research : mackenzian

March 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Despair and resilience among LGBT+ Adventists

Illustration credit: Jared A. Wright/Spectrum Media

Remember the Andrews University researchers who wanted to hear from LGBT+ Adventist young adults last summer? Nearly 500 people responded, and 310 young adults completed the survey. The researchers are reporting early findings now.

On the Spectrum blog this week, Drs. Nancy Carbonell, Curtis VanderWaal, Shannon Trecartin, and David Sedlacek talked with Alita Byrd about what they’re learning from their study of family acceptance:

Research shows that around 9% of teens in the U.S. are kicked out of their homes when they tell parents about their orientation or identity. We wondered how that statistic compared to the Adventist church (we found the same rate in our study)…

Although we knew from the research literature that suicidal thinking and suicide attempts were much higher among LGBT+ individuals than the general population, we were shocked to find this level of despair among those who had grown up as Adventists… Conversely, we were quite surprised by how many respondents have remained deeply spiritual and have continued their involvement in religious activities.” —Curtis VanderWaal

There is no doubt that LGBT+ adults often see their parents, homes, and churches as very rejecting places, making coming out or understanding their sexual orientation or gender identity extremely difficult for the majority of these young people…

While many of our LGBT+ youth reported having a friend that they could share their joys and sorrows with (70%), less found this support from their parents (34.2%), few found support from their pastor (11.9%), and even fewer found their congregation [to be an] important source of support (9.3%).” — Nancy Carbonell

In survey responses, LGBT+ young adults explained parents’ and caregivers’ responses to their coming out. Forty percent disclosed their gender or sexual orientation to their families during their 20s, 20% haven’t come out at all yet, and a full three-quarters of the respondents reported anti-LGBT prejudice among their relatives that made the disclosure process more difficult.

As well as drawing implications for Adventist church workers and educators, Carbonell, VanderWaal, Trecartin, and Sedlacek are also placing reports in professional publications like the journal of the North American Association of Christians in Social Work, Social Work and Christianity (Spring 2017).

One of these articles, “The Impact of Family Rejection or Acceptance among LGBT+ Millennials in the Seventh-day Adventist Church” (VanderWaal, Sedlacek, & Lane), focuses on young LGBT+ Adventists’ experiences and what caring professions can do to support members of this population who might cross their office thresholds for individual or family/social systems counselling.

“Caregivers, clergy, and religious congregations,” the researchers write, “were generally not considered to be good sources of social support for respondents.” But many of us hope that can change.

If you want to learn more about the subset of social work research that Carbonell, VanderWaal, Trecartin, and Sedlacek are contributing to, check out the work of the Family Acceptance Project, based at San Francisco State University.

February 24, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Solutions that don’t work for problems that don’t exist

“When you visit a doctor, you probably assume the treatment you receive is backed by evidence from medical research. Surely, the drug you’re prescribed or the surgery you’ll undergo wouldn’t be so common if it didn’t work, right?

“LOL” is what The Atlantic writer David Epstein and ProPublica might have preferred to have written after this paragraph in their column about the gap between health research and “evidence-based” medicine. They share what happens to patients who receive unnecessary procedures, and crack open the system behind the mess.

It turns out that some prescription and treatment protocols are not evidence-based, even when they could be. Medics prioritize tradition rather than effectiveness, and the regulatory system doesn’t help them change.

A few weeks ago, I read a line from Roman Catholic essayist G.K. Chesterton: “Tradition,” he wrote, “is only democracy extended through time… It means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

Like religious people who shape a common tradition by passing stories, practices, and lenses across generations, scientists come to share a consensus of interpretations and inferences through the disciplines of repeating and confirming previous experiments and peer-reviewing the findings. This is a kind of tradition: as Epstein demonstrates, it’s the ideal medical researchers sometimes fall short of.

Like Chesterton, I can see tradition as admirable. Thanks to the ideals of science and the kind of journalism that calls it out, I’ve also learned to require that traditions be beneficial as well as long-lasting.

That’s the expectation the writers of the Atlantic/Pro-Publica article have about contemporary medicine. Read the article and share your thoughts about it with me on Twitter.

February 22, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The disease of shame

Correlation isn’t causation, but this is the most hope-building correlation I’ve seen this week.

Johns Hopkins researcher Julia Raifman, Ellen Moscoe, and S. Bryn Austin co-published a study of sixteen years of data from more than 26,000 lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) high school students. A key finding?

In states that have legalized same-sex marriage, both heterosexual and LGB teens reported substantially fewer suicide attempts. By contrast, “in states that did not legalize same-sex marriage, there was no change” from previous years. Read the study yourself.

One of my favorite hashtags on Twitter is #SDoH, which stands for social determinants of health. It includes news and research from a sector of public health that acknowledges we can’t be healthy or whole in isolation.

Our health is literally shaped by social factors, factors that take shape well above the level of individual will. From the availability of nutritious food in our neighborhoods to the wider legal climate in which we live, learn, and love, we’re formed by social determinants.

Reifman and her co-researchers acknowledge the impact of social stigma on teens’ mental health: the literature shows that “the confluence of labeling, stereotyping, differentiation from the norm, status loss, and discrimination in the context of differential power” are associated with outcomes like depression, suicide ideation, and neurological disorders.

The important principle here: stigma (imposed) and shame (received) have physiological consequences, and improving the social environment improves individual outcomes.

As Dr. Mario Martinez writes, “In general, our biology adjusts to our cultural beliefs; and in particular, our immune system confirms the operative consciousness with which we choose to view our world.”

Martinez studies psychoneuroimmunology (he calls the field biocognition). He explains how our bodies interact with our experiences, how our emotional states aren’t merely “neurological”—brain-centric—but diffused throughout the systems of the body, and how social interactions like compassion and shame play out physically.

We look askance on industrial companies for their toxic waste dumps: how dare them foul the land and water that we depend on? But what consequences are there for those who dump stigma on marginalized and vulnerable people?

February 15, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Backstory on the right to discriminate

Why are White evangelical Protestants in the United States so likely to justify discrimination based on religious or moral conviction? Because they’ve done it before.

Christians using our religion to shield ourselves from the consequences of our social prejudice isn’t new. It’s also not a personal attack, though that’s little assurance for Muslims, LGBTQ people, single parents, or anyone else marginalized in mainstream evangelical culture. It’s part of the community’s history, and it goes back more than fifty years.

As Randall Balmer explains, the 1969-1970 case Green v. Kennedy inspired White Evangelicals to abandon rapidly desegregating public schools for schools and colleges where they could be sure their children would only learn with and date other White children. When President Nixon’s administration argued that the Civil Rights Act required non-profit organizations not to discriminate or risk their federal tax exemption, evangelical people mobilized to protect their “right to discriminate.”

Clear into the year 2000, Bob Jones University discouraged students from multi-racial dating. Its policy, like its restrictions on the enrollment of Black students through the 1970s, rested on the “sincere moral convictions” of the university’s board and constituencies. Today, the university website includes statements that repudiate that era. “Scripture is our final authority for faith and practice,” the university wrote in 2008, “and it is our intent to have it govern all of our policies.”

For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures.” —Bob Jones University, Statement about Race at BJU

Today it seems obvious that Christianity should be incompatible with racism and prejudice, but it wasn’t always obvious, and the evangelical community hasn’t always argued that it should be. Some members of the community still don’t.

David W. Congdon tracks these patterns not just fifty years back but four centuries back. Congdon is a systematic theologian and staff member at the InterVarsity Press, and developed two Twitter threads that outline historical and philosophical influences on evangelical culture’s custom of pulling up the drawbridge behind it and leaving the riffraff outside the walls.

Allowing theological differences, esp. on touchy issues, threatens the unity and financial future of an organization. Whether it’s a ban, physical wall, firing, church split, or statement of faith, it’s all the same fear of the other [and] pursuit of purity.” —David W. Congdon, February 9, 2017

Congdon may be alluding to a 2016 controversy about InterVarsity enforcing constraints on what its staff members can believe about marriage, all in the name of faithfulness to Biblical convictions. Staff members who wouldn’t or couldn’t sign an IVP statement of belief faced job losses.

Given this context, when PRRI finds that 42% of White evangelical Protestants oppose refusing Others service on the basis of religion, it’s not surprising that there are so few. It’s surprising that there are so many! The Church needs to generate more.

As new policies about denials of service emerge over the next several months, one of the biblical parables that you can expect to hear a lot about is the story of the Good Samaritan. In this story, the outsider is the most moral character in a narrative usually set up to praise ordinary Israelites not from the families of Aaron (priests) or Levi (Levites or temple staff). Christian communities are beginning to use this story to challenge the poor habit of using our beliefs to raise walls between “us” and those “not like us.” It’s tempting, for non-evangelicals too, to leave someone out, to deny, repel, and reject, and to credit (or blame) God or other authorities for our choices to do so.

As Jesus tells this parable, his audience asks, “Who is my neighbor?” The more I hear about religious freedom, especially from the constituencies that elected the current federal administration, the more I sense that Jesus’ original audience didn’t like his answer any more than we do.

But that doesn’t make his answer wrong.

February 13, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Timely research: Who are our neighbors?

Street shot of Regent Street, London: small clusters of people of different genders walk along the edges of the street. — Photo credit: David Marcu

Learning to share the public space with those with whom we disagree; learning to overcome humanity’s abysmal record of religious wars, religious ethnic cleansing, and genocide-fueled religious bigotry—these have become some of the most urgent challenges of our time.” —Ganoune Diop, October 2016

Our friends at PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute, have published a research summary on more than 100,000 interviews of US adults.

Of these interviews, 40,000 focused on respondents’ values and political views, and included questions about legalized discrimination against LGBT people. PRRI’s research summary also breaks down responses based on religious affiliation.

Take this chart, for example. It addresses support for or opposition to denials of service based on religion or “sincerely held morals”:

Findings for PRRI's question on support for or opposition to religiously based service refusals: Most likely to support are Jehovah's Witnesses and White evangelical Protestants. Least likely to do so are Buddhists and Unitarian Universalists. — Chart credit: PRRI

The only group more likely than Latter-day Saints to support denials of service in the name of religion are White evangelical Protestants.¹ The groups least likely to support religiously or morally justified service denials are Buddhists and Unitarian Universalists.

Even among religious groups without majority support for same-sex marriage, nearly all oppose religiously based service refusals of gay and lesbian people.” —PRRI, February 3, 2017

And a strong majority of respondents recognize in society “a lot of discrimination” against “gay and lesbian” and “transgender” people. (PRRI’s questions did not address bisexual people.)

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll share some of the history behind these responses. For now, take a look at PRRI’s report, and imagine for yourself how your local faith community might be represented on charts like these.

Denial of service laws don’t just affect small businesses and street vendors. They also impact schools, hospitals, and public social services like clinics, childcare centers, and foster care homes. How, if at all, do you think members of your community might justify social discrimination in these spaces?

Whatever your group’s official position statements on race, sexuality, or care for the foreigner and other vulnerable people, how do group members actually treat Others? Who are your neighbors and how do you show it?

Seventh-day Adventists aren’t among the groups named in PRRI’s report, but can be classified as evangelical Protestants. I know of no recent survey of Seventh-day Adventists that addresses these questions. [Back to text: ◄]

December 5, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Learning from all cases

There are so many ways to arrive at faulty conclusions.

When it comes to populations that have undergone trauma, one way to arrive at a faulty conclusion is to learn exclusively from those survive their experiences—taking campus policy advice solely from students who manage to stay in school despite bullying and marginalization, for example.

Another way to arrive at a faulty conclusion is to take cues only from those who don’t survive. A study about contraception recently ended because some study subjects found common side effects intolerable. By ending the study prematurely, researchers have ensured that they can’t track the progress of subjects who were more resilient, and the testing of this medicine might be permanently halted.

As they work to understand their members’ motivations, denominations like mine are commissioning retention research projects about former members as well as current ones. These studies are a tool for mitigating the impact of survivorship bias on church policymakers who would otherwise focus only on people who remain formally affiliated. Of course, the quality of their conclusions from these studies depends on how the studies are designed and what respondents volunteer when asked.

A fascinating example of survivorship bias featuring US Navy researchers went viral on Twitter yesterday:

During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. Researchers from the Center for Naval Analyses had conducted a study of the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions, and had recommended that armor be added to the areas that showed the most damage. Wald noted that the study only considered the aircraft that had survived their missions—the bombers that had been shot down were not present for the damage assessment. The holes in the returning aircraft, then, represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still return home safely. Wald proposed that the Navy instead reinforce the areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, since those were the areas that, if hit, would cause the plane to be lost. — Image: Ryan O’Horo (Twitter); source: Wikipedia

It’s a remarkable story: were it not for Abraham Wald and his analyses, the Navy might have protected parts of their planes that didn’t need protecting and left vulnerable the parts that most needed armor.

Consider the range of sources you use to teach you about the populations you work with. Could you be misreading why “survivors” survive and what set them apart from those who don’t thrive?

As far as it lies within your power, learn from all cases, not just those that match your initial assumptions.