Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Individuals’ Perceptions of American Religious Traditions

ABSTRACT

The cumulative alienation sexual minorities experience from American mainline religious groups may leave them feeling disillusioned and even hostile toward the religious organizations that have historically rejected them. However, research to date has not explored sexual minorities’ perceptions of religious traditions in the United States. The current study examines the variations between lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults’ (LGB) perceptions of whether religious traditions are friendly/neutral or unfriendly toward the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) population. Using data from the Pew Research Center 2013 Survey of LGBT Adults, the author conducts separate binary logistic regression analyses examining whether four religious traditions—evangelical Protestantism, the Catholic Church, the Jewish religion, and mainline Protestantism—are generally perceived as friendly/neutral or unfriendly toward LGBT people. The findings from this study offer rare insight on sexual minorities’ perceptions of major religious traditions and illustrates that sexual minorities have a complex relationship with religion.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• attitudes toward LGBT people
• perceptions of religious traditions
• sexual minorities
• American religious traditions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The terminology of “friendly/neutral” and “unfriendly” is used throughout this article to remain true to the data and the original wording of the question in the 2013 Pew Research Center Survey of LGBT Adults. The category of “friendly/neutral” represents those who view religious traditions as either “friendly” or “neutral” toward LGBT people, whereas “unfriendly” represents those who view religious traditions as unfriendly toward LGBT people. This language accurately represents the data and overcomes the occasionally statistically insufficient small sample sizes by collapsing the three original categories into a dichotomous measure.