THE (RAINBOW) ELEPHANT IN THE EMAIL: HOW SEXUAL ORIENTATION, GENDER, AND PARENTHOOD STATUS SHAPE CHURCHES’ TREATMENT OF POTENTIAL NEW MEMBERS

Although the United States has witnessed a liberalization of attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) rights since the 1980s, Christians – and particularly evangelical Christians – have liberalized more slowly than members of other religious groups. Indeed, most Christian denominations in the U.S. retain official statements claiming homosexuality to be incompatible with Christianity. This project seeks to understand how potential new church members who vary by sexual orientation, gender, and parenthood status are treated by church representatives as I answer this central research question: do churches discriminate against same-sex couples in the United States, and if so, how? To answer these questions, I designed and implemented a correspondence audit study. In such studies, researchers create fictitious characters who are identical on all measures except the variable(s) of interest. For this project, the fictitious characters are six different couples moving to a new area and collecting information from churches: a straight couple with a male correspondent; a straight couple with a female correspondent; a gay couple; a lesbian couple; a straight couple (female correspondent) with children; and a lesbian couple with children. I created a nationally representative sample of churches distributed across Mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, and Catholicism, and each church in the sample was randomly assigned to receive a single email from one of the six couples. Analysis of 2,756 emails received from church representatives reveals some evidence of discrimination: same-sex couples receive shorter emails and are less likely to have their spouse mentioned than straight couples; the straight parents receive more information about children’s ministries than the lesbian parents; and forms of gatekeeping may lead to straight couples feeling more welcomed in these church communities than same-sex couples. However, to say only that discrimination persists is to overlook important nuance in how that discrimination is manifested, as well as to miss an unexpected but significant similarity across religious traditions: I find very little evidence that the effect of sexual orientation varies by religious tradition. Thus, while religious traditions may not be as polarized around sexuality as rhetoric would lead us to believe, discrimination nevertheless persists at the local level.Doctor of Philosoph