Spirituality/Religiosity of Sexual and Gender Minorities in Brazil: Assessment of Spiritual Resources and Religious Struggles

Abstract

Stigma and discriminatory attitudes create hostile and stressful environments that impact the mental health of marginalized populations. In view of these stressful situations, empirical research was undertaken with the objective of assessing the spiritual/religious resources employed by sexual and gender minorities to manage such situations, identifying the presence of religious and spiritual struggles and the style of attachment to God. This is a cross-sectional quantitative exploratory-descriptive study. The applied instruments were a sociodemographic questionnaire, the Centrality of Religiosity Scale, the Brief SRCOPE Scale, the Religious and Spiritual Struggles (RSS) Scale, and the Attachment to God Inventory. In total, 308 people participated in the study. The sample was categorized as religious (M = 3.37, SD = 1.10), and the use of positive spiritual/religious coping strategies was considered medium (M = 2.83, SD = 1.18). They scored 2.10 on the RSS Scale (SD = 0.65), which is considered a modest level, and the predominant attachment style was avoidant. The results indicate that this group has specific stressors resulting from the minority status and that a small number of people use spiritual/religious resources to deal with stressful situations. Religious transit and, mainly, the process of religious deidentification seem to work as coping strategies to deal with struggles experienced in religious environments that are not welcoming of sexual and gender diversity. In these transition and migration processes, “religious residues” (i.e., previous modes of thinking and feeling persist following religious deidentification) may be present. Thus, identifying whether such residues are made up of beliefs that negatively affect the mental health of sexual and gender minorities is a process that needs to be looked at carefully by faith communities, health professionals, and spiritual caregivers.