Scholars are interested in what keeps people in groups: their commitment to the group’s ideals or social structures. Classic economic theories would expect people to make individually rational assessments of the gains they get from a group, and leave when the group’s values shift from their own. Insight from sociological and social networks research, on the other hand, suggests that people’s commitment to groups is not reducible to their individual beliefs alone, and that group cohesion plays an important role in decisions to leave. This problem has been difficult to study because it is rare to find a clear test case where (1) an organization dramatically and clearly shifts its stated values and (2) there is information on individuals who left the group. We identify a case that addresses both of these problems: the United Methodist Church (UMC), which experienced a recent schism over same-sex marriage. We analyzed a dataset of UMC pastors in North Carolina collected prior to the schism to investigate the ideological and social network predictors of leaving the UMC. Preliminary findings show that, net of personal beliefs, pastors were more likely to remain in the UMC if they were connected to other pastors who also remained. Individuals’ ideology is a significant factor in group cohesion, but social structure plays an important role as well.

Project 2025 is a political initiative of The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think-tank based in Washington, D.C. The initiative’s agenda is captured in its book, Mandate for Change: The Conservative Promise: Project 2025 (Dans and Groves 2023). It seeks to promote conservative policies for reshaping the federal government. Some critics argue that the initiative is a Christian nationalist plan to infuse the government with conservative Christian values. There is little doubt that Project 2025 seeks to shape the Federal government in a conservative direction. It is less clear that it is a Christian nationalist plan to promote Christian values. Notably, “Christian” only appears seven times in the Project’s book. Although it may be true that theologically-conservative Christians find many of Project's policy recommendations appealing, that does not mean that the initiative is a Christian nationalist document; one would expect conservative Christians to see many of the policy recommendations of a conservative think-tank appealing for the simple reason that they are conservatives. This paper will draw on semantic network analysis and LDA topic modeling to examine the Project's primary text and assess the extent to which it is a Christian nationalist document. Ideally, it will do so by comparing it with earlier mandate editions (conditional on the availability of digital copies of earlier mandates).