The Impact of Sexual Orientation on Religion
Does being gay keep someone from attending church?
I went to high school in the late 1990s in a small town in Southern Illinois. My graduating class was about 160 kids. I basically knew all of them by name. One tradition at Salem Community High School was for the seniors to all pile in the gym and take one of those panoramic photos where the camera on a tripod starts out by pointing to the right side of the room and slowly turns to the left side. The end result is a picture that’s about eight inches tall and two feet wide. My kids love looking at that photo and asking me about people that I graduated with more than 20 years ago.
The last time I looked at that photo I had a revelation - not a single person in my class that graduated in 2000 was open about not being straight. Not a single one out of 160. Now, because we remained friends on Facebook, I know that several of them are gay. Among the students that I teach at EIU, lots of them do not identify as straight. It’s commonplace. It would have been a scandal if someone came out of the closet in the late 1990s. Today, it’s just a Tuesday.
And that shifting reality about sexuality has begun to show in the survey data, as well. What’s really interesting to me is that the Cooperative Election Study did not start asking about sexual orientation until 2016. In fact, it’s really hard to find any survey questions at all about sexual orientation from just a decade ago. Things moved just that quickly.
The CES asks folks which term describes their sexuality and are given a whole menu of option. The first one is heterosexual/straight, but then there are bunch like: lesbian, gay, bisexual, other, or prefer not to say. The graph below is the share of each birth year in the survey who did not describe themselves as straight - they chose some other option.
Among those born in the 1940s, about one in twenty report not being straight. That hasn’t really changed a whole lot between 2017 and 2022. However, that trend line begins to inch up with each subsequent decade. Among those born around 1960, 10% are not straight. It’s about 12% for those born around 1980. For those born in the 1990s, it’s significantly higher.
For those born in 1995, about 22% said that they weren’t straight when surveyed in 2017. When other folks born in 1995 were polled in 2022, the share who were not straight had risen to at least 25%. There’s evidence here that the youngest adult Americans are about 30% not straight.
But obviously this is deeply related to religion. Given the stance of many religious traditions (evangelicalism, the Catholic Church, Islam), that homosexuality is sinful and thus should be discouraged, it would logically follow that LGB people would be less likely to be religious. But just how much less likely? That’s what I wanted to explore in this post.