Master's Thesis

The Politics of Church Space: North Carolina's United Methodist Clergy Respond to Homosexuality

What did I find? I describe the approach, methods, discussion, and conclusion in much detail in the documents attached, but here's the synopsis:

• Quantitative Methods: 382 UMC pastors from the Western NC and NC Annual Conferences out of 1,581 were part of a quantitative survey in 2006-2007. They were asked about their theology overall, their views on homosexuality (I should've asked about LGBTQ people in particular), and to provide a take on what they've preached from the pulpit about it.

Quantitative Findings:

Please note that these findings are only generalizable to the WNC and NC Annual Conferences.

• The most common theology was "Biblical Moderate" (40%) of pastors. This is on a range of (1) Biblical Literalist, (2) Biblical Conservative, (3) Biblical Moderate, and (4) Biblical Liberal. The mean was 2.81, range of 1 to 4. (See full thesis for details on these definitions.)
• Half of pastors said there were no gay people they were aware of in their congregation; the other half knew of one or more.
• Nearly all pastors (93%) said they were aware of parents or relatives of gay people in their church.
• Many (61%) pastors believed they are more liberal on homosexuality than their congregation.
• Most (77%) felt that homosexuality was a choice.
• Just under half felt that "just being attracted to the same sex" was sinful.
• Nearly all (95%) said they would be welcoming to a gay person to their church, only 5% said "hesitantly welcoming".
• Many (68%) have preached about homosexuality from their pulpits, and they were scored negative or positive. See the full text for complete explanation of these terms and the methods used to analyse this.
  • 15% were very negative
  • 22% were negative
  • 33% were middle-ground
  • 12% were positive
  • 6% were very positive

Quantitative Findings from Multiple Regression:

I conducted a multiple regression to determine if I could tell what factors may be related to why a pastor would have spoken negatively/positively about homosexuality from the pulpit. The model was only able to explain 44% of the reason why pastors spoke the way they did; the remaining 54% is unknown. What explains why they spoke negatively/positively?

• Theology! Liberal theologies were more positive.
• If they thought homosexual activity was not sinful they were more positive in their comments.
• Their awareness of gay person/parents of gay persons in their congregation meant more positive comments.
• Female pastors were more positive.
• Those with a seminary degree were more positive.

Qualitative work

After the quantitative survey was partially analyzed, I conducted 12 interviews; 3 pastors were chosen randomly from each theological grouping to further explore the data. It might be best to refer to the direct text below to read their responses. Please note that I use pseudonyms!