roles as community organizers and moral authorities. In a lead-authored paper published at Politics & Religion, my co-author and I use recent nationally representative data on congregational leaders to investigate how their views compare with the views of their congregants. We find that evangelical and Black Protestant clergy are politically well matched with their congregants, but Catholic and (especially) mainline Protestant clergy tend to be more liberal than their laity. In another lead-authored article (published in Sociological Focus), I investigate the political activities and agendas of clergy and how they vary across religious traditions. In a subsequent co-authored piece in Sociological Focus, my co-author and I focus in particular on the politics of Catholic priests, and identify important patterns in their ministerial formation that leads to differing political and theological views.
Changes in Religious Congregations and Congregational Leaders. I have conducted a substantial amount of research investigating religious congregations and their leaders. Published articles I have co-authored with Mark Chaves and Anna Holleman track the increase in technology use and enthusiastic practices among religious congregations, as well as assess the technological and financial preparedness of congregations prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. I followed up on these findings in my solo-authored work by exploring the organizational processes driving changes in worship practice and technology. I find that most of the trend towards enthusiastic worship is driven by congregations adapting their practices (and not turnover in the population of organizations), and that cultural factors (not just financial resources) were important in determining which congregations had streaming or recording services prior to the pandemic. In more recent co-authored work (forthcoming in Review of Religious Research), my co-authors and I investigate how mental health and illness are discussed in Canadian congregations, and how variations in these frames are related to stigma experienced by congregants. My work with the National Congregations Study and National Survey of Religious Leaders have also resulted in the publication of large, co-authored reports on congregations and clergy, respectively.