Church as Community: Religiosity and Queer Identity Among Emerging Adults in Adventist Higher Education

How do LGBTQ+ or “queer”-identifying emerging adults attending Seventh-day Adventist Christian institutions of higher education in the United States relate to their religiosity or relationship with religion? Within certain religious contexts (Avishai, 2020; Chiongbian et al., 2023; Lockett et al., 2023), including within the Seventh-day Adventist church (Pew Research Center, 2014), an individual’s LGBTQ+ identity may seem incongruent with commonly held stigmas, norms, doctrines, and beliefs maintained by religious group members and officials. LGBTQ+ identity and religiosity in such contexts are often described through “conflict” and “beyond conflict” theories, principally Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Identity Integration Theory (Rêgo-Moreira et al., 2024). For permission to interview the noted population, an Institutional Review Board application was submitted to each of the twelve Seventh-day Adventist universities and colleges in the United States of America, receiving three acceptances. Permitted recruiting materials, namely posters and the option of confidential referral, were then distributed in participating institutions. Participant experiences were gauged through semi-structured interviews that were analyzed through an inductive qualitative analysis. Dominant emergent themes were: church as community, personal negotiation with identities, role of learning spaces, and correspondence of religiosity and queer identity, each with three subthemes. The importance of community in identity formation and integration was the most consistent finding. Themes indicate that queer-identifying students make negotiations with their queer and religious identities, quelling cognitive dissonance and encouraging identity integration. A recommendation is made to create community spaces for this population, minimizing harm and collective cognitive dissonance while increasing positive regard toward church spaces.