New numbers released by the Pew Research Center show that LGBTQ+ people are a lot less likely to be religious than their non-LGBTQ+ counterparts. While this statement is unlikely to shock many readers, the gap between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ people in terms of religiosity is rather large.

About 73% of non-LGBTQ+ people identify with a religion, but fewer than half (48%) of LGBTQ+ people said the same. Non-LGBTQ+ people were over twice as likely to say that religion is “very important in their lives” than LGBTQ+ people (42% vs. 17%). Non-LGBTQ+ people were twice as likely than LGBTQ+ people to attend religious services at least monthly (31% vs. 16%) and to pray daily (46% vs. 23%).

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The results were taken from a poll of the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel. The poll was conducted in July and August 2024, and included 751 LGBTQ+ U.S. adults.

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Pew also looked at the results it got from its 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study, which involved 2,402 gay and bisexual respondents. (The survey didn’t ask about transgender identity.). Both data sets showed some results that could explain why queer people are less religious. They found that LGB people were a lot more likely (46%) to believe that religion does more harm than good than straight people were to believe the same thing (17%).

LGB people were more likely to believe that religious institutions are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules, and too involved in politics. They were less likely to agree that religious institutions have positive outcomes, and the biggest difference came to protecting and strengthening “morality in society.” Only 35% of LGB people agreed that religious institutions do that, but two-thirds (67%) of straight people agreed with that statement.

This makes sense considering that many churches preach that being queer or trans is inherently immoral, which is at odds with the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people, who generally see their identities as facts of life without a moral dimension.

Pew also found that LGB people were less likely to hold a wide range of religious beliefs. LGB people were somewhat less likely to believe in a soul or to say they thought about God and religion. But they were about 20 percentage points less likely than non-LGB people to say they believed in “God or a universal spirit” (85% vs. 64%) and nearly 30 percentage points less likely to say they believed in an afterlife that could involve heaven, hell, or both (72% vs. 46%).

LGB people were also less likely to practice spirituality at least once a week in a wide range of ways, including feeling “a strong sense of gratitude and thankfulness” and feeling “the presence of something from beyond this world.” LGB people were more likely to say they did yoga or visited something in nature for spiritual reasons.

Pew notes that LGBTQ+ people tend to be much younger than the population as a whole, which could explain part of the results, since younger people also tend to be less religious. But even controlling for age, gender, politics, education, income, race, and ethnicity, LGBTQ+ people were still found to be less religious than non-LGBTQ+ people.

A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) last year found that about a quarter of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated and that LGBTQ+ people were more likely to have left their religions, even citing reasons not related to their identities, like sex abuse scandals and mental health.

“Religion’s negative teaching about LGBTQ people are driving younger Americans to leave church,” PRRI executive director Melissa Deckman said at the time. “We found that about 60% of Americans who are under the age of 30 who have left religion say they left because of their religious traditions teaching, which is a much higher rate than for older Americans.”

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