Identity-affirming religious experience and political activism among LGBT people

ABSTRACT

Contrary to stereotypes, recent research indicates that a majority of LGBT people identify as religious. As with heterosexuals, religious belief and activity conditionally act as political resources among LGBT people, augmenting political participation. In recent decades, an increasing number of religious congregations have adopted theologies that explicitly affirm their LGBT congregants’ identities. In this study, I quantitatively examine affirming religious experiences, using data collected from a unique survey instrument administered to a sample of LGBT adults in the United States. Building on the resource paradigm of political participation, I hypothesize that attending an affirming religious congregation increases psychological resources such as LGBT group consciousness and internal efficacy that are easily translatable into political participation among marginalized groups. I find that about two in ten LGBT people report attending an affirming congregation and that attendance is positively associated with both psychological resources and political participation across a number of indicators, including volunteerism, financial contributions, and voting.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBT
• religion
• affirming
• political participation
• group consciousness
• political resource

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for their helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Heteroscedasticity refers to a violation of OLS regression assumptions related to ‘non-constant’ or unknown variance in the model residuals (Wooldridge 2013, 51). Consistent with the assumptions of OLS regression estimation, in these cases, the variance inflation factor (VIF) and Breusch-Pagan test for heteroscedasticity (available upon request) suggest model residuals are homoscedastic or have the same variance.

Additional information

Funding

The author received funding support from the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee while working on the data collection phase of this project.

Notes on contributors

Royal G. Cravens

R. G. Cravens is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at California Polytechnic State University where he studies LGBT politics, focusing on the effects of identity intersections on political behavior. His research has appeared in journals such as Politics & Religion, Politics, Groups, & Identities, and Social Politics. CORRESPONDENCE: Department of Political Science, California Polytechnic State University, 1 Grand Avenue, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407-0328, USA.