Ongoing Work
Brian Haggard. “Gatekeepers or Conduits? Christian Ministers’ Relationship with Mental Health Professionals in the Age of Polarization”
Landon Schnabel, Brian Haggard, Erika Abbott. “The Stained-Glass Closet: Concealing Doubts and Exaggerating Religiosity in the United States”
Published Work
Haggard, Brian W. 2026. “Conduits or Alternative Providers? Christian Ministers as Gateway Providers in an Age of Polarization.” in Society and Mental Health.
Amid America's mental health crisis, Christian ministers serve as intermediaries between congregants and professional care. Drawing on the Gateway Provider Model, this study uses nationally representative data from the National Survey of Religious Leaders (N = 752) to explore three competing explanations for variation in ministers’ referral behavior: biblical belief, racial identity, and political identity. Findings show that most ministers (79 percent) function as Conduits, referring congregants to mental health professionals at least once yearly. Among the 21 percent who did not refer, Alternative Providers (6 percent) engage with congregants’ mental health needs but make no professional referrals, while Inactive Ministers (15 percent) neither report being approached nor make referrals. Ministers holding dogmatic biblical beliefs show significantly higher odds of being Alternative Providers. These findings emphasize the importance of ministers’ theological orientation shaping their behavior as gateway providers in their congregant communities.
Hicke, Rebecca M. M., Brian W. Haggard, Mia Ferrante, Rayhan Khanna, and David Mimno. 2025. “Are You There God? Lightweight Narrative Annotation of Christian Fiction with LMs.” in Proceedings of the 6th Computational Humanities Research Conference.
Abstract: In addition to its more widely studied cultural movements, American Evangelicalism has a well-developed but less externally visible literary side. Christian Fiction, however, has been little studied, and what scholarly attention there is has focused on the explosively popular Left Behind series. In this work, we use computational tools to provide both a broad topical overview of Christian Fiction as a genre and a more directed exploration of how its authors depict divine acts. Working with human annotators, we first developed a codebook for identifying "acts of God." We then adapted the codebook for use by a recent, lightweight LM with the assistance of a much larger model. The laptop-scale LM is largely capable of matching human annotations, even when the task is subtle and challenging. Using these annotations, we show that significant and meaningful differences exist between divine acts depicted by the Left Behind books and Christian Fiction more broadly.
Landon Schnabel, Katherine A. Zaslavsky, Brian Haggard et al. “An Invitation to the Sociology of Religion: Important Questions Answered by Scholars in the Field” in the Sociology of Religion
Abstract: What are the most important questions in the sociology of religion? And how would scholars answer them? This article explores what people consider the most important questions in the field. Sociologists tend to study what we can readily answer with data, but the questions that elicit the most interest turn out to be quite different. They are bigger, broader, and harder to answer empirically. A crowd-sourced poll identified what people consider the most important questions in the sociology of religion, which were then posed to scholars in the field. They provided nuanced and complex answers revealing a diversity of approaches involved in the study of religion. This unorthodox article invites the reader to listen in on dynamic conversations that bring scholars into dialogue with one another, revealing points of consensus, ongoing debate, areas where there are more questions than answers, and directions for future work.