LGBT Americans Are Less Religious For Good Reason

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A new Gallup survey has not surprisingly found that LGBT Americans are "less religious" than other segments of society.   Of course, given the evils done to gays in the name of religion and the daily religious based discrimination many of us face, the findings should surprise no one.  Yet the usual Christofascists and professional Christians are using the data to denigrate gays and depict us as a societal evil.  As I said, there is good reason that many in the LGBT community have walked away from religion which has hate and bigotry as its most noticeable attributes.  An article in The New Civil Rights Movement looks at the survey findings and the reasons why gays eschew religion.  Here are excerpts:

By a wide margin, LGBT Americans are "significantly less religious" than heterosexuals. A new Gallup survey finds that LGBT people in the U.S. are "significantly less likely than non-LGBT Americans to be highly religious, and significantly more likely to be classified as not religious."

Overall, nearly half -- 47 percent -- of LGBT people are "not religious," they say, agreeing that "religion is not an important part of their daily lives and that they seldom or never attend religious services." By comparison, 30 percent of non-LGBT people identify as not religious.
 
Those who say they are moderately religious, claiming "religion is important in their lives but that they do not attend services regularly, or that religion is not important but that they still attend services," weigh in equally at 29 percent of the population -- both LGBT and non-LGBT.

In reality, it's no wonder that LGBT people are less religious, when daily the LGBT community is lambasted as perverted, sick, sinners, of the devil, and "worthy of death." It's no wonder that LGBT people are less religious, when those who claim to represent God and religion call for the mass murder of the world’s homosexuals. 

Gays are regularly treated them as inhuman by most of the religious right's loudest voices. Those same voices, along with the majority of GOP politicians -- who are often one in the same -- attack LGBT people as “perverted,” “degenerate,” “spiritually darkened” and “frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally.” They often engage in verbal assaults, like claiming homosexuality is an "unhealthy, sexual addiction,” an “abomination in the sight of God,” that same-sex marriage leads to "Adam and a bull," and almost daily compare LGBT people to alcoholics, child-molesters, and thieves, and claim same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy, incest, increase in disease, and general immorality. And they call coming out as LGBT a "tragedy," and a "family crisis."

Ironically, the loudest voices who also claim to represent religion -- or the religious right -- now regularly claim that homosexuality and Christianity are incompatible, and even that "Jesus would stone homos."

I remain nominally a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America but rarely attend church services.  For me to enter a church, it usually involves a funeral or a wedding.   With science and modern knowledge increasingly proving the Bible to be false, it simply is more and more difficult subscribing to what is in someways a fairy tale authored by ignorant, backward herders who knew nothing of modern science, medical or mental health knowledge.  Add to that the Church's manipulation of the Bible's contents to enhance power and control and the entire work but for some of the Gospel message becomes almost obscene.