Us Versus Us: The Untold Story of Religion and the LGBT Community by Andrew Marin

Author:Andrew Marin [Marin, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Sexuality & Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781631466205
Amazon: 1631466194
Publisher: The Navigators
Published: 2016-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

Conviction

As we’ve covered previously, it’s important to acknowledge not only the facts but what informs those facts. The two most prevalent responses to the question of continued participation—“It’s what I believe” (33 percent) and “Expression of my faith” (26 percent)—suggest that a substantial majority of those who remain in the church (59 percent) do so out of faith conviction.

There is a strong correlation between belief in God and its expression through the church. They are mutually reinforcing. Although churchgoing isn’t necessarily the most frequent practice for LGBT people of faith (more on that later), it is definitely the most recognizable, outward expression. Marcus, a 44-year-old gay man living in Miami, illustrates this connection between faith and churchgoing; he is one of our study’s 5 percent of theologically progressive LGBT people who attend a theologically conservative church. “[Faith] is a foundational piece of my life, and no matter what anyone else says, I’m not ready to let it go just because I’m gay. God is faithful to me, and so I go to church and show God I’m faithful in return.”

Age, it turns out, is an overwhelming predictor of who in the LGBT community continues to go to church. Our data found that LGBT people under the age of thirty continue going to church at a rate over ten times greater than that of LGBT people over the age of thirty, and almost seventy times greater than LGBT people over the age of fifty. These findings are, again, in direct opposition to the general American public, where persons under the age of thirty are the least religiously active in the country.[5] There are two implications to note.

First, since correlation doesn’t determine causation, we cannot conclude that faith (or faith engagement) becomes less important as LGBT people age. Rather, I believe the disparity has to do with the vastly different experiences of different generations of LGBT people. In all areas of life—family relations, workplace, social relationships, community safety, politics, and even religion—older LGBT people have had a vastly different life experience than younger LGBT people.

The difference between LGBT people under thirty and those over thirty is staggering. I’m in my midthirties; in my high school of 4,000 students, there was no gay-straight alliance, and in my class of 1,000 students, not one person was out as LGBT. (Some of my classmates have since come out.) When I was a teenager—the age when many people report realizing their LGBT orientation for the first time (more on this in chapter 6)—Democratic president Bill Clinton was signing into law the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that ejected people from the armed forces if they were discovered to be gay. Less than twenty years later that same Bill Clinton received GLAAD’s first Advocate for Change award honoring his “support for the LGBT community.”[6] Clinton has indeed championed LGBT issues in recent years, a radical change that exemplifies the extreme juxtaposition between LGBT people in their thirties and those just a few years younger.

This stark contrast

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