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In this article, we present a newly established corpus of 11,955 sermon manuscripts written by pastors in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Denmark (ELCD) in 2011-2016. We argue that this corpus provides a resource for studying how pastors within the same religious institution attend to general themes in church and society, respond to contemporary events, and represent social worlds. The aim of the article is twofold. 1) To present and discuss our approach to acquire and assemble the sermons corpus. This approach entailed sampling sermons directly from Danish pastors, and cleaning the corpus and annotating it with metadata manually. 2) To demonstrate the research potential of the corpus through a case study on gender representations in the sermons. We find that male and female pastors differ in their use of fundamental linguistic components, namely gendered pronouns and associated verbs. This affects how they assign agency to male and female characters in the corpus, and indicate that male and female pastors shape the social worlds in sermons in quite different ways. This case study therefore illustrates just one of the ways in which corpus-based research of Danish sermons may provide novel insights in the field of religion and society. The role of religion in contemporary democratic societies is a complex topic. A tendency within the study of religion has been to assert that religion today emerges primarily in individualized spiritual forms that have displaced the relevance of the old religious traditions in society – in the European context, of the old Christian majority churches in particular.1 In Denmark, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark (ELCD) still represents the majority religion, inscribed in the constitution and subsidized as such by the state through church taxes. The ELCD is present in the public sphere in Denmark, but as an institution, the church has no distinct agency that speaks in public on behalf of the ELCD: it has no unified voice to respond to societal change or crises, to address ethical matters, or to prioritize particular societal or religious topics over others. It is individual pastors who speak for the ELCD, and S E R M O N S A S D A T A : I N T R O D U C I N G A C O R P U S O F 1 1 , 9 5 5 D A N I S H S E R M O N S 2 these voices are at their most distinct when they write their sermons for the weekly service – a synchronous event in the ELCD, with pastors interpreting the same biblical passages within a context they deem pertinent to assembled congregations all over the country. In this endeavor, pastors are not mere agents of an organization, sending a consistent and uniform signal to their congregations. The content of preaching of course depends upon tradition and doctrine but preaching is also shaped by contemporary contingencies (local and global news, natural disasters, elections, and cultural discourses) and by the profile of the individual preachers and recipients (gender, age, personality, and sociodemographics). This practice results in the production of approximately 1,500 written sermons a week, a collective production of texts which remain the property of the individual pastors after the service. From these unique and otherwise detached documents, we can uncover the public voice of a religious majority institution. In this article, we present a newly established corpus of 11,955 ELCD sermons. The corpus will provide a resource for studying how pastors within the same religious institution attend to general themes in church and society, respond to contemporary events, and represent social worlds. After an introduction to the religious and societal context of which this corpus is a product, we will briefly review digital archival resources for studying religion and sermons more generally. Against this background, we will discuss our own careful considerations in regard to sampling, cleaning, annotating, and archiving our corpus, a process that was predominantly conducted manually. We further provide basic corpus statistics in order to describe our data set. Finally, we present a case study demonstrating how pastors perform the ELCD’s public voice when they represent gender in this newly established corpus of sermons. The public voice of a religious community: the Danish context In the second half of the twentieth century, secularization theories became important perspectives for predicting and interpreting the role of religion in democratic societies. The secularization thesis – in its early form associated with sociologists such as Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Karl Marx – stated that over time, as rational modes of thinking in societies increased, religion would lose its ability to J O U R N A L O F C U L T U R A L A N A L Y T I C S 3 set societal agendas. By the end of the century, secularization discussions were influenced by new concepts, such as “deprivatization,” “desecularity,” and “postsecularity,” and it was argued that societies were becoming increasingly religious once again.2 In recent years, past secularization perspectives have been criticized for viewing religion and the secular as two clearly distinguishable and separate domains.3 Rather, religion in public spheres is a complex phenomenon that unfolds in relation to other aspects of society, and not just singularly. It is therefore pertinent to attend to the concrete cultural and societal context in which religious phenomena unfold. In the Danish context, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark is the majority religion. Most Danish citizens are members of the ELCD (74.7% of the Danish population at January 1 2019). However, membership rates are slowly but steadily declining (from 81.5% at January 1 2009). Church members tend to participate primarily in church activities that are connected to life events – in particular funerals, but also baptisms, confirmations, and weddings – while participation in Sunday services is low, with an estimated 11% of members attending church services regularly in 2017.4 From a secularization perspective, these numbers could indicate that the church is losing its ability to remain relevant in society. Nevertheless, in view of the societal structure of the ELCD, the church is intricately involved in the public sphere of Danish society. On a macro level, the church is inscribed in the constitution and as such subsidized by government through church taxes, with church legislation handled by parliament. The ELCD is composed of ten dioceses and bishops (four female, six male). Dioceses are divided into deaneries, and deaneries further divided into geographically determined parishes, each with one or more pastors employed. Approximately two thousand pastors are employed by the ELCD. At parish level, small congregational councils are formed in civil society to share in the running of the local churches, a structure that was devised to rule out the possibility that a congregation might be led by a pastor whose theology did not accommodate that of the local population.5 The confession of the church is Evangelical–Lutheran, its framework liberal theological. In 1948, the ELCD was the first Lutheran church in the world to ordain women as pastors; in 2014, 55% of pastors employed by the ELCD were women. Same-sex marriages within the ELCD were authorized in 2012. S E R M O N S A S D A T A : I N T R O D U C I N G A C O R P U S O F 1 1 , 9 5 5 D A N I S H S E R M O N S 4 This authorization is a good example of how the branching structure of the church works in practice: the bill was passed in parliament; bishops were required to develop a ritual for performing the wedding ceremony; but in the end, individual pastors could decide whether their own theological attitude was compatible with their actually performing the ritual.6 However, accounting for the societal structures of the ELCD gives little insight into the responses and attitudes of the church to contemporary time and society. The structure in which the ELCD is embedded entails that many agencies are involved in regulating church affairs and that the church has no single, unified public voice with which to respond to societal change or standardize theological, ethical, political, or other attitudes. Instead, this voice is governed collectively by the pastors employed in the ELCD. Every Sunday, individual pastors form a collective voice as they preach simultaneously to congregations all over the country. Preaching in the ELCD is a practice embedded within a church liturgy that includes performing the Creed, prayers, hymn singing, the Lord’s Supper, and readings from the Bible. In the ELCD, the biblical readings are ordered in a prescribed lectionary which determines readings for each church holiday. There are two lectionaries: one for even years, one for odd. The biblical readings include a text from the Old Testament; a text from the epistles in the New Testament; and a text from one of the gospels in the New Testament. Texts for the same holiday share thematic similarities. The pastor reads the gospel passage aloud immediately before preaching and is obliged to preach in consideration of this gospel passage. Compared with more strictly regulated parts of the liturgy, though, preaching is a practice in which pastors address their congregations from a contemporary point of view. Pastors do not merely paraphrase the biblical passages but may instead use them to raise or reflect on existential, societal, or philosophical issues, and they are inclined to implicitly produce, reproduce, or divert from different discourses. As they preach, pastors are thus engaging in a dialogue with both Christian tradition and contemporary time. Even though attendance rates at regular ELCD services are low, this collective voice uttered by pastors is documented in the thousands of written sermon documents that pastors prepare in the week before the service. We argue that these documents are immensely valuable for uncovering the attitudes an

Sermons as data: Introducing a corpus of 11,955 Danish sermons