Religious Identity Dissonance: How Do Sexual Minority Adolescents Manage Negative Religious Messages?

Introduction: Sexual minority adolescents (SMA; age 14-19) experience significant disparities in negative mental health outcomes compared to their heterosexual counterparts. Recent literature suggests SMA from religious contexts may be at increased risk for mental health issues (i.e., suicide attempt), due to religious identity dissonance (i.e. discomfort with being both a SMA and the religious affiliation of maturation). This study applied mixed methodology to investigate the cognitive strategies used to manage anti-homosexual religious messages and resolve religious identity dissonance among a sample of ethnically diverse SMA. This included an investigation of the mental health issues, which may arise from religious identity dissonance.

Methods: In 2014, 48 SMA were interviewed using a life history calendar methodology in a large metropolitan area. Youth were prompted to discuss experiences with religion, anti-homosexual messages, and their strategies for managing these messages throughout their lifetime. Grounded theory informed methods were utilized to analyze the qualitative data and chi square analysis was used to analyze quantitative data.

Results: A third of the sample reported religious identity dissonance, and youth indicated related mental health issues. Mental health symptoms that emerged included depression, anxiety and low self esteem. Internalizing mental health behaviors that emerged included reports of self-harm and isolation. There were three different types of religious messages (i.e., sin-based, creation-based, and afterlife-focused), which were communicated to youth and came from several different sources (e.g., parents, siblings, other family, peers, religious authorities). Youth who reported identity dissonance also reported on average more sources of the anti-homosexual religious messages with more than one type of message content. Six different anti-homosexual religious message management strategies emerged from both youth who experience religious identity dissonance and those that did not.

Conclusions: Findings indicate that all youth, including non-religious youth, may use cognitive strategies to manage negative messages and that these strategies relate to current religious identification. Experience of identity dissonance seems to be limited to youth that matured in a religious family or community and also received anti-homosexual religious messages from multiple contexts. These results suggest that youth experience heightened stress when experiencing identity dissonance that may require mental health intervention due to reports of internalizing symptoms and behaviors. Research and clinical best practices with SMA should consider intersectional approaches that consider youths’ different racial/ethnic, religious, and sexual identities.