First Paper Friday: Lavinia Dunagan

University of Michigan School of Information PhD candidate Lavinia Dunagan has published her first paper as a UMSI doctoral student. The paper examines how religious language, particularly Christian references, has appeared in the Congressional Record over the past 30 years. 

“Characterizing Religious Rhetoric in the U.S. Congressional Record” was published in the November issue of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. The paper reveals how scripture and spiritual language have become critical tools in politics in the U.S. 

The publication of a PhD student’s first paper is a milestone in their career, initiating them into the scholarly community as producers of knowledge. UMSI supports their work as part of our mission to share knowledge. 

“Democrats and Republicans used to use religious rhetoric about the same amount, but they began to diverge during the 2000s, with Republicans now deploying more than double the amount of religious speech they did in the ‘90s,” Dunagan says. “This is despite the widely reported pattern of secularization in American culture more broadly.” 

The paper also finds that references to the Bible are frequently used to frame military and foreign policy, with John 15:13 (“Greater love has no one than this…”) and Matthew 5:9 (“Blessed are the peacemakers…”) being the two most commonly cited Bible verses. 

Working with her advisor, UMSI assistant professor Dallas Card, Dunagan analyzed more than 1.4 million speeches from the Congressional Record to track mentions of religious terms and identify quotations or paraphrases of Bible verses.  

Dunagan’s path to UMSI began at the University of Washington, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science with minors in linguistics and English. She joined UMSI’s PhD program to study research that includes natural language processing, history and archival theory. Her work explores how computational tools can help scholars build and interrogate archives while also raising critical questions about the ethics of AI in shaping historical narratives.

“I've always been interested in how language can reflect beliefs about the structure of the social world,” Dunagan says. “I actually thought I would major in linguistics at the start of undergrad, but I was hooked on computer science after a couple of programming classes.”

In the future, Dunagan plans to continue studying how religion and technology intersect in archival contexts, particularly in digital tools like genealogy and ancestry databases. 

“The best part of UMSI really is the people here,” she adds. “In a world of LLM-generated misinformation and collective forgetting of the past, I'm glad to be working with and around people who are trying to understand and combat those issues through rigorous scholarship.” 

Read “Characterizing Religious Rhetoric in the U.S. Congressional Record” in the November issue of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. See the abstract below: 

Christianity has historically been a potent force in American culture. In order to understand the place of religious expression in an increasingly secular and polarized society, we study the prevalence of religious rhetoric in the Congressional Record over the past three decades. We capture religious rhetoric through two distinct approaches: counting mentions of religious terms and identifying exact or approximate quotations of Bible verses using a combination of textual overlap and verse embeddings. While members of both parties routinely mention God and occasionally reference scripture, Republicans have used these signals more and more over the course of the last two decades to evoke a distinct cultural identity in addition to justifying normative commitments. Despite a pronounced decline in overall religiosity in the United States over the past fifty years, religious rhetoric remains a powerful yet flexible way for legislators, especially conservatives, to negotiate a highly partisan discursive environment while connecting their politics to a broader historical tradition.

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Learn more about Lavinia Dunagan and Dallas Card by visiting their UMSI profiles. 

Read about UMSI’s PhD in Information program today!