Trump Can't Be Ignored: A Congregational Case Study

I wrote this paper for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Religious Research Association, held jointly with the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion at the Denver Marriott Tech Center, October 30 – November 1, 2026. The theme of this year's meeting is Rethinking Religion for the 21st Century.

The paper is a participant-observer study of a suburban Denver United Methodist church. It draws on a survey of congregation participants and on interviews. It asks how people in one congregation are making sense of the changes in American politics, and what the sociology of knowledge can offer them.

Read or download the paper

Summary

This case study grew out of more than seven years of participation in the life of a suburban Denver United Methodist church. I conceived the project after observing that the political reality created by the Republican Party and President Donald Trump is causing congregation participants to talk about how to respond. The church offers short-term book studies and other small groups. That made it a good site to study in light of the sociology of knowledge and the research on small groups begun by Wuthnow and Putnam. As the study progressed, it became clear that the impact of President Trump on the congregation cannot be ignored. A new hypothesis emerged: congregation participants have not examined the paradigms they use to understand the "separation of church and state" and the authority of scripture and church teaching. So, the sociology of knowledge's tools to examine paradigms in religion and politics offer a place to start in addressing the anxieties that respondents and informants expressed.

The session

See the full SSSR–RRA 2026 program (PDF).

Thank you

This site first invited congregation participants to take the survey and to sign up for interviews. Thank you to everyone who took part. The survey and interviews are now closed, and the paper above reports what we learned.