Communicating in Good Faith? Dynamics of the Christian Right Agenda

Abstract

It is an article of faith that organized interests represent members to elected officials making use of synchronized communication channels. Rarely, if at all, have researchers had access to multiple, internal, and external channels to test this notion. We mine a trove of nearly 2,500 emails the Family Research Council (FRC) sent to list subscribers from 2007 to 2018. Text tools allow us to depict message flexibility of the FRC. We then consider how internal and external messages may be linked by examining the issue content of emails in relation to press releases. Finally, we note the bills lobbied by FRC and the frequency these are mentioned in the internal email messages. Our findings are twofold. First, they support the conditional independence of communication channels in ways that appear to conform to the requisites of the different audiences: elected officials are likely mobilized by different signals than members are. Second, our evidence shows that the flexibility organized interests have in composing their communications can mean that different audiences are presented with considerably different political agendas. While FRC has significant sophisticated message flexibility, our data set indicates that such flexibility can raise serious concerns about good faith representation.

Do Religious Justifications Distort Policy Debates? Some Empirics on the Case for Public Reason

“…Academic research into the way in which religious actors engage in the use of discourse covers a diversity of themes. Examples of the breadth of coverage here include religious and secular discourse in Islamic societies (An-Na'im 2005; Pfeifer 2019), Islamist discourses on human rights (Carle 2005), conflicts over evolutionary theory (Silva 2018), the discourse of Buddhist nationalist groups (Walton and Jerryson 2016), the discourse of South Korean evangelical Christians (Yi et al 2017), religion in Swedish public discourse (Lövheim and Axner 2011), abortion discourse in Singapore (Tan 2010), the use of religious discourse on the Internet (Karaflogka 2002), the rhetoric of the U.S. Christian Right (Jelen 2005; Wilson and Djupe 2020), the discourse of conservative Christian groups in the UK (Kettell 2016a; 2016b), as well as religious discourse on sexual rights (Hunt 2010; Thomas and Olson 2012), assisted dying, and same-sex marriage (Djupe, Lewis, and Jelen 2016; Kettell 2018).…”

Does Disgust Drive Religious Freedom Attitudes? Experimental Results About the Context of Service Refusal Opinion

“…Perhaps one reason for the higher levels of support from evangelical identifiers is that they may have heard about and considered these scenarios before, which is quite likely given the degree to which Christian Right organizations talked about “religious freedom” cases after the Obergefell decision in 2015 (Wilson and Djupe, 2020). Nonevangelical Protestants, on the other hand, show much greater treatment effects, which is not the same conclusion when we look by denominational affiliation.…”

“…Instead, conservative Christian advocacy groups have fashioned a variety of legal arguments to resist the application of gay rights (see Bennett, 2017;Lewis, 2017;Lewis, 2018), including passage of state-level religious freedom laws. Advocacy groups also increasingly cite "religious freedom" when communicating with their constituents (Wilson and Djupe, 2020), and politicians have joined the chorus, with high-profile candidates such as Ted Cruz putting religious freedom at the center of their campaigns, and religious freedom language inserted into Republican Party platforms (den Dulk, 2018).…”

The Religious Communication Approach and Political Behavior

“…Much of the logic of this approach can be applied to meso‐level organizations like interest groups (Hofrenning, 1995). We need more studies that examine the development of engagement with particular issues (Knutson, 2011), message development and limitations (Jelen, 2005), who they target with which message (see Wilson & Djupe, 2020), and with what effect (e.g., Djupe & Conger, 2012; Wallsten & Nteta, 2016). We know even less about reception and adoption of messages from religious interest groups than we do from congregations.…”