Everyone Belongs Here: How Affirming and Non-Affirming Church Messages and Imagery Cause Different Feelings of Acceptance in LGBTQ+ Christians

Pub Date : 2023-07-14 DOI:10.1177/00916471231185811

Juan Carlos Hugues, S. Rouse

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Abstract

Most US churches are non-affirming toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning and more (LGBTQ+) communities, but a few have developed affirming theologies. We investigate the causal link between church messages and imagery on the expectation that queer Christians would feel accepted in a church. We designed two church websites with affirming and non-affirming theology. We hypothesized that queer Christians who examined an affirming church website would feel a greater sense of church acceptance than those who viewed a non-affirming church website. Queer Christians evidenced significantly greater expectations that they would be accepted when viewing the affirming church website than when viewing the non-affirming website. Exploratory analyses examined how these websites affected straight Christians. Straight Christians did not differ significantly between the two conditions but showed a trend toward greater feelings of acceptance by the affirming church. Therefore, when finding a church, symbols rooted in affirming theology welcome LGBTQ+ and straight Christians more than those rooted in non-affirming theology.

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每个人都属于这里:肯定和非肯定的教会信息和图像如何引起LGBTQ+基督徒不同的接受感受

大多数美国教会对女同性恋、男同性恋、双性恋、变性人、酷儿或质疑者以及更多(LGBTQ+)群体持否定态度，但有少数教会发展了肯定神学。我们调查了教会信息和意象之间的因果关系，期望酷儿基督徒在教会中被接受。我们设计了两个教会网站，分别是肯定神学和非肯定神学。我们假设那些浏览肯定性教会网站的酷儿基督徒比那些浏览非肯定性教会网站的人更能感受到教会的接纳。酷儿基督徒在浏览肯定教会网站时比浏览非肯定教会网站时表现出更大的期望，他们会被接受。探索性分析考察了这些网站是如何影响异性恋基督徒的。在这两种情况下，异性恋基督徒并没有明显的差异，但他们表现出更容易被肯定派教会接受的趋势。因此，当找到一个教堂时，植根于肯定神学的符号比植根于非肯定神学的符号更欢迎LGBTQ+和异性恋基督徒。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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