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Are Religious Gay People Unhealthy?

Stephen C

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One of the most underappreciated but informative social science studies in the US today is Lefevor et al’s* “The Relationship Between Religiousness and Health among Sexual Minorities. A Meta-Analysis” published in Psychological Bulletin.

While I get the sense that sexual minority issues aren’t the most explosive issue right now (they’ve been displaced by transgender people and illegal immigrants), this article provides a useful public corrective for a hot button topic that many people have knee-jerk assumptions about. The picture of self-hating religions gay people is a common trope in popular culture, but how true is it?

Lefevor’s team did the hard work of schlogging through everything that has been published in the scientific literature on the subject of sexual minority health and religion: 279 effect sizes from 73 studies, analyzing their analyses. And what did they find? On average, religious gay people have a slight advantage over non-religious gay people, but this isn’t a super consistent finding. The advantage doesn’t hold when the study sampled from gay venues like bars or gay organizations, and the health benefits for self-identified spirituality are greater than they are for self-identified religion.

Visually, the take-away in the Lefevor paper is in Figure 3: a “Forest Plot” showing the effect of religion when it has been statistically standardized so that we’re comparing apples to apples.

As you can see, they weren’t kidding when they said that the results are “heterogenous,” technical speak for all over the place. I have a small part to play in this literature with two studies. (My study looking specifically at Latter-day Saints is a couple of lines above a certain Mormon podcaster), although I’ve published one since then that specifically looked at whether all the healthy religious gay people were just attending “gay affirming” churches (which, incidentally, does not include the Church of England as of recently, so if I’m reading this right their American Episcopalian counterparts are now more liberal than the European version).

Incidentally, Lefevor has a Latter-day Saint background, as does Lee Beckstead, who has spent a career trying to be a peacemaker between conservative religionists and sexual minorities, and was a huge figure in the APA’s latest position on sexuality and religion that tried to thread a needle respecting both of those groups.

Between them, Leonard Matlovich (the first army serviceman to out himself in order to challenge “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”), and a bunch of movies and plays about gay Latter-day Saints, for some reason our little 1% of the population has had disproportionate impact on sexual minority issues. As I’ve noted before, fraternal birth order of large religious families might be playing a role here but who knows.

 

 

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Comments

2 responses to “Are Religious Gay People Unhealthy?”

  1. ReTx

    “The advantage doesn’t hold when the study sampled from gay venues like bars or gay organizations, and the health benefits for self-identified spirituality are greater than they are for self-identified religion.”

    Are you saying that changing the study sample venues to gay bars or organizations changes the results so that non-religious people have the health advantage? (What other venues were used?) And are you also saying self-identified gay spiritualists are more healthy than self-identified gay religionist?

    The thought that I kept having as I read the article (I would have loved to examine the chart but my eyes just aren’t that good) was that perhaps the causal relationship to health is a deeper element than what is mentioned here and what is being measured is correlated to the deeper element not these more superficial ones (like venue and spiritual vs religionist vs none), if that makes sense.

  2. Stephen C

    It’s not that non-religious people have a health advantage necessarily, just that the religious health advantage goes away, so it can be statistically tied.

    And in a sense yes, self-identified “spirituality” is a stronger predictor than self-identified “religiosity,” but in practice the two typically go together (“spiritual but not religious” people are actually quite rare), and a religious sexual minority is, on average, healthier than a non-religious one.

    Yes, there is indeed always the chance that venue/spirituality or whatever is actually just proxying for a deeper variable.

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