Almost two-thirds of LGBTQ+ people who were raised Christian have left the faith, studies have shown. They’re acting on the Church’s mostly unwelcoming appeals against gay believers.
There are exceptions, like the Universalist Unitarians, the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, and Episcopalians, still around after conservative Anglicans broke away from that denomination, unhappy with women’s ordination and gay members.
Related
But the official stand for the large majority of churches in the U.S. is “no (non-celibate) gays allowed”; unofficially, it’s a kind of ecclesiastical “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” with clergy overlooking gay congregants who (in turn) overlook the overt homophobia among the Baptists, Catholics, and other more conservative denominations.
Deciding if or when to leave that hypocrisy behind is a struggle for many gay Christians.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
For believer Monty Bennett, reconciling her faith and sexuality became increasingly difficult when she was confronted with them together at her Southern Baptist college in Tennessee.
“One of my classmates suggested that people might be born gay. Would this require a more compassionate response?” the student asked the professor. He was “unfazed,” Bennett wrote in The Atlantic.
“I’m sure there is a biological component, and that doesn’t change my view,” the professor said. “You can have cancer that is not your fault, and some people are born with cancer of the soul.”
Her church, Bennett wrote, has left no room for “embracing our sexuality alongside our faith.” Is it any wonder, then, that the gay faithful are leaving?
Data from the Williams Institute at UCLA shows almost two-thirds of LGBTQ+ people who were raised Christian have left their church. And while the number of faithful overall has stabilized in recent years after a precipitous drop, longer-term trends don’t look good for unwelcoming religions.
“The data shows a religious exodus,” Tyler Lefevor, an associate professor of psychology at Utah State University, told The 19th. “Religions do a s**t job of affirming queer folks.”
Approximately 63% of Americans today describe themselves as Christian, while 29% identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular,” (a group that the Pew Research Center calls the “nones”).
Those numbers are growing among the most LGBTQ+-affirming segment of the population: young people.
Young adults aged 18 to 24 are less likely than older Americans (74 and up) to identify as Christian (46% vs. 80%), pray daily (27% vs. 58%), or attend religious services regularly (25% vs. 49%).
They are also, by a large number, much more likely to be religiously unaffiliated (43% vs. 13%).
A Pew survey found as well that younger Americans are less likely than older adults to say they were raised in religious households, and, compared with older adults, fewer young people who were raised in religious households have remained religious after reaching adulthood.
When he moved to New York City several years ago, Karmen Michael Smith sought out a “church home” to help lay down the kind of roots he had in rural Texas. What he didn’t experience there, however, was the incongruence of his faith and life outside the church, now that he was living as an out Black man.
“The church has historically been, for Black Americans, the one place where we could be ourselves,” Smith told the 19th. Now that wasn’t the case for him.
Smith left the Southern Baptists. He went on to become an ordained, nondenominational Christian minister.
“I learned that if God had not wanted me to be this way, I would not be gay. And then I also learned the divine privilege it is in which to be gay.… that it is not anti-God,” he said. “It took me getting out of church to learn that.”
Onetime Southern Baptist Monty Bennett, too, learned that familiarity had bred contempt for the faith she’d always relied on. After she came out, Bennett was encouraged by Anglican clergy to stay in the church, deny herself, and take up the cross. She only found true acceptance after joining the Presbyterian Church, at a fully LGBTQ+-affirming congregation.
“I am effectively estranged from the communities that I grew up in and committed to as an adult,” she said.
“The churches that embrace LGBTQ people as beloved members of the community are motivated by Christian love for God and neighbor,” Bennett said, calling the affirmation “an equally sincere religious conviction.”
“We see the beauty of God’s design in our real, embodied lives,” she continued, “and we seek human flourishing that is more than an abstract promise of finding meaning in the pain.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.