The Catholic Church issues another statement about gay marriage

[Kingpoleon]

Maybe your friends care, but if they teach their kids that the church is wrong, their kids will eventually see remaining Catholic as pointless.

This has to be the dumbest take yet. From abortion to female priests to gay marriage to trans people to the death penalty to climate change to economic programs, over 95% of lay Catholics teach their children that at least one major teaching of the church is wrong. Female priests has something like 80% of lay American Catholics disagreeing. The idea that LGBT issues play an especial place as some thing that parents must teach their children is wrong, in line with church teachings, or the church will die is Christian conservative nonsense. LGBT people are the only group in the whole country becoming more religious - they are four times more Christian today than in 2000, while every other group is 10-30% less Christian.

[Kingpoleon]

Source?

I am familiar with broad polling from a textbook I read on the subject. The media’s covered it as little as possible, but the most notable poll available online was the shift from 2013-2015:
“More LGB Americans consider themselves Christian than ever before. In a new Pew Research Center report, 48 percent of LGB Americans identify as Christian, up from 42 percent in 2013. The statistic contrasts the study’s finding of overall decline of Christianity, from 78.4 percent of Americans identifying as Christian, down to 70.6 percent.”
https://www.advocate.com/politics/religion/2015/05/12/report-half-lgb-americans-identify-christian

It’s not particularly beneficial to any narrative, so they’ve not done very many polls on the subject. And VERY few public ones.

[Kingpoleon]

There are lots of cultural Catholics, and this has been going on long before the issue of gay rights was being debated.

Yes - the majority of Catholics worldwide are cultural Catholics. It is becoming a semi ethnic religion, like Judaism, which has more cultural implications than religious ones.

[Kingpoleon]

The subsample size is 1604 which is decent enough, and a 6 point rise in the context of a 8 point decline in the population as a whole probably does signify something but yeah I'd be wary of hanging too much on one poll, especially one which has to navigate both identifying religiosity and sexuality.

A better approach is probably to think about this from first principles, to ask whether it makes sense that a greater or the same (which is functionally an increase given the secular decline in belief) proportion of people who are identifying as gay are also identifying as christian compared to 10 or 20 years ago. And when you phrase it in that way it becomes not just plausible but overwhelmingly likely. If you came out in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s you were doing so in a culture which treated you terrible mostly for religious reasons (you could maybe argue that a lot of this was a theological excuse for an instinctive hatred, but what the real motivation of the bigot is doesn't actually matter- in the public sphere you are judged on the words that you say) and only a few tiny sects dissented from this consensus. In that context it is hardly surprising that few openly gay people identified with christianity, any more than its surprising that so many Jewish brits turned their back on Labour during Corbyn's leadership. If you treat a group of people with contempt they will respond in kind.

But of course there is nothing inherent about being gay that means you are more or less likely to believe in God, or that can not be reconciled with Christianity, which just as a matter of sociological fact is almost infinitely malleable. In a society without homophobia you would expect the proportion of gay theists to be similar to the proportion of gay atheists. Of course we don't live in that society, the news story that this thread is about testifies to that, but it is undeniable that we are light years away from the situation in 1984, 1994 or even 2004. Christian Churches as a whole are not close to being there yet, but the direction of travel is unmistakable, there are now many affirming denominations and most that aren't are in retreat, largely restricting their comments to whinging about religious freedom.

Because of this, because homophobia in the public sphere is year by year becoming uncoupled from christianity qua christianity, its easier for people to hold onto and explore their own faith when they come out rather than have to jettison it because its so hostile to them, and so it makes sense to see a gradual increase in religious identification of LGB people to meet the levels we see dropping in the population as a whole.

This is, broadly, the view I would say is most based on the facts. But it is important to note something else as well - this is not merely a six percent increase in Christianity, but a six percent increase inside of two years!

[Kingpoleon]

I think you are perhaps hanging too much on one poll from 2015. There's plenty of reporting on LGBT affiliation being consistently lower.

2020: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/lgbt-religiosity-us/

Here you have 47% saying they were religious with 37% being Christian (Gallup) compared to 68% Christian in the rest of the population (Gallup 2020) which is a 23% fall to a 4% fall amongst the general population.

Bore and I are not disputing a consistent difference with negative correlation compared to the general populace. We are instead noting something which is fairly surprising: that polls generally indicate a standard increase, ESPECIALLY relative to general population. Bore explained the two likely demographic patterns here, and I would suggest that it will either A) stabilize right at or nearly at that of the general populace; or B) it will surpass the general populace by some degree and eventually stabilize.

You shouldn’t cross compare polls from different sources like that - they will word questions differently, sample differently, etc., so regardless of how accurate actual numbers are, actual change from two different polling sources is fallacious and ill advised.

[Kingpoleon]

https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/austrias-cardinal-sch-nborn-god-will-not-deny-same-sex-couples-blessing

Interesting to see a Cardinal publicly disagree like this. Isn’t the German Church in general a bit more liberal than the rest of the Church at large?