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. Public Significance Statement<br /> Gay/lesbian Christians are caught between two groups seen as politically opposed. In this study, neither nonreligious gay/lesbian people nor cisgender heterosexual Christians fully embraced gay/lesbian Christians, which may be driven by assumptions regarding this target group's political ideology.