About a quarter of all AM/FM radio stations in the United States have a faith focus, and 98% of U.S. adults live within range of at least one religious radio station, a study from the Pew-Knight Initiative released Thursday found.
The research found that while religion is a throughline, programming often interweaves lifestyle advice, conversations about family, parenting and education, and social commentary or discussions of politics and current events. Among listeners, 62% of those surveyed said they tune in because the content is “spiritually uplifting.”
Most did not cite news and politics coverage as a core reason for tuning in. Forty percent said those topics are a minor reason for listening to these stations, and just 14% called it a major one.
“News and politics is a great example of a topic where the programming that listeners choose to listen to has a pretty big impact on what it is that they hear. It’s only 14% who said, ‘This is the major reason that I’m tuning in,’” said Samuel Bestvater, a senior data scientist on the Data Labs team at Pew Research Center and one of the researchers behind this study. “We also asked people just how much news and politics they hear while they’re listening at all, and most listeners say they don’t hear that much.”
Religious radio stations spend around two hours a day on average discussing politics, current events and social issues, the study found, though the average hides quite a bit of station-to-station variation.
“Some 30% of religious radio stations spend less than half an hour per day talking about news and politics, with many dedicating only a few minutes a day to these issues,” the study found. “A nearly identical share of stations (29%) devote more than two and a half hours each day to discussions of politics and current events. On some of these stations, this content is in focus for 10 or more hours per day.”
Bestvater said the goal of the study was to obtain as broad a look as possible at the landscape of religious radio across the country.
“I think anyone who travels around the country and makes a habit of flipping through the radio dial in different places has probably noticed that you can tune into a religious station pretty much anywhere you are,” he said. “For a few years, we’ve had on our agenda that this is kind of an understudied part of the media landscape that we would love to research.”
The study found that, on average, religious radio stations across the U.S. devote about half their broadcast time to music and half to spoken content, including classic “talk radio” programming and religious services or sermons.
Researchers recorded and analyzed around 440,000 hours of streamed broadcasts from religious stations in July 2025, as well as surveyed 5,023 U.S. adults from June 9-15, 2025. Bestvater said the three data sources the report pulls from (which also included data about all FCC-licensed terrestrial AM and FM radio stations in the U.S. from Radio-Locator) provide a detailed window into not just the audience, but also the geography and content of religious stations.
When it comes to political content, Bestvater said stations tend to fall into two distinct camps: those that devote significant time to it and those that largely avoid it.
“There was really this pretty clear differentiation between how news and politics are approached on the stations that spend a lot of time talking about politics, and the ones that don’t,” he said. “There are some stations, about 30%, where that’s kind of a major focus and accounts for several hours of programming every day.”
Comments