In a recent blog post on Religion in Public, two researchers, Brittany Bramlett, teacher at University of Georgia and Ryan P.Burge, teacher at Eastern Illinois University analyzed tweets of all members of Congress from January of 2017 through April of 2018 to get a sense of how much "God Talk" is occurring on social media.
"God Talk" is often used as a type of dog-whistle and has become an important emerging area in the study of religion and politics.
The researchers looked for the difference between Republicans and Democrats and as well as men and women with several Christian language use such as "God", "Faith", "Bible", and "Jesus".
God is invoked much more frequently than faith, but both terms are used much more often than "Bible" and "Jesus."
They found that despite the fact that Republican men only send a third of all tweets(Democrats tend to tweet more frequently), they represent 78.4% of all tweets containing the word "God". While 60% of all tweets sent out during that month came were from Democrats, just 21.6% of all tweets containing "God" in the month came from Democrats.
As Generic God talk is much more pervasive than specific Christian language, they researched instances of members of Congress tweeting verses from the Bible.
The cases were rare and there are two members of Congress who often mention the Bible: Rep. John Shimkus and Senator Marco Rubio. Both are all Republicans.
Democrats shy away from religious language - but Republicans are more likely to invoke God Talk on the digital stage.
You can find more interesting findings in the Politics and Religion in their article. An ungated version can be found here.
