Saturday, July 04, 2009
Poll explores gays' feelings on faith
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A nationwide poll released by the California-based Barna Group has found that 58 percent of gays and lesbians "cite their faith as a central facet of their life, consider themselves to be Christian and claim to have some type of meaningful personal commitment to Jesus Christ active in their life today."
Among conservatives, the poll, titled "Spiritual profile of homosexual adults," has made some waves.
Among some liberal Christians, it has provoked sarcasm.
"Well, duh," wrote the Rev. Candace Chellew-Hodge at religiondispatches.org.
Chellew-Hodge is the founder and editor of "Whosoever: An Online Magazine for GLBT Christians" and author of "Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians."
But, the United Church of Christ minister did grudgingly write: "The best thing about Barna's latest research is that, finally, a respected conservative voice has given credibility to the idea that one can be both gay and Christian."
The Barna Group is a conservative Christian research and marketing firm founded in 1984 by George Barna, a noted author and speaker.
In truth, Christians on both sides of the "gays and lesbians in church life" debate will find little interesting here. The poll mostly confirms what many of the faithful already know: straight Christians are more likely than gays to go to church and hew to orthodox interpretations of the faith.
The authors of the poll offer little analysis on why that might be the case, despite an obvious explanation: Christian orthodoxy rejects homosexuality.
Surprising to me was the finding that 27 percent of gays and lesbians surveyed qualified as "born-again Christians."
Then I read further and found that the poll did not ask participants if they were born again. Rather, authors assessed participants' "born-again" status.
For purposes of the study, "born again" was defined as a person who made "a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that was still important in their life today and ... believed that when they die they will go to heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior."
That a conservative Christian organization would seek to include gays and lesbians in the born-again category seemed, well, a little strange. But interesting, nonetheless.
The poll was based on 9,232 telephone interviews conducted between January 2007 and November 2008. Of those surveyed, 8,548 identified themselves as heterosexual and 280 as homosexual. An additional 404 people said they did not know into what category they fit or declined to choose a category, according to the poll.
Read the results in their entirety at tinyurl.com/ma6fhk.
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A perhaps more surprising study related to gays in the church was released in May.
"More than two-thirds of mainline clergy support hate crimes legislation and protections from workplace discrimination for gays and lesbians; more than half (55 percent) say gay couples should be allowed to adopt children," according to the "Clergy Voices Survey" conducted by Washington-based Public Religion
Research and reported by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Read more at tinyurl.com/qfbpud.
