Gender, Sexuality, and Religion: A Critical Integrative Review and Agenda for Future Research

Abstract

This article sets forth a critical integrative review of the study of gender, sexuality, and religion. Treating religion as a cause, an effect, and an intermediary factor in relation to gender and sexuality, it draws on and synthesizes multiple theoretical approaches including gender and queer lenses on religion, cultural analysis, and intersectionality. The article is structured around ten big-picture questions about gender, sexuality, and religion and argues that gender and sexuality are a key symbolic boundary and cultural divide in religious and political life in the United States and around the world. It concludes with an agenda for future research.

The Religious Work Ethic and the Spirit of Patriarchy: Religiosity and the Gender Gap in Working for Its Own Sake, 1977 to 2018

“…The gender revolution was an important part of broader social changes happening in the 1960s and 1970s, and reacting to these social movements restructured American Christianity around political issues with gender playing a particularly important role for some congregations. Drawing a line around women's issues galvanized the (white) Christian Right in the post-1960s backlash that eventually led to the highly polarized and politicized nature of contemporary religion in the United States (O'Brien and Abdelhadi 2020;Schnabel 2016a;Schnabel et al forthcoming). Whereas religious groups were previously less political and in some ways more culturally distinct from one another, with the political restructuring of American religion there are now cross-cutting currents such that more intensely religious mainline Protestants hold values in some ways more similar to evangelicals than moderate mainline Protestants-accordingly, religious attendance has become an increasingly important dividing line on issues related to gender and family, whereas denominational divides have become comparatively less important (Perry and Schleifer 2019;Schnabel 2021a;Wuthnow 1988).…”