SACRED: A Faithful Annotated Multimedia Multimodal Multilingual Dataset for Classifying Connectedness Types in Online Spirituality

Religious radio is a widespread but understudied form of mass communication in the United States, and content-level analysis of it has been constrained by the absence of large-scale transcript data. This Data Descriptor presents a corpus of transcribed English-language religious radio broadcasts captured from live webstreams over a one-month period in July 2025. Fifteen-minute segments were recorded on a rolling schedule from 785 distinct streams, which together rebroadcast the signals of more than two thousand AM and FM stations, yielding over 700,000 recordings and more than 60 million diarized lines of speech. Each recording was transcribed and speaker-diarized with an automated pipeline, and segmented and labeled by programming format and topic using a large language model. The corpus is organized as linked tables of stream metadata, recording metadata, and transcript lines. It supports descriptive study of religious broadcasting across regions and traditions, analysis of how social and political issues are discussed in religious media, and speech-processing research in an underrepresented domain.

We ask whether large language models (LLMs) treat queries about religious conversion symmetrically. The answer is no. When asked for advice on hypothetical faith transitions from religion A->B vs. religion B->A , models exhibited consistent asymmetries, favoring some religions while subtly discouraging conversion to others. On average Catholic, Bahá'í, and Sikh religions were broadly favored (high support for joining, low support for leaving), while Atheists, Agnostics, and Jehovah's Witnesses were primarily disfavored. Patterns varied by model size and model provider, with Grok 4.20 exhibiting the strongest asymmetries. We tested 20 commercial and open-source language models across 182 religion pairings using a human-verified LLM-as-judge framework. Each model was probed via interactions with a simulated user asking for advice on a potential faith conversion. Models tended to use more encouraging language for some faith transitions over others; these patterns were systematically repeatable across multiple trials. All LLMs tested exhibited reproducible asymmetry, though the pattern of preferences differed for each. Overall preferences persist across multiple question phrasings and variations in the religious pairing dataset. Taken together, these results suggest that asymmetry is a robust property of model behavior rather than an artifact of how the models' answers were scored. It is important to consider that any imbalances deployed and reproduced at scale can have real-world implications.

Recent work on chain-of-thought (CoT) faithfulness reports single aggregate numbers (e.g., DeepSeek-R1 acknowledges hints 39% of the time), implying that faithfulness is an objective, measurable property of a model. This paper provides evidence that it is not. Three classifiers (a regex-only detector, a regex-plus-LLM pipeline, and a Claude Sonnet 4 judge) are applied to 10,276 influenced reasoning traces from 12 open-weight models spanning 9 families and 7B to 1T parameters. On identical data, these classifiers produce faithfulness rates of 74.4%, 82.6%, and 69.7%. Per-model gaps range from 2.6 to 30.6 percentage points; all pairwise McNemar tests are significant (p < 0.001). The disagreements are systematic: Cohen's kappa ranges from 0.06 ("slight") for sycophancy hints to 0.42 ("moderate") for grader hints, and the asymmetry is pronounced: for sycophancy, 883 cases are classified as faithful by the pipeline but unfaithful by the Sonnet judge, while only 2 go the other direction. Classifier choice can also reverse model rankings: Qwen3.5-27B ranks 1st under the pipeline but 7th under Sonnet; OLMo-3.1-32B moves from 9th to 3rd. Different classifiers operationalize faithfulness at different levels of stringency (lexical mention versus epistemic dependence), yielding divergent measurements on the same behavior. These results indicate that published faithfulness numbers cannot be meaningfully compared across studies using different classifiers, and that future evaluations should report sensitivity ranges across multiple classification methodologies.