Ahmad Greene-Hayes is a 2025-2026 PRRI Public Fellow focusing on LGBTQ rights and gender. He is also an Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School.
LGBTQ people are under attack in President Donald Trump’s America following a mass of anti-LGBTQ executive orders issued during the president’s second term. Most notably, the Trump administration has organized against what they describe as “gender ideology extremism” in an effort “to restore biological truth to the federal government.” They have explicitly targeted transgender women athletes by misgendering them and demanding that sports associations “keep men out of women’s sports.” In addition, they have banned transgender people from serving in the armed forces and “discontinued the practice of pronoun self-identification,” calling for the end of federal funds for gender-affirming care for Americans under the age of 19. At the same time, across the country, faith leaders in organizations like the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), “a multi-denominational movement of Christian leaders, churches, ministries, and laity committed to the radical inclusion of every person in the community of faith,” have denounced these orders through litigation and demonstrations.
Debates over gender and sexuality offer insight into the competing religious and moral frameworks within American society. This Spotlight Analysis examines Americans’ views regarding LGBTQ issues and sheds light on how political party, religious affiliation, Christian nationalism, and race are connected to these views, while placing them within broader theological struggles over the varied meanings of Christianity.
A vital metric of a democracy’s health is the degree to which the majority protects the rights of marginalized people. The 2025 PRRI American Values Atlas, which surveyed Americans over the course of 2025 following Trump’s anti-LGBTQ executive orders, shows that 71% of Americans agree that transgender people deserve the same rights and protections as other Americans. This includes majorities of Democrats (88%), independents (77%), and Republicans (57%). In addition, most Americans (72%) support LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections, highlighting a strong national consensus among Democrats (90%), independents (76%), and Republicans (56%) that democracy requires LGBTQ inclusion.
PRRI’s data also shows that support of nondiscrimination laws for LGBTQ people varies by religious affiliation, with pronounced differences among racial groups. Over seven in ten Christians of color (71%) support nondiscrimination laws for LGBTQ people, relative to two-thirds of white Christians (66%). Among Christians of color, Hispanic Protestants (59%) are the least likely to support these protections, compared with 73% of Black Protestants and 77% of Hispanic Catholics. Among white Christian groups, white evangelical Protestants are the least likely to support nondiscrimination protections (54%), about 20 percentage points lower than white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (74%) and white Catholics (74%).
The differences in support for LGBTQ rights across different groups may, in part, reflect the interventions of LGBTQ theologians and the work of allies and accomplices who have organized in their religious communities on behalf of LGBTQ individuals.
PRRI data also shows that support for LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections has remained largely stable or increased among most religious groups between 2015 and 2025. At the same time, opposition to religiously based refusals has declined. While a majority of Americans continue to oppose allowing businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people on religious grounds, that opposition declined from a peak of 66% in 2021 to 59% in 2025. This 7-point decline since 2021 aligns with the rise of Christian nationalist rhetoric, which often reframes service refusals as a protected matter of religious identity rather than a question of discrimination, while also privileging the heteronormative, nuclear family model over other forms of kinship and family structure. As these ideologies gain more traction in the political and legal spheres, they are likely to shift public opinion, as the current administration villainizes DEI initiatives and nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ individuals.
Considering the violence that many queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming people experience both within and beyond religious institutions, many LGBTQ individuals express ambivalence about identifying with traditional religious institutions. Indeed, PRRI data shows that 51% of LGBTQ Americans are religiously unaffiliated. However, this shift, nearly double the rate of the general population (27%), often represents a departure from formal religious structures like Christianity rather than a total move away from personal spiritual belief and practice. If we look to the African diaspora as an example, this unaffiliated status often reflects a growing trend of leaving institutions that have historically marginalized LGBTQ people in favor of non-Christian African diasporic religions where fluid interpretations of gender and sexuality situate LGBTQ individuals as embodied manifestations of various divinities.
Despite these numbers, there are many queer people and allies who continue to view Christianity as a vehicle for social change. For example, Bishop Yvette Flunder, the founder of TFAM, noted at a recent symposium at Yale Divinity School in April 2026 that “religion [is used] as a weapon.” Flunder continued, “This has happened many times to justify racism, homophobia [and] slavery,” in which the powerful “weaponized God against justice.” At the same event, the Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks, an ally and the author of The Politics of Jesus, observed “These Christian fascists have abandoned their religion, its values, even its greatest commandments.” Hendricks contended, “They have replaced the Gospels’ call to love with animosity and hatemongering. What they are doing has nothing to do with the gospel.”
Flunder, Hendricks, and many queer Christians and their allies reclaim the revolutionary politics of Jesus to not only uphold nondiscrimination protections and transgender rights but to take up space in the American theological arena.
