American Muslims’ Attitudes Toward Homosexuality: Exploring the Effects of Gender, Religiosity, and Income Inequality

ABSTRACT

Literature on Muslims and Islam has not empirically assessed the impact of American Muslims’ gender, religiosity, income inequality, and the interaction between the latter two factors, on their attitudes toward homosexuality. Using logistic regression models fitted to data from the 2017 Pew Survey of US Muslims (n = 712), this article assesses these factors’ effects on their view that society should either accept or discourage homosexuality. Findings reveal that men, compared with women, and more religious individuals tend to express homonegativity; while those from higher-income households are likely to agree that society should accept same-sex relationships. Also, the religiosity-prejudice association is moderated by income inequality. These findings have important religious and social implications. Firstly, the prevailing approach of essentializing Islamic perspectives on homosexuality as being favorable or prejudicial overlooks that they are socially contingent. Secondly, policies contributing to Muslim minorities’ economic well-being can encourage them to embrace liberal religious and social values.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• gender
• religiosity
• income inequality
• attitudes
• homosexuality
• American Muslims

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Liza McCoy, Lloyd Wong, Pallavi Banerjee, and Mushegh Asatryan for their helpful comments and suggestions. Also, I would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable feedback on the previous draft. Lastly, I would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. John P. Elia, for his support and guidance during the revision of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Since the data used for this study is Pew Research Center (2017) Muslim American Survey in which American Muslims were asked whether “homosexuality should be accepted by society” or “homosexuality should be discouraged by society” the term homosexuality is used in the paper. Interchangeably, the terms same-sex unions, same-sex relationships, and gay and lesbian relationships are also used. In addition, when stating acceptance of same-sex relationships, or other similar phrases, it only refers to American Muslims agreeing that society should accept homosexuality.

2. If income distribution is known up to a certain level, then it is possible to predict the look of the remaining unobserved distributions. According to Pareto curve estimator, the distribution of income can be linearly represented by the following formula: log (Y) = log (A)—vlog(X). In the formula, X refers to the cutoff score, after which income information is not provided. Y is the percentage of people whose incomes are above this cutoff value. It is similar to a regression equation, where v represents the slope. Calculating v provides information about the distribution of the unobserved portion of income, i.e., open-ended category. After calculating v, which in this study is 0.2090, it is added into the following formula: MD = 10^(.301/v)(X_i). MD is the open-ended response category’s midpoint, while 0.301 is a constant, and X_i is the lower limit of the last category. After calculating, the midpoint of the last response category of the total family income variable is 266,107.98.

3. Also, it is to be noted that since there is a high percentage of missing cases, the second last model, which tests all the first three hypotheses simultaneously, and then the final model that adds the interaction variable are cross-checked through running multiple imputation analysis. The results matched the outcomes of the multiple imputation analysis. In addition, each model was run without adding political ideology variable as it can mediate the effects between religiosity and tolerance toward same-sex relationships. The results converged with the results presented in this study.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.