Is safe space safe? Being gay and college faculty across religious moral communities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Prior research on the effect of religion on prejudicial attitudes against sexual minorities has looked into how religion may influence public attitudes towards homosexual behaviours, gay marriage, and same-sex adoption. However, less is known about how religion may influence employment discrimination against gays in the education industry where prejudice and discrimination against gays frequently occur. Using the 1993–2018 cumulative General Social Survey data merged with county and state-level demographic and religious data of the United States, this study finds that individuals are more likely to favour banning homosexual men from teaching in college when county-level evangelical Protestant homogeneity increases. By contrast, when a county has a higher concentration of Catholics, individuals are less likely to endorse such discriminatory action, regardless of their own individual religious affiliation. This study contributes to a growing trend of research examining religious moral communities beyond its most general form – the overall church membership rates. Instead, as the results suggest, religious moral communities are multi-dimensional and the extent to which a religion dominates a geographic area may have a broad social impact on the whole community.