ESSAY
Gay West and Straight East?

Should we trust Vladimir Putin, we could come to believe that the West is a gay paradise whereas Russia strongly defends traditional and even Christian morality.

Similar conclusion could be drawn from polls, which say that the European Union and America are the parts of the world where the acceptance of homosexuality is most widespread. Over 90% in the Middle East and 87% in Africa say that homosexuality is morally unacceptable. In the EU, only 16% think homosexual behavior is immoral. The U.S. is in between, with 37% regarding homosexuality as wrong (source: 2013 Global Attitudes survey).

But when we look at the issue more closely, the picture is not so clear. When asked: “Should society accept homosexuality,” negative answers varied from 11% in Spain and Germany to 46% in Poland, and positive answers from 88% in Spain to 42% in Poland (source: Pew Research Center Q27, 2013). A similar East-West divide among the EU countries is noticeable when it comes to gay marriage. It is legal in basically all EU countries west and north of Germany, with some sort of same-sex unions in the central European countries. Same-sex unions do not have legal status in Italy or most of the EU countries east of Germany. Obviously, the new (post-communist) EU member states and societies are generally more opposed to same-sex unions and homosexuality.

What could be the reasons for that? It is often presumed that religion plays a big role, and to some degree it is true, especially when we compare the member countries in the East and in the West of the EU. The eastern societies tend to be more religious than their western partners. But religion doesn’t tell the whole story. On the religiosity scale (0-3) the United States scores 1.5, but Russia only 0.7 (source: 2011 Global Attitudes Survey). Yet in Russia only 16% of the population accepts homosexuality, whereas in the United States the number is as high as 60% (source: Pew Research Center Q27; 2013). Even though the American society is twice more religious, the acceptance of homosexuality there is almost four times higher than in Russia.

One could conclude that it is not religiosity itself that plays the decisive role in the perception of homosexuality but also the kind of religiosity that people adhere to. Even this does not explain why the acceptance of homosexuality is more popular among certain religious groups. In the United States, homosexuality is more broadly accepted by Roman Catholics than by Protestants, in spite of the official position of the Roman Catholic Church (71% and 47% respectively; source: Pew Research Center Q17b; 2013).

It is not so much the confessional affiliation that plays the primary role, but rather personal religious commitment. People who attend the church more often tend to have more negative perception of homosexuality. 41% of the people living in Spain never go to church, and the comparable number is 28% in Germany and 5% in Poland. Only 20% of Spaniards attend church once a month, 18% of Germans, but 70% of Poles (source: Eurobarometer 73.1; 2010).

Also in the USA the correlation between church attendance and acceptance of homosexuality is evident, though to a lesser degree. Roman Catholics attend the church less often than Protestants (source: Pew Research Center 2012). On the other hand, the strong opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to gay marriage has some influence on the thinking of those Roman Catholics who go to church only occasionally. This may explain why Germany, despite wide acceptance of homosexuality, does not plan to legalize gay marriages in the near future. The influence of the Roman Catholic Church on the Christian Democratic Party is still substantial there.

If we look east of the EU, the picture changes again. On the one hand, only 16% of Russians accept homosexuality, but, on the other hand, only 7% of adult Russians attend the church at least once a month (even though 56% of them believe in God and 72% [sic!] say they are Eastern Orthodox Christians; source: Pew Research Center 2008). Why then the Russian society so “homophobic”?

According to Anna Arutunyan, Russian “conservatism” does not have much to do with God, but rather with “the deep-seated, possibly acquired distrust of provocation and conflict among Russians. There’s a reason for that distrust: Russians know how their society and government functions, and they know that by raising your head and causing a ruckus you risk being destroyed.” An average Russian is not going to support any gay agenda simply because it is against the official position of the government which is presented by most of the mass media. Going against the government would not be smart.

The blogger Pico gives other reasons for Russian negative perception of homosexuality. He claims that the official “homophobia” is connected with the idea of national survival, which is endangered by constantly dropping birth rate. Another aspect is the nostalgia for the USSR where, since Stalin, male homosexuality was illegal. Actually, it was decriminalized in 1917 under Lenin, but male homosexuality was recriminalized under Stalin in 1933, only to be decriminalized again after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993. For Stalin, recriminalization of homosexuality (together with prohibition of abortion) was an attempt to increase the birthrate in the USSR and so had to do with the survival issue and with the imperialistic ambitions of Moscow. According to Pico, the same imperialistic ambitions lead the present rulers of Russia to similar to Stalin’s stand on homosexuality.

Alexei Bayer points at one more source of Russian hostility toward homosexuality: The prison and gulag experience of many Russian people under the Soviet regime: “Prison is fertile ground for homoerotic relationships and homosexual rape, refracting and heightening the pervasive self-hating homophobia of Russian society. Not surprisingly, homosexuality in prisons is surrounded by a variety of primitive, almost tribal rituals, stratified and fenced in by unbreakable taboos that turn the class of passive homosexuals, quite literally, into untouchables” (Deep Roots of Russian Homophobia).

Bayer speaks only about “passive homosexuals” who become “untouchables.” They are the weak ones, who stand at the bottom of prison hierarchy. Active homosexuals who are strong and dominating are not in view here. One could conclude that the enmity toward homosexuality here has to do more with disdain for weakness rather than with the homosexual act itself. It could also be argued that this is how an average Russian perceives the West: By siding with the despised “passive homosexuals,” the West becomes contemptible. On the other hand, for the rulers in the Kremlin, the issue of homosexuality has to do mainly with the sustainability of the state and serves as a tool of its propaganda war against the West.

The cliché about the liberal and atheistic West and the conservative and religious East is not very accurate. American society is much more religious than the Russian one, even though the average American is much more sympathetic towards homosexuals than the average Russian. And in America the sympathy for the gay agenda is often formulated in religious, and specifically, Christian terms, whereas in Russia, the religious factor plays rather minor role in the discussion. The cliché makes more sense when applied to the EU countries where the religious East perceives homosexuality in much more negative way than the irreligious West.

Putin may at least partly right when he speaks about the West as a gay paradise, but this does not apply to all the EU member countries. It is also not accurate to say that the low level of religious, and especially Christian, commitment translates into sympathy and even support for the gay agenda. In the West, there are much more gay supporters among people who perceive themselves as religious but who are inclined to a more individualistic or informal kind of religiosity. Yet low church attendance in Russia does not produce the same kind of results as in the West.

Perhaps religion per se is not the main determinator here. Maybe some other historical reasons blur the picture.


Bogumil Jarmulak is pastor of Evangelical Reformed Church (CREC) in Poznan, Poland. His PhD is from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.

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