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Religious Organizations and Homosexuality: The Acceptance of Gays and Lesbians in American Congregations

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

The participation of gays and lesbians in all aspects of society is continually disputed in the United States. Religion is one of the key battlegrounds. The extent to which religious congregations include lesbians and gays in congregational life is vital to the wider debate over homosexuality because congregations consistently influence more Americans than any other voluntary social institution reported by Putnam (Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2000). Using nationally representative data from the 2006–2007 National Congregations Study this analysis investigates the level of acceptance of gays and lesbians within congregations as well as which congregations are most likely to allow lesbians and gays to become involved. I find that religious tradition, theological and political ideology, location, and demographic composition of congregations all influence the degree to which gays and lesbians are included into congregational life.

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Notes

  1. I am thankful to a reviewer for highlighting this point.

  2. See Chaves and Anderson (2008) for a complete description of the NCS-II.

  3. The 2001 US Congregational Life Survey is also nationally representative and contains one question on the congregational survey pertaining to homosexuality that asks, “Does your congregation or denomination have any special rules or prohibitions regarding the following? Homosexual behavior.” The question wording inhibits straightforward interpretation however because we do not know if the rules and prohibitions the respondent is alluding to emanate from the denomination or congregation, or both. The questions contained in the NCS (2006–2007) are more straightforward concerning the congregation’s stance and indicate exactly how and the extent to which the congregation prohibits homosexuality.

  4. The Jewish category was later combined with the other category due to such a small number of synagogues present in the NCS-II.

  5. Two weights are employed in the descriptive and bivariate analyses of the NCS-II data. Because the NCS-II is a probability-proportional-to-size sample, the percentage of regular attenders within various congregations is obtained by using a weight that accounts for the fact that some congregations were nominated by more than one person. To obtain the percent of congregations with various characteristics, a weight is utilized that weighs congregations inversely proportional to their size. See Chaves and Anderson (2008) for details.

  6. Of the 1,506 congregations in the NCS (2006–2007), 21 % were missing on at least one variable included in the model, leaving under 1,200 congregations with usable data. Subsequent analyses performed on those congregations remaining after listwise deletion revealed that they were significantly more likely to allow those in same-sex relationships to become leaders compared to the missing congregations. There was no significant difference concerning allowing lesbians and gay men to become members however.

  7. The MI procedure generates five imputations using multiple Markov Chains based on all variables included in each model, resulting in an overall N of 7,530 (1,506 × 5). The results reported in each table are from the MIANALYZE procedure in SAS. This procedure combines all of the results from each of the five imputations resulting in overall estimates, standard errors, and significance levels. The proportional reduction in error (PRE) reported in Table 4 for each model is the average of the PRE for each individual iteration..

  8. I follow Pampel’s (2000) assumption that the standard deviation of logit(y) = 1.8138.

  9. Interpreting the differences between the two is fairly straightforward: if the percentage in the percent attender column is larger than the percentage in the percent congregations column, larger congregations are more likely to exhibit the characteristic in question; conversely, if the percentage in the percent congregations column is larger than the percent attender column the congregations exhibiting the characteristic tend to be smaller.

  10. The results for the bivariate analyses found in Tables 2 and 3 utilize the percent congregation weight described in footnote 5. Results using the percent attender weight are not displayed because the focus of this investigation concerns religious organizations first and foremost. Results that employ the percent attender weight are available from the author upon request.

  11. Chi-square tests for significance were performed using unweighted data. The weight utilized in Tables 2 and 3 for the percentages and means displayed weighs the data inversely proportional to congregation size and it is inappropriate to calculate Chi-square tests on data weighted in this fashion. However, tests for significance can be performed when weighing the data to account for duplicate nominations which produces the percentage of attenders results discussed in footnote 5. These tests produced identical results to the unweighted data.

  12. I am thankful to a reviewer for pointing out the connection between congregations and culture.

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Acknowlegments

The author would like to thank Kevin Dougherty, Paul Froese, Carson Mencken, Wade Rowatt, Charles Tolbert, Christopher Bader, Adair Lummis, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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  1. Department of Social and Behavioral Science, University of Mobile, 5735 College Parkway, Mobile, AL, 36613, USA

    Andrew L. Whitehead

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Whitehead, A.L. Religious Organizations and Homosexuality: The Acceptance of Gays and Lesbians in American Congregations. Rev Relig Res 55, 297–317 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-012-0066-1

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