Seeing is Believing: Religious Media Consumption and Public Opinion toward Same-Sex Relationships

Abstract

An extensive literature demonstrates that religion is a key determinant of Americans' social and political attitudes. This literature, however, has neglected an important measure of everyday religious practice, preference, and socialization: religious media consumption. We take a key social issue where attitudes have been shown to be largely shaped by religion-same-sex relationships-as an example to determine whether religious media consumption predicts social attitudes net of the measures typically included in the literature on religion and attitudes: affiliation, practice, and literalism. We draw on data from three national surveys, each of which contains different measures of religious media consumption and attitudes toward various samesex relationships: the 1998 General Social Survey, 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, and 2012 Portraits of American Life Study. Both multivariate and propensity score matching analyses demonstrate that religious media consumption independently predicts lower support for same-sex relationships in all three surveys. We propose that religious media consumption is a key measure of religious practice, preference, and socialization that shapes Americans' views toward social issues through both direct messages and by fortifying subcultural boundaries.Key Words: attitudes, public opinion, religion, media, sexuality, same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, propensity score matching The publisher's version of this paper can be found at DOI: 0.1177/2329496516686616 Citation: Perry, Samuel L. and Landon Schnabel. 2017. "Seeing is Believing: Religious Media Consumption and Public Opinion toward Same-Sex Relationships." Social Currents 4(5): 462-481.* Both authors contributed equally to the work, and their names are listed alphabetically. We are grateful to Brian Powell for the insightful feedback on an earlier draft. We would also like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Direct correspondence to Landon Schnabel, Department of Sociology, Indiana University, 744 Ballantine Hall, 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. Email: lpschnab@indiana.edu.Religious Media and Same-Sex Relationships 2 An extensive literature demonstrates that religion is a key determinant of Americans' social and political attitudes. This literature, however, has neglected an important measure of everyday religious practice, preference, and socialization: religious media consumption. We take a key social issue where attitudes have been shown to be largely shaped by religion-same-sex relationships-as an example to determine whether religious media consumption predicts social attitudes net of the measures typically included in the literature on religion and attitudes: evangelical affiliation, religious practice (attendance, prayer, and scripture reading frequency), and view of the Bible.Conservative religious identification and commitment are strongly related to public opinion toward gay and lesbian family relationships in the United States

Group Identification and Support for the Supreme Court: Evidence from Evangelical Protestants

“…Consumption of religious media shapes attitudes, including those on issues decided by the Supreme Court, and group identification. Perry and Schnabel () show that consumption of religious media changes attitudes about same‐sex marriage and reinforces identity within the religious subculture (see also Perry and Snawder ).…”