Study explores why gays quit the church

They may reject religion, but they remain spiritual

Taylor Valci was 7 the first time she spoke in tongues. The daughter of a Pentecostal pastor in California’s Bay Area, she grew up watching “Veggie Tales” and attending Missionettes, the Assemblies of God version of Girl Scouts.

“For me, personally, God was absolutely the most important thing in the world,” Valci said.

But by the time she was attending Gordon College in Massachusetts in the fall of 2016, Valci, now 22, no longer considered herself a Christian, at least in part because she was starting to realize she was lesbian.

Her experience is not uncommon in the Christian church. Earlier this year, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion published a report that said same-sex attraction and behavior, and gay identity is strongly associated with a decision to step away from organized religion, attend church less frequently or stop going altogether.

The authors of the study, Brandi Woodell, a sociology professor at Old Dominion University, and Philip Schwadel, a sociology professor from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, found that those who report same-sex attraction were almost twice as likely to disaffiliate from their religion.

The study, which observed changes in queer people’s religious attendance, religious identity and prayer practices over time, included only lesbian, gay and bisexual-emerging, or LGB, adults ages 11 to 34 — not enough data was available on other sexual minorities to include them in the analysis. The overwhelming majority of those in the study’s sample were Christian.

The Rev. Emmy Kegler, a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said the findings matched her experience. Though the study didn’t give reasons for the phenomenon, Kegler suggested it was the church’s attitudes toward sexual minorities. “There’s still a significant understanding in Christian culture overall that being a member of the LGBTQ+ community is incompatible with the Christian faith,” she said.

That bias can work to alienate LGB individuals, even if they have come to terms with their sexuality. “Even for people likeme, who are out loud and proud,” said Jamie Manson, president for Catholics for Choice, “there’s always going to be that element of shame, of not being legitimate, of your love not being worthy to be blessed by God in the church of your childhood.”

When Valci got to college, she developed a crush on a woman and joined the campus’s underground gay and lesbian scene.

She then came out as both lesbian and non-Christian her first year of college. “I was coming to a place inmy own life withmy sexuality where I just wanted to stop living in shame. To stop lying and living in fear. I wanted to be transparent about what I believed and who I was,” she said.

Kurtis Zolman’s departure was more directly a result of discovering his gay identity.

Zolman, 26, grew up attending a Nazarene Church in rural Michigan that had rules he compared to those in the movie “Footloose” — no dancing, no drinking. When he was in ninth grade, he told his parents that he is gay. They sent him to a “straight camp” where, Zolman said, he was told he’d go to hell if he didn’t conform.

Zolman remained a Christian, however, until after high school graduation, when he came out publicly. Soon after, his youth pastor told him he could no longer be on the church praise team or attend youth group, and asked Zolman to sit in the back during church because he was “actively living in sin.”

“That was 10 years ago,” said Zolman, “and I’ve been to a church maybe four times since then.”

Yet if LGB people drop out of church, they don’t always lose their spirituality altogether.

“I am always talking to God,” said one Christian who played piano at his Fundamentalist Baptist congregation in the Bahamas as a teenager. A decade later, theman, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “I have a closer relationship with God than I could ever have because I’m being honest with my self.”

Zolman said he also finds himself praying “about once every other week.”

“I think a common motif with gay people brought up in the church is that we don’t hate Jesus, but we hate the institution the church has become,” he said.

Bob Owen / Staff file photo In 2019, the Rev. Dr. Michael Diaz of Dallas, from left, and the Rev. Naomi L. Brown and the Rev. Andries Coetzee of San Antonio join in protest of religious discrimination against gays.