The Proverbial Closet: Do Faith and Religiosity Affect Coming Out Patterns?

Abstract

Disclosing one’s sexual minority identity or “coming out of the closet” is a key milestone in sexual minority identity development. While scholars have explored how race, gender, class, and other social classifications shape coming out patterns among lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) individuals, we know far less about the effect of religious contexts. To address this shortcoming, we extend existing theoretical insights to better understand how faith and religiosity shape coming out patterns among sexual minorities both independently and collectively. Specifically, we examine how religious affiliation and religious attendance (a measure of religiosity) affect when LGB individuals privately realize and publicly disclose their sexual minority identity. Using data from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 Survey of LGBT Adults, we conduct a series of ordinary least squares regressions on a representative sample of LGB adults ( n = 1,136). We find religious contexts—both religious affiliation and attendance—have no independent effect on when a person realizes or publicly discloses their sexual minority identity for the first time. However, evangelical Protestants that frequently attend religious services publicly disclose their sexual minority identity at older ages. These results highlight the social cost of publicly disclosing an LGB identity, especially within conservative religious spaces.