Political Campaigns and Church Contributions

Abstract

We combine a new dataset of weekly Catholic church donations with a new dataset of presidential-election campaign stops to explore the impact of stops on donations. We find that stops increase donations, with a campaign stop generating 2 percent more donations in the following week. Our results suggest that this effect is of short duration. Using a well-known list of politically-motivated words, we find that this effect does not appear to vary based on the political language used by the parish. Our results underscore the contemporary political dimension of US religiosity and the elemental relationship between religious and political events more generally.