http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2014/08/13667/
Churchgoing Christians who support same-sex
marriage are more likely to think pornography, cohabitation, hook-ups,
adultery, polyamory, and abortion are acceptable. And it’s reasonable to
expect continued change in more permissive directions.
As mainline Protestant denominations increasingly accept the
ordination of gay clergy and publicly affirm same-sex unions, the
sociologist in me wishes to understand what this development means for
people in those denominations. I’m not talking about subtle linguistic
shifts. While the difference between speaking of marriage as a “civil
contract between a woman and a man” and as “a unique commitment between
two people” is obvious to those who pay attention to
church documents, the impact of such changes on congregants’ attitudes and internalized paradigms—their hearts, I suppose—is seldom considered.
What is the sexual and relational morality of Christians who accept
the moral legitimacy of same-sex marriages? Some questions naturally
arise. Does adultery mean the same thing for both same-sex and
opposite-sex unions? Does it make sense to speak of premarital sex in
such a context? Historically, the fear of pregnancy was enough to scare
many love-struck Christians into taking things slow, but same-sex
pregnancies are an accomplishment, not an accident, and most Christians
use contraception now anyway.
Integrating homosexual relationships into Christian moral systems is
not simple, and has ramifications for how heterosexual relationships are
understood, too. What exactly do pro-same-sex-marriage Christians think
about sex and relationships in general?
I’m not asking what perspectives on sexual behavior people
ought to
hold. Instead, I’m trying to discover what perspectives churchgoing
Christians who disagree over same-sex marriage actually express.
To be sure, the sexual and relational standards of many Christians
have already shifted. I’m not so naïve as to think that affirming
same-sex marriage is the first significant change to take hold in their
sexual and relational norms. More likely, the sexual morality of many
churchgoing Christians shifted years ago, and the acceptance of same-sex
marriage as licit Christian action follows significant change rather
than prompts it. An ideal test would have been to have successfully
interviewed congregants in “shifting” denominations (like the
Presbyterian Church USA and the Episcopalians) over time, mapping what
happens to their personal attitudes and opinions as social change
occurred around them. So far as I’m aware, no one has done that. Indeed,
it would have been difficult to do, involving the successful
anticipation of future changes that were far from certain at the time.
What I do here is far more circumscribed. I assess a set of sexual
and relational attitudes of Christians who support—and Christians who
oppose—same-sex marriage.
Primarily, this exercise concerns the attitudes of all churchgoing
Christians who express support for same-sex marriage. And since the LGBT
population remains a small minority (and even smaller in organized
religious communities), it’s reasonable to conclude that the sexual
morality that “welcoming” congregations or individual Christians profess
will have largely been fashioned—and maintained—by sympathetic
heterosexuals. These are and will remain the majority (and hence, the
norm) in all congregations, save for the Metropolitan Community Church
and perhaps scattered congregations of the United Church of Christ.
The Relationships in America Survey
To do this, I rely on the
Relationships in America survey, a
data collection project I oversaw that interviewed 15,738 Americans,
ages 18-60, in early 2014. It’s a population-based sample, meaning that
its results are nationally representative. The survey asked respondents
to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with these seven
statements:
1. Viewing pornographic material is OK.
2. It is a good idea for couples considering
marriage to live together in order to decide whether or not they get
along well enough to be married to one another.
3. It is OK for two people to get together for sex and not necessarily expect anything further.
4. If a couple has children, they should stay married unless there is physical or emotional abuse.
5. It is sometimes permissible for a married person to have sex with someone other than his/her spouse.
6. It is OK for three or more consenting adults to live together in a sexual/romantic relationship.
7. I support abortion rights.
There is more to sexual and relationship morality than just these
seven items, to be sure, but they do offer us a glimpse into how people
perceive various practices and relationships. In order to ensure this is
not just an exercise in documenting the attitudes of Christians “in
name only,” I’ve restricted the analysis to churchgoing Christians—here
defined as those who report they attend religious services at least
three times a month and who self-identified with some sort of Christian
affiliation. And I’ve restricted the analysis to those who report a
position either for or against same-sex marriage. (I’ve excluded the
one-in-four who reported they are undecided.)
For comparison purposes, however, I report the
population average for
each measure here, to use as a gauge of where the country is as a
whole, as well as the attitudes professed by self-identified gays and
lesbians who also report affiliation with a Christian tradition, and
gays and lesbians that do
not report a Christian affiliation.
Because there is no attendance proviso attached to these two groups, the
minority of gay and lesbian Christians that are regular churchgoers may
also appear in one of the first two columns.
So
what do the numbers say? The table above displays the share of each
group who either “agree” or “strongly agree” with the seven statements
listed above. At a glance, there is a pretty obvious fissure between
Christians who do and do not oppose same-sex marriage. More than seven
times as many of the latter think pornography is OK. Three times as many
back cohabiting as a good idea, six times as many are OK with
no-strings-attached sex, five times as many think adultery could be
permissible, thirteen times as many have no issue with polyamorous
relationships, and six times as many support abortion rights. The
closest the two come together is over the wisdom of a married couple
staying together at all costs (except in cases of abuse).
Churchgoing Christians who support same-sex marriage look very much
like the country as a whole—the population average (visible in the third
column). That answers my original question. What would a pro-SSM
Christian sexual morality look like? The national average—the
norm—that’s what.
While the divisions here are notable, we should maintain some
perspective. No more than four in ten Christians who support same-sex
marriage agreed with any of the statements above (except the question
about children and divorce). The same cannot be said for American
Christians who self-identify as gay or lesbian, as the fourth column
demonstrates. And that group is clearly distinct from those gay and
lesbian Americans who do not affiliate with a Christian tradition (e.g.,
nonreligious, Jews, spiritual-but-not-religious, Buddhists, etc.).
I’m not suggesting any “slippery slope” sort of argument here,
implying that a shift in one attitude will prompt lock-step adjustments
in others. In reality, our moral systems concerning sex and sexuality
tend rather to resemble personalized “tool kits” reflecting distinctive
visions of the purpose of sex and significant relationships (and their
proper timing), the meaning of things like marriage and gender roles,
and basic ideas about rights, goods, and privacy. Americans construct
them in quite distinct combinations, often cafeteria-style. Instead, the
results might be better interpreted as a simple story of
social learning from quite
different reference groups—those
sets of people we use as a standard of comparison for ourselves,
regardless of whether we identify as a member of that group. Indeed,
attitude shifts in this domain are probably far more about reference
groups than about any sort of individual “evolution” or rational
construction of personal values. And it’s because of reference groups
that
both sets of Christians tend to perceive themselves as rather embattled, which is an inherently social sensation.
Christians Feel Embattled—Regardless of Their Views on Marriage
Churchgoers who oppose same-sex marriage sense that they are out of
step with the rest of the nation about sex and relationships. (The
numbers above reinforce that.) And Christians who favor legalizing
same-sex marriage often remain embattled with those who oppose it, and
yet sense that their own views on sexuality still lag behind those gay
and lesbian Christians from whom they’ve have become convinced of the
legitimacy of same-sex marriage. That, too, is true. Gay and lesbian
Christians, in turn, have much in common with gay and lesbian
non-Christians—their social circles often overlap. The sexual norms of
the former are not as permissive as the latter, but are still well above
the national average in permissiveness. The latter likely constitutes a
reference group for gay and lesbian Christians (together with
heterosexual Christians with whom they are in fellowship).
Given the rather massive divide in attitudes about sexual and
romantic relationships evidenced in the table above, reference group
theory—if employed here—would suggest that the current division between
these groups of churchgoing Christians will remain far into the future.
Even if a share of American Christians who presently oppose same-sex
marriage track in more liberal directions—and it would be shrewd to
presume that this will occur—those Christians who already support
same-sex marriage are themselves still tracking in that same direction.
And, from the looks of it, they have plenty of territory to cover yet.
Mark Regnerus is associate professor of sociology at the
University of Texas at Austin, research associate at its Population
Research Center, and a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the
Study of Family and Culture.
