A new study says that 47% of LGBTQ adults in the U.S.A. are religious.
This study comes from researchers at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. To get their results, the researchers analyzed data from the Gallup Daily Tracking Politics and Economy Survey, which collected information between 2015 and 2017. Respondents were categorized as non-religious, moderately religious, or highly religious based on the responses to questions like, “Is religion an important part of your daily life.”
In the end, five million (47% of the pool) said that they were religious. Then, one million said that they were highly religious. Older Americans, Black Americans, and American Southerners were more likely to belong in the highly religious group.
Our new study finds that nearly half (47%) of LGBT adults in the U.S. are religious. https://t.co/vBFDHz1QKn pic.twitter.com/fBfuGschbO
— Williams Institute (@WilliamsPolicy) October 8, 2020
When it came to older Americans, 51.1% of those ages 35 to 49, 55.8% of those ages 50 to 64, and 64.9% of those ages 65 and up reported being religious. Meanwhile, 71% of Black LGBTQ Americans reported being religious. Then, 61% of Hawaiian and Asian Pacific Islanders, 57% of American Indians and Alaskan Natives, and 57% of Lantinx people said the same.
But what form of religion did these respondents practice? For the most part, Christianity. 1.5 million respondents said they were Protestants while 1.3 million said they were Roman Catholics. Then the remaining 1.3 Christians said they belonged ot another sect of the faith. Meanwhile, there were only 131,000 Jewish respondents and 106,000 Muslims. Overall, the number of non-Christian respondents rounded out to 425,000.
Kerith Conron, the Williams Institue’s research director, said, “Our study shows that religion plays an important role in the lives of nearly half of all LGBT people in the country. Religious LGBT adults are socio-demographically diverse, live in every region and state, and participate in all religious denominations.”
