An Interactional Study of How Religion is Used in U.S. Senate Campaign Speeches

This paper explores how religion is used in campaign speeches given by candidates for the U.S. Senate. A Senator’s communicative competence is one vehicle through which they convey their strengths to the electorate, their fellow Senators, and the media. Given the current historical period in which polarization, criticism and negativity are rampant in politics, research into how political figures communicate to others about religion can produce insights and information that may be useful both analytically and practically. This paper combines different approaches to discourse analysis, including a grounded theory approach, the lens of impression management drawing on symbolic interactionist traditions, and the theoretical and analytical perspective within conversation analysis called “membership categorization analysis.” Forty U.S. Senate campaign speeches are analyzed for this paper, twenty by Republican candidates and twenty by Democratic candidates, in matched pairs of winners and losers. I found that while some candidates made no religious references in their speeches, most produced at least brief formulaic references at the openings or closings of their speeches. In addition, there were a variety of ways religion was referenced in the body of the speeches, including statements of belief, quotes from the bible, prayer or references to prayer, or brief formulaic references. Interactional functions of these references could be to disparage an opponent, to convey a relationship to religion consistent with one's supporters or inconsistent with one's opponents, to present a neutral front which may be acceptable to a wide range of audience members, or to express the relationship of religion to politics. Some speeches also contained implicit references to religion which worked to highlight positions on religiously controversial issues without mentioning religion.