From Pews to Politics

Does religion influence political participation? This book takes up this pressing debate using Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa as its empirical base to demonstrate that religious teachings communicated in sermons can influence both the degree and the form of citizens’ political participation. McClendon and Riedl document some of the current diversity of sermon content in contemporary Christian houses of worship and then use a combination of laboratory experiments, observational survey data, focus groups, and case comparisons in Zambia, Uganda, and Kenya to interrogate the impact of sermon exposure on political participation and the longevity of that impact. Pews to Politics in Africa leverages the pluralism of sermons in sub-Saharan Africa to gain insight into the content of cultural influences and their consequences for how ordinary citizens participate in politics.

Author Biography

Gwyneth H. McClendon is Assistant Professor of Politics at New York University and the author of Envy in Politics (2018). She has published numerous articles on political psychology, religion, and political participation, in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies among other journals. Rachel Beatty Riedl is Associate Professor of Political Science, Director of the Program of African Studies, and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, Illinois. She is the author of the award-winning Authoritarian Origins of Democratic Party Systems in Africa (Cambridge, 2014). Riedl is the Chair of the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association and member of the Council on Foreign Relations.