Sexual minority and religious majority: Nonreligious gay/lesbian people’s and cisgender heterosexual Christians’ evaluations of gay and lesbian Christians

We examined how gay/lesbian Christians (a group with two intersecting, “conflicting” identities) are evaluated by nonreligious gay/lesbian people and cisgender heterosexual Christians, two groups who each share one identity with gay/lesbian Christians. We recruited subsamples of nonreligious gay/lesbian people ( n = 175) and cisgender heterosexual Christians ( n = 211) and found that they evaluated gay/lesbian Christians differently. For example, nonreligious gay/lesbian people evaluated gay/lesbian Christians more positively than cisgender heterosexual Christians did. Intergroup conflict, identity incompatibility, and stereotypic inferences about political ideology were associated with participants’ evaluations of gay/lesbian Christians and their “double outgroups.” Political ideology may help explain cases where participants evaluated gay/lesbian Christians differently from their double outgroups. However, additional causal evidence is needed to further support this claim. The present work is a first step in examining how two “opposing” groups evaluate a group at the intersection of their identities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)