LGBT Americans Are ‘Significantly Less Religious’ Says Gallup – Here’s Why

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans are much less religious than their heterosexual peers, a new Gallup poll finds.

By a wide margin, LGBT Americans are “significantly less religious” than heterosexuals. A new Gallup survey finds that LGBT people in the U.S. are “significantly less likely than non-LGBT Americans to be highly religious, and significantly more likely to be classified as not religious.”

Overall, nearly half — 47 percent — of LGBT people are “not religious,” they say, agreeing that “religion is not an important part of their daily lives and that they seldom or never attend religious services.” By comparison, 30 percent of non-LGBT people identify as not religious.

This who say they are moderately religious, claiming “religion is important in their lives but that they do not attend services regularly, or that religion is not important but that they still attend services,” weigh in equally at 29 percent of the population — both LGBT and non-LGBT.

 

Less than one-quarter — just 24 percent — of LGBT people ay they are highly religious, claiming “religion is an important part of their daily lives and that they attend religious services every week or almost every week.” 41 percent of non-LGBT Americans also identify as highly-religious in Gallup’s survey of 104,024 adults, conducted from January to July of this year.

Gallup also notes that “67% of LGBT Americans identify with a specific or general religion, lower than the 83% of non-LGBT adults who identify with one.”

Unsurprisingly, Gallup offers these possible reasons for the lack of religious beliefs among the LGBT population.

There are a number of possible explanations for the lower level of religiosity among the U.S. LGBT population. LGBT individuals may feel less welcome in many congregations whose church doctrine, church policy, or ministers or parishioners condemn same-sex relations, and for the same reasons may be less likely to adopt religion into their own daily lives and beliefs.

Other possible explanations have to do less with church doctrine and more with the demographics of the LGBT population. LGBT individuals may be more likely to live in areas and cities where religion and religious service attendance are less common, and may adopt the practices of those with whom they share geography.

But Gallup whitewashes the “possible explanations.”

In reality, it’s no wonder that LGBT people are less religious, when daily the LGBT community is lambasted as perverted, sick, sinners, of the devil, and “worthy of death.” It’s no wonder that LGBT people are less religious, when those who claim to represent God and religion call for the mass murder of the world’s homosexuals. 

Gays are regularly treated them as inhuman by most of the religious right’s loudest voices. Those same voices, along with the majority of GOP politicians — who are often one in the same — attack LGBT people as “perverted,” “degenerate,” “spiritually darkened” and “frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally.” They often engage in verbal assaults, like claiming homosexuality is an “unhealthy, sexual addiction,” an “abomination in the sight of God,” that same-sex marriage leads to “Adam and a bull,” and almost daily compare LGBT people to alcoholics, child-molesters, and thieves, and claim same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy, incest, increase in disease, and general immorality. And they call coming out as LGBT a “tragedy,” and a “family crisis.”

Ironically, the loudest voices who also claim to represent religion — or the religious right — now regularly claim that homosexuality and Christianity are incompatible, and even that “Jesus would stone homos.”

 

Image by khrawlings via Flickr