Christianity and the Limits of Minority Acceptance in America

Sumerau and Cragun’s study of how religious people make sense of the increasing visibility of transgender, intersex, bi+, poly, and unchurched individuals in their midst fills a gaping void in our understanding of how traditional, established gender and religious norms continue to shape civic life in the United States. While a dominant narrative in the sociology of religion extols the limited acceptance of gay and lesbian people within Christendom, the authors show that beneath this veneer of progress there is unabated disdain for those outside mono-, hetero- and cisnormativities. The authors use ethnographic interviews to uncover the contours of this intolerance and describe how it is constructed and maintained. This is a timely, sophisticated, and essential contribution to the sociologies of religion and sexuality. -- Rick Philips, University of North Florida
For decades, sociologists of religion and sexuality were stuck asking what American Christians thought about homosexuality. As Sumerau and Cragun illustrate, it’s time to ask new questions. The authors dig into topics usually left out by fellow sociologists of religion, exploring the far reaches of American Christian assumptions that privilege monogamy, monosexuality, and cisgender reality and that leave out bisexual, nonbinary, and nonreligious people. This timely book is a must read for understanding the complete landscape of religion and sexuality in contemporary America. -- Kelsy Burke, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Sumerau and Cragun’s pathbreaking study sheds light on the ideological assumptions that still inform much social research on attitudes—that male and female are two mutually exclusive categories, that sexual orientation must reflect this dichotomy, that religion is the sole source of morality, and being cisgender in lifelong monogamy is necessary to demonstrate it. They reveal that the stereotypes that used to hound gays and lesbians, of being immature, sick, and/or untrustworthy, have not gone away but been displaced onto less conforming categories of people: bisexuals, trans people, polyamorous people, and atheists. This provocative study is a must-read for anyone seriously committed to value-neutral social science, and could shift the paradigm for social science research. -- Dawne Moon, Marquette University