Yes Gawd!: How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States. By Royal G. Cravens

Extract

In Yes Gawd!: How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States, Royal G. Cravens III draws on theories of socialization, political mobilization, and identity to explore how faith shapes queer people’s participation in and perceptions of LGBT identity and politics. His affirmation of the confluence of religiosity and LGBT identity urges readers to engage with the complex relationship between faith, organized religion, and queerness in the USA. He centrally claims that religious socialization is an important, although overlooked, component of LGBT political mobilization, and that LGBT religious groups and organizations confer political resources distinct from those conferred by secular LGBT groups. The bulk of evidence Cravens uses to support his claims comes from extensive analysis of his original 2022 survey of over one thousand LGBT people.

The book opens by challenging the commonly held belief that LGBT and religious identities are incompatible. In the first chapter, Cravens provides a detailed synthesis of the white evangelical anti-LGBT movement and its efforts to portray LGBT civil rights and religion as fundamentally opposed. Here, he also highlights the work of organizations such as the Council on Religion and the Homosexual and the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches in integrating LGBT acceptance into religious spaces. Chapter 2 goes on to demonstrate that despite conservative assertions about the incompatibility of LGBT people and faith, many LGBT people participate in religious communities and engage in religious practices. Chapter 3 posits that exposure to anti-gay and LGBT-affirming religious messages influences LGBT people’s political leanings and behaviors. Cravens argues that early religious experiences contribute to LGBT people’s conceptions of linked fate with other LGBT people and whether they experience internal conflict related to their religious and sexual/gender identity. The book continues by proposing a model of LGBT religious development that illustrates how experiences such as changing one’s religious affiliation or hearing negative messages about LGBT people at church shape future politico-religious activities. Chapter 5 examines the differences in how religious and secular organizations contribute to LGBT people’s political beliefs and actions. Chapter 6 explores how LGBT-affirming religious organizations shape the political values and actions of LGBT people. In this chapter, Cravens adeptly builds on political resource theory and demonstrates that despite the prevalence of anti-gay religious messages in some religious groups, religious affiliation provides LGBT people with the skills and resources necessary for political engagement. Thus, he finds that LGBT religious people are more politically engaged than their non-religious counterparts. In the final analytical chapter, Cravens builds on these findings to account for how religious socialization impacts the extent to which LGBT people align themselves with LGBT-related political causes and liberal political attitudes more broadly.