Characterizing Religious Rhetoric in the U.S. Congressional Record

Christianity has historically been a potent force in American culture. In order to understand the place of religious expression in an increasingly secular and polarized society, we study the prevalence of religious rhetoric in the Congressional Record over the past three decades. We capture religious rhetoric through two distinct approaches: counting mentions of religious terms and identifying exact or approximate quotations of Bible verses using a combination of textual overlap and verse embeddings. While members of both parties routinely mention God and occasionally reference scripture, Republicans have used these signals more and more over the course of the last two decades to evoke a distinct cultural identity in addition to justifying normative commitments. Despite a pronounced decline in overall religiosity in the United States over the past fifty years, religious rhetoric remains a powerful yet flexible way for legislators, especially conservatives, to negotiate a highly partisan discursive environment while connecting their politics to a broader historical tradition.