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Chapter 2

Researching Religion in
LGBTQ Populations
Melissa M. Wilcox

Researching the intersection of sexuality, gender identity, and religion requires a


double dose of finesse on the part of the scholar. As other chapters in this book
demonstrate, researching sexual and gender identities in general involves a great
deal of nuance and caution. Furthermore, the challenges that face the scholar
of religion are equally numerous. In combination, sexuality, gender identity,
and religion are complex subjects for which a scholar must be prepared before
entering the field. This chapter is intended to guide interested scholars toward
such preparation. I begin by introducing the reader to the existing social scientific
literature on sexuality, gender identity, and religion. I then address methodological
considerations specific to this area of study, and provide a section focusing on the
role of the interviewer in qualitative studies. In the conclusion, I suggest several
possible directions that those new to the field may wish to pursue in their research.

Existing Literature
Social scientific inquiry into the roles of religion in LGBTQ communities began in
the early 1970s, when two sociologists with anti-cult leanings investigated the San
Francisco congregation of the recently founded Metropolitan Community Church
(Enroth 1974, Enroth and Jamison 1974). Concluding that this "homosexual
church" was little more than a respectable cruising spot and a coping mechanism
for psyches damaged by social opprobrium, Enroth and Jamison failed to take
seriously a movement that would grow to claim over 40,000 members worldwide.
In so doing, however, they also foreshadowed the attitudes of many later social
scientists, both scholars of sexuality and scholars of religion, who have been
unable to take seriously the possibility that LGBTQ identities and religious
practices especially traditional practices can be successfully combined and are
worthy of study.
Despite such reservations on the part of many social scientists, the study of
sexuality and religion has grown to the point where it is impossible to succinctly
cover everything that has been written. Beginning with two unpublished
dissertations (Gorman 1980, Primiano 1993) and a brief article (Thumma 1991),

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sociologists, anthropologists, and the occasional psychologist (e.g., Mahaffy


1996) have over the past two decades offered in-depth studies ranging from
identity negotiation to congregational dynamics among LGBTQ Jews (Gorman
1980, Shokeid 1995, 2002), Christians (Thumma 1991, Shokeid 1995, Mahaffy
1996, Yip 1997, 2002, 2005, 2009, Dillon 1999, Rodriguez and Ouellette 2000,
Wilcox 2002, 2003, Wolkomir 2006), and Muslims (Minwalla et al. 2005, Yip
2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2007, 2008) as well as ex-gays (Ponticelli 1996, Erzen
2006, Wolkomir 2006), Buddhists (Cadge 2005), neo-pagans (Neitz 2000,
Hasbrouck 2005), Native North American two-spirit people (Jacobs, Thomas
and Lang 1997, Gilley 2006), practitioners of the African diasporic tradition
Santeria (Vidal-Ortiz 2005) and those claiming spirituality without a specific
religious identification (Wilcox 2009, 2012). Though much of the published
work in this area of study stems from the US, a recent publication from the UK
(Browne, Munt and Yip 2010) offers an excellent overview of existing research
as well as several strong studies of religious beliefs and practices in what the
editors term "queer spiritual spaces."
Thus, a great deal is already known about the ways in which religion, sexuality,
and gender identity intertwine - though, as the conclusion to this chapter points
out, much remains to be discovered as well. First and foremost, it is clear that
LGBTQ identities can be integrated with the beliefs and practices of nearly any
existing religion. The process of identity negotiation appears to be primarily
individual; while the religious beliefs and practices of LGBTIQ people depend
significantly on the teachings,* of their religious leaders, LGBTIQ people often
strike out on their own when it comes to negotiating a space for themselves within
traditional, sometimes unwelcoming religions. As Yip notes (2005), they grapple
with sacred texts through a variety of individualized strategies, such as challenging
the authority of the texts' interpreter and even the authority of the text itself.
And as I have noted elsewhere (Wilcox 2002,. 2003), there are also individual
strategies for struggling - or not - with the divine. Though some LGBTQ people
find ample room for themselves within their religious traditions, regardless of how
socially conservative or liberal that tradition may be, others find their
religions to be unwelcoming, and decide for a period of time or even forever to
choose between being religious and identifying as LGBTQ. Some join the ranks
of the LGBTQ and ex-religious, while others become religious and ex-gay. It
would appear, however, that it is relatively frequently that the ex-religious and the exgay eventually reconcile the two identities, with the former returning to some form
of religious practice and the latter eventually leaving the ex-gay movement.
Religious and even secular organizations, both LGBTQ and straight/
cisgendered, also play an important role in the lives of some religious or spiritual
LGBTQ people. One interesting finding that has emerged over the course of the
past two decades is the general predominance of gay men in LGBTQ-focused,
traditional congregations (see especially Primiano 1993a, 1993b, Shokeid 2001,
Wilcox 2009). As Shokeid (2001) points out, this skew may have something
to do with congregational leadership, in that the synagogue he studied shifted
from being heavily male-dominated to being slightly female-dominated when a

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29

female rabbi took office. Indeed, my own research has indicated that a similar, but
reverse, shift took place at the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles
when the congregation's long-serving, female senior pastor left and was
replaced by a man. Significantly, this effect appears to be restricted to senior
clergy only; the gender of assistant clergy seems to have little effect on the
gender makeup of the congregation. On the other hand, there may be additional
explanations for the relative absence of women (and, as far as we can tell,
transgendered people as well) from LGBTQ-focused congregations of traditional
religions, at least in the US. Not only are women subject to sexism as well as
homophobia in traditional religions, but lesbians in the US have historically
developed their sexual identities later than gay men, placing their identity
development after many have left their parents' home and their childhood
religions behind; gay men's sexual identities, on the other hand, appear to
develop while they are still in the parental home and the parental religion.
Thus, gay men are forced to reconcile their traditional religions with their sexuality
in a way that lesbians (overall, of course) are not (see Wilcox 2009, 2012 for a more
in-depth explication of this argument).

Methodological Considerations
There is immense difficulty in obtaining probability samples of LGBTQ-identified
persons, in part because people are often reluctant to name a non-normative sexual
orientation or gender identity to a stranger over the telephone, or even face-toface. Added to this difficulty is the problem of identifying those who are religious
within such a sample, if one could even be produced. As noted above, LGBTQ
people frequently practice what they call their "spirituality" outside of traditional
religions. Thus, measures such as attendance at religious services, frequency of
prayer, and belief in the Bible as the literal word of God capture only a small
number of LGBTQ people who are in some way religious or spiritual (see Sherkat
2002 for a study that makes this mistake, with quite problematic results). In
response to these difficulties, traditionally the study of LGBTQ people in religion
has been approached through qualitative methods, primarily interviews and
participant observation.
Recruitment has also been a challenge for studies of religion in LGBTQ
populations. Historically, most studies (e.g., Gorman 1980, Thumma 1991,
Primiano 1993, Shokeid 1995, Wilcox 2003, Wolkomir 2005) have begun with a
congregation that serves primarily LGBTQ people. If one is interested in studying
specifically LGBT Christians and Jews, or even Muslims or Buddhists, this is
an entirely adequate approach. It tells us little, however, about the religious,
spiritual, agnostic, or atheist leanings of the larger LGBTQ population. Even
studies recruiting in secular venues (e.g., Wilcox 2009) face the challenge that
those who do not identify as religious or spiritual will not volunteer for the study,
thus producing yet more research that offers very interesting findings
regarding

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spirituality and religion among LGBTQ populations but tells us little about the
distribution of spiritual and religious inclinations among those populations. Thus,
ultimately the intensive, qualitative approach will need to be supplemented with
large-scale, quantitative work that can give us a sense for the variety of religious,
spiritual, and irreligious lives of LGBTIQ people.
How can we recruit participants for such a large-scale study? How do we
track the amorphous spiritualities that seem to characterize queer communities,
and especially queer women? One possibility is to recruit where LGBTQ people
are likely to gather, and a particularly promising location from this
perspective is the annual Pride festival. These take place in many cities, drawing
anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of people. They are among the largest
gatherings of LGBTQ people, and thus they are important potential recruiting
locations. At the same time, however, Pride festivals are not ideal. They tend to
draw people who are very open about their identities, people who are heavily
involved in the queer community, and people who live near urban centres. Any
study drawing on Pride festivals for recruitment would need to correct for the
potential under-representation of rural and closeted LGBTQ people, and those
whose primary communal commitments lie elsewhere. Furthermore, the
mainstream Pride celebrations have historically tended to be predominantly
white. In order to tap the ethnic diversity of queer communities, one needs to
supplement recruitment at Pride festivals with other forms of recruitment. One
solution to this problem is to recruit at festivals such as Black Pride and Latino
Pride, which take place in larger cities often the weekend before or after the main
Pride festival. Yet, while such additional recruiting addresses possible racial
skews, it fails to address all such possible skews (what about those who don't
have a Pride festival?), and it leaves in place the over-sampling of urban LGBTQ
people and those for whom LGBTQ identity is highly salient.
Advertising and snowball or "viral" sampling can supplement recruitment at
Pride festivals. Some LGBTQ people who do not attend Pride still subscribe to
LGBTQ-related publications or have contact with other LGBTQ people through
community organizations such as Parents, Friends, and Family of Lesbians and
Gays (PFLAG). In addition, the increasing ubiquity of the Internet makes possible
advertising over e-mail and on social networking sites. The concern remains of
representation across class lines, however. Ultimately, to track such a dispersed
group it is necessary to make use of hybrid methods: recruitment at Pride festivals,
both mainstream and those targeted at specific ethnic groups; print advertising;
online advertising, and word of mouth.
Also worth mentioning are the disinterest and sometimes open hostility
directed by LGBT people toward organized religion. Such attitudes obviously add
to the difficulty of recruiting a study population, especially if the study description
uses the term "religion." In the US at least, this term is often associated with
dogmatic, dictatorial religious hierarchies, whereas the term "spirituality" carries
the much more positive connotations of individualism and direct connection to
the divine. Of course, the use of such words can also shape the answers offered
by one's participants; because religion is such a negative term at the moment and

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31

spirituality such a positive one, far fewer people are likely to claim a religious
identity than a spiritual one. Quite a few participants, on the other hand, may claim
spiritual identities. The vagueness of the latter term adds to this difficulty, as those
who are occasional agnostics they think from time to time about a higher being
of whose existence they are unsure can still justify a claim to spiritual
identity. In recruitment, however, a wide and potentially diverse pool of
participants is far better than a small and narrow one; thus, there are significant
advantages to advertising a study as focused on "spirituality" or "attitudes
toward spirituality and religion" rather than on "religion" alone.
That said, qualitative work remains the sine qua non for this area of research,
for several reasons. First, sexual and gender identity formation are complicated
enough that easily operationalizable variables cannot fully capture these
experiences. Second, qualitative methods offer participants the opportunity to
guide the researcher in perhaps unexpected directions, whereas quantitative work
necessarily shapes the participant's answers more forcefully. Third, religion
itself is notoriously difficult to operationalize, if we take into account the ways in
which religiosity is lived outside of traditional religious settings (Hall 1997,
Hervieu-Lger 2005, 2006, McGuire 2008). With its two key variables being this
complex, research on religion in LGBTQ populations must rely heavily on
qualitative work.
Researchers new to the field must consider in some depth how best to design
their study so as to fully capture the nuances of religion, spirituality, and sexual/
gender identity. Open-ended questions are often the most useful; in the interviews
for my study of spirituality among queer women in Los Angeles (Wilcox 2009,
2012), I opened simply by asking, "Tell me about the roles that religion and/or
spirituality have played in your life." Some answered this question in a minute or
two, and some took as much as half an hour. Either way, participants' responses
to this question guided me in the rest of the interview, as I was able to see what
areas of their religious and spiritual experiences were most significant to them
and consequently was able to follow up on those experiences as well as probe into
areas that had not been mentioned. I also find the semi-structured interview to be
the most useful approach, as structured interviews allow too little room for the
participant to guide the conversation and unstructured interviews may result in not
covering the areas the researcher wishes to cover.
Assumptions about what constitutes religion have plagued quantitative
studies of religion in the general population, and similar problems can affect
both quantitative and qualitative studies of religiosity in LGBTQ communities as
well. It is important for the researcher to exercise caution in designing interview
questions because, as most researchers know, what questions are asked and how
they are worded can significantly impact the results of a study. Both in the US and
in Europe, for instance, there is a significant difference in usage between the words
"religion" and "spirituality" (Wuthnow 1998, Roof 1999, Heelas and Woodhead
2005). Questions about the role of religion in one's life will often produce very
different responses than questions about the role of spirituality.

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Other considerations in planning the interview include location, recording the


interview, management of recordings and transcripts, and responses to sensitive
issues that may arise during the conversation. Interviews in a formal setting such
as an office or laboratory are not the best approach for developing a rapport with
the interview participant. Instead, I ask participants to recommend a (preferably
quiet) meeting place where they will be most comfortable. Some prefer a public
setting such as a coffee house or a bar during off-peak hours, whereas others have
invited me to their homes. In my experience, nearly all research participants are
comfortable with audio recording of the interview, especially given the small,
unobtrusive size of contemporary recording equipment. Video recording, on
the other hand, is daunting for many people and can throw off the rapport of
the interview. Thus, it is best to avoid video recording unless there is a specific
reason for collecting video records. Video diaries, on the other hand, are a newer
research tool that have not yet been used in studies of LGBTQ religiosity. They
hold great promise for studying the everyday spirituality of such populations,
especially among youth. In both cases audio and video recording it is important
to be clear with participants from the beginning about how the recordings will be
handled after they are made. Unless there is a video project involved (e.g., Wilcox
2006), it is best to keep recordings on a password-protected hard drive or on data
devices (such as flash drives or CDs) that are stored in a locked filing cabinet.
Interviews should be transcribed only by people who are trained in confidentiality,
and transcripts should be stored in a similar way to the recordings themselves.
Knowing that the researcher plans to take such care with one's private reflections
often puts participants at ease and makes them more likely to be open about their
experiences.
Finally, while it is impossible to prepare for some of the experiences one will
have during interviews; it is worthwhile to be aware that participants may share
extremely moving and sometimes deeply troublingexperiences. It cannot be stressed
enough how important it is for the researcher to respond in an open, empathetic,
and non-judgmental way to such revelations. Notably, this advice is just as
salient, if not more so, for religious and spiritual experiences as for experiences
with sexuality and gender identity. Some participants may share religious or
spiritual experiences or beliefs that conflict directly with the researcher's
understanding of the world; scholars of religion are trained to approach such
events through epoch, or a suspension of dis/belief, and verstehen, or empathetic
understanding (van der Leeuw 1963) of which more below.

Insider, Outsider, or Both at Once?


The insider/outsider divide is particularly tricky to navigate in the context of
religion and spirituality in LGBTQ populations, especially since the researcher
may often find herself on both sides of the fence (see Wilcox 2001). Researchers
who identify as LGBTQ, especially those who are easily identifiable as such

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by participants or who choose to "out" themselves to participants in some way,


may have an easier time gaining participants' trust and may experience an easier
conversation because they are more likely to understand the nuances of (some)
queer cultures. On the other hand, it is all too easy for an LGBTQ researcher to
assume that she shares a fundamental similarity with her LGBTQ participants,
when in fact there are deep differences between them. This consideration is
especially relevant across the boundaries of religion, ethnicity, gender, and gender
history. Thus, just as a heterosexually-identified, cisgender researcher would
need to learn a great deal about LGBTQ communities, both through reading and
through involvement with those communities, before launching a study, so too
LGBTQidentified researchers will be most successful if they learn about and
experience (to the best of their ability) the subcultures of their community before
beginning their work.
The insider/outsider divide can also be tricky with respect to religion. Similar to
the divide across sexual and gender identities, one can encounter problems with the
religious insider/outsider divide in at least two ways: through being non-religious
and working with a religious population, and through being religiously
identified or culturally religious and working with a population that is either
irreligious or religious/spiritual in a different way from that of the researcher.
Here, again, is where the above-mentioned concepts of epoch and verstehen come
into play. For researchers who are interested in understanding the role of religion
and spirituality in the lives of LGBTQ people, it is important not to delineate
what constitutes these categories, but rather to let one's participants
determine and populate the categories as they see fit. We learn a great deal more
about contemporary spirituality and religion by asking participants what such
terms mean to them, or even whether other terms might be more applicable,
than by predetermining what will suit the definition and what will not. For
instance, in my study of queer women in Los Angeles, I refrained from asking
about religious attendance. Instead, I asked whether participants took part in any
organized activities as a part of their spiritual practice. Through such questions, I
learned about the importance of a hiking group as a spiritual resource for one
participant, and the role that billiards played in another participant's spirituality.
Furthermore, through the use of empathetic understanding and the suspension of
dis/belief I was able to pursue lines of questioning that a more rigid approach
would not have allowed. I learned, for example, about a transgender lesbian who
believes that the future of humanity, on another plane and in another incarnation,
is to be genderless, and who believes that she and other transgender people are
the spiritually advanced harbingers of such a future. I also learned about a
transgender, pansexual person who was visited as a child by the Santera orish
(saint/ancestor/deity) Chang in order to help her more easily survive a transgender
childhood, and about a cisgender lesbian whose steadfast devotion to Jesus
survived even her years of homophobic churches, bringing her through to the
discovery of a highly conservative, fire-and-brimstone, LGBT-focused church.
Without the openness of the traditional religious studies

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Researching Religion in LGBTQ Populations

approach to religion, I would likely have failed to learn about these important
aspects of each participant's life.

Catholic, explained that he could not seem to stop his attraction to men despite
the fact that he knew God frowned upon it. "God knows I do not like to be a
homosexual," he wrote. "I thought I can change myself; I keep asking God, why
me? Sometimes I'm happy, but most of the time I am depressed. Sometimes I think
crazy. I wish somebody will kill me. I like to evaporate from this world." Above
this passage, he wrote, "I just have to pray that I'll die very soon because I
cannot kill myself. It's against God's law" (see Wilcox 2001, 2003).

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Ethical Challenges
In conducting the research for my first book, Corning Out in Christianity (Wilcox
2003), I interviewed a young man not too much older than myself. A follower of
the conservative Salvation Army, Miguel lived an apparent theological paradox:
he was attracted to men and he knew that God did not wish him to act on that
attraction. He spoke of "a battle inside of me" over his life as a gay Christian.
"I'm a firm believer that God made me gay," he explained, "but yet I was just
reading in the Bible last night, the one passage that clearly states that homosexuals
don't have a place anywhere." Miguel described his gayness as both a blessing
and a "cross to bear." As a blessing, he felt, his gay identity bestowed upon him a
sensitivity to the beauty in the world, an appreciation for art and nature. It made
him particularly empathetic and intuitive. As a cross, however, it was a bitter irony,
for this sensitivity and intuition could be deeply shared with no one. He was
forced to remain alone for the course of his life, celibate and single due to the
commands of his God. He bore this cross bravely, but with deep sadness. He
admitted to me that he was lonely.
I felt deeply for this young man. Furthermore, I had prepared for my research
by familiarizing myself with gay and lesbian Christian theology. I had
arguments at my fingertips to counter all of the beliefs he held about the tensions
between his Christianity and his attraction to men. But the social scientific ethics I
had been taught stressed non-intervention; according to this perspective, it would
have been arrogant of me to assume that I had a better answer to my interviewee's
identity conflict than he did. Yet was it not equally arrogant for the ethics of
"objective" social science to respond to the clear anguish of my study participant with
studious neutrality? How does one walk the line between two forms of academic
arrogance?
As a graduate student I had little experience with this kind of ethical dilemma
and had few answers to the questions that arose; more than a decade down the
line I have greater experience but even fewer answers. At the time, I listened
sympathetically, took my notes and recorded my interview, and left the scene.
Yet I remained haunted by this young man, especially in a research project
where I only had a single contact with each participant. Over the years I have
wondered whether he has resolved the tension with which he lived, and in what
way, or whether he still lives within the apparent paradox of his blessing and his
cross.
Perhaps because I was a graduate student and new to the field, perhaps
because I was studying the often-fraught nexus of LGBT identity and Christianity,
another participant in the same research project raised further dilemmas for me. My
data collection for that project included both face-to-face interviews and
anonymous, mailed surveys. One survey respondent, who described himself as

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In this case I faced a different kind of ethical dilemma: the surveys were
anonymous, yet I had enough demographic information on this man that a pastor
at one of the churches with which I was working could have narrowed his identity
down to a small handful of people, had he been a regular attendee. As it was, he
had only had brief contact with these congregations, and thus likely could not
have been identified though I still could have tried. Judging the maintenance of
anonymity to be my responsibility, and judging the chances of identifying him to
be slim regardless, I did not act on what I knew. Yet still today, I wonder whether
he is alive.
This case raises another broad question: Is anonymity negotiable? Comparison
cases exist with medical personnel, teachers, psychologists, and other "mandatory
reporters" in the US, who are required to go to the authorities if they judge a client
or student to be at risk of experiencing or causing harm. Is a researcher like these
other figures, called not legally but ethically to report someone who is suicidal in
cases where that person might be identifiable? Or is anonymity to be privileged
over all else? These are the knotty questions that the practice of human subjects
research can raise, especially when one works at the intersection of sexuality,
gender, and religion.
Since conducting the research for my first book, I have both gained experience
and had the time to reflect on that experience; I have learned enough to have
opinions on when the formal rules of ethics should be bent in order to follow
ethical principles. I have also, however, encountered further ethical questions.
Although my research for Coming Out in Christianity involved life histories of
the relationship between interviewees' religious beliefs and their sexual or gender
identities, in subsequent work I conducted interviews that began with a deceptively
simple question: "Tell me about the roles that religion or spirituality has played in
your life." This question often evoked very powerful stories of loss and struggle
as well as joy, and participants became quite emotionally involved in the telling.
More than one participant reflected at some point during the interview that telling
her story had been therapeutic. Some felt as though they had been through a
session with a therapist, and one even told me, "I feel like I should be paying you!"
Having interviewees enjoy the interview process is both personally and
professionally rewarding. Having them be willing to open their hearts as well as
their past is a great boon for a researcher. Yet how much disclosure is too much?
How much depth is too much in a research interview? Should research really
seem like therapy to the participants? I grappled with these questions
throughout the research for my second book, Queer Women and Religious
Individualism (Wilcox 2009). I was grateful to interviewees who opened
their lives to me.

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Researching Religion in LGBTQ Populations

I listened intently, having largely foregone notes and structured interviews in


favour of a more conversational and intimate style of interviewing. I empathized
when participants' stories led them to tears, and turned off the recorder when the
telling became too painful or they needed a break. I thanked them profusely for
their time and their stories, and I sent them copies of the interview transcripts
for their records and their correction if needed. All of these were attempts on
my part to acknowledge the central role the participants played in my work,
and to honour the gift of their stories. Yet still I wonder: Should there be a
limit to the intimacy between interviewer and interviewee? In what ways does
such intimacy obscure the power-laden relationship between the provider and
the collector of stories that are, essentially, "data" and does the
combination of obscured power with intimacy represent in some way an
exploitation of the interview participant? I continue to conduct interview-based
research, and I continue to grapple with these questions.
Another way in which accepted research practices create difficulties in the
study of religion and LGBTQ populations is in the practice of naming. Since its
inception social science has relied on pseudonyms to represent its participants; this
has seemed the best way to protect them from exposure, especially in cases where
the research reveals intimate personal details. Surely, religion, sexuality, and
gender identity are sensitive enough topics that they especially should be
subject to these protections. But such assumptions are complicated by the
relationship between secrecy and identity. In developing a non-normative sexual
or gender identity, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer person must
decide how open or secret to be about that identity. Some begin quite openly but
experience life changes that require a greater secrecy about identity. Others may
start out feeling threatened by the potential reactions of friends and family, but
over time become more comfortable with being "out." And still others are forced
to be "closeted" by work, family, or religion. This is a population, in other
words, that is well accustomed to managing secrecy and revelation. It is also a
population that may deeply resent having such secrecy managed, much less
mandated, by others.
In researching Coming Out in Christianity I simply made the assumption that
participants would appear in the book under a pseudonym. I offered participants the
opportunity to select a pseudonym so that they could recognize themselves in the
final written product. Yet one man objected. He had expended a great deal of effort
in coming out of the closet, he pointed out to me. Why did I insist on putting him
back in? This objection gave me great pause, and in subsequent research projects I
have attempted to address it. I now offer participants the option of using their real
given names, their real given and last names, or a pseudonym of their choosing. Yet
here too an ethical issue arises. Even with informed consent forms, are research
participants fully cognizant of the risks they may face with publication? Do we as
researchers have the responsibility of protecting participants from such harm, or
does such responsibility represent yet another example of academic arrogance?
A final ethical challenge of research on non-dominant sexualities and religion

lies in the potential political impact of such research. With LGBTQ people under
fire from many religious and political conservatives, especially in the United States
but elsewhere as well, the research that we publish has the potential to help or harm
LGBTQ populations. Thus, researchers in this field have a particularly powerful
imperative to represent their participants in as sensitive and nuanced a way as
possible. While it could be argued that all research has political implications,
this is especially so in the case of research on religion and LGBTIQ people.

Conclusion
The field of LGBTQ studies in religion has been slowly gaining momentum
since Enroth and Jamison's book appeared in 1974, and has come into its own
in the twenty-first century. As the field has developed, especially in the area of
qualitative work, questions concerning research methods and ethics have arisen
and have defied simple answers. Researchers have faced challenges in recruiting
sufficiently large and diverse samples, and have faced further challenges in the
areas of funding and publication due to the intersection of two often opposed, or
at least mutually indifferent, fields. Yet as interest grows in the roles played by
religion among LGBTQ populations, and as religion has increasingly been
shown in both Europe and North America to hold continuing and even growing
influence over people's lives (Hout and Fischer 2002, 2009, Barker 2008,
Gorski and Altinordu 2008, Baker and Smith 2009, Storm 2009, Voas 2009), more
and more researchers have become interested in the connections between religion,
sexuality, and gender. Excellent qualitative studies have been conducted in the
US and the UK on the roles of religion in LGBT communities; what is now needed
are studies within mainland Europe and other countries, as well as large-scale
quantitative work that can offer a broader picture of the complex roles played by
religion and spirituality among these populations that have historically been so
mistreated by and yet have often worked to reclaim traditional Western
religions.
Potential future projects include quantitative approaches using some of the
recruitment methods delineated above. Such studies must approach both LGBTQ
identity and religious/spiritual beliefs and practices with a great deal of nuance in
order to capture the complexity that exists within these communities. If successful,
however, a large-scale, quantitative study could have a significant impact on the
field. First, it would provide a far more complete picture of religious/spiritual
beliefs and practices in LGBTQ communities than we have now; second, it would
have potential political implications, given the common assumption by adherents
of conservative religions, and social conservatives in general, that LGBTQ people
are irreligious.
Another important area to explore is religion among bisexual and transgender
people. Most of the research that has been produced on LGBTQ populations
and religion is actually about lesbians and gay men (and often mostly gay men).
Though in my own work I have striven to include bisexual and transgender people,
because I was recruiting from among the broader LGBTQ population I was able
to

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recruit only a small handful of people identifying in these ways. There have been
some excellent social scientific studies of transgender people and communities
(see especially Valentine 2007), but only one to date (Tanis 2003) considers
religion, and it is largely a theological work.
Also of some urgency is the need to study religion in LGBTQ communities of
colour. Some scholars have already approached this issue in the context of AfricanAmerican communities (e.g., Leong 2007, Pitt 2010) and Muslim communities in
the UK (Yip 2004, 2005, 2008). Far more remains to be done, however, if the field
is to be shifted from a largely white domain to a more diverse and representative
one. In addition, religious diversity is lacking in the field, with most of the work
focusing on various aspects of Christianity. A few studies have been
conducted of Judaism, and Yip's work on Islam is especially notable, but there is
little to no social scientific coverage of LGBTQ people in Buddhism or
Hinduism, nor has there been adequate study of the phenomenon of irreligious
"spirituality" in these populations.
Despite the impressive growth in the social scientific study of LGBTQ
religiosities over the past four decades, then, much remains to be done. With
careful preparation and attention to detail, the researcher new to this field can
select from a wide range of topics and approaches through which to deepen and
broaden our understanding of this important area of sexuality and gender studies.

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