Queer Women and Religious Individualism

5 Tiles in the Mosaic: Organizations as Resources

In the mid-1990s, theologian Mary Hunt wrote, “‘Where have all the women gone?’ is an oft-sung hymn” in LGBT church groups.1 Academics, too, have sung this refrain since the early 1990s, and have been humming a similar tune since 1974—in the context of not only church groups but synagogues as well. The stories of the women who participated in my research indicate that there is not a single or simple answer to this question. The women with whom I spoke described a wide range of relationships with explicitly religious organizations, from active avoidance to avid and nearly lifelong commitment. What is consistent in their descriptions, though, is an understanding of such organizations as resources for their personal spiritual development. Those who saw such resources as being of little use, as “not working for me,” avoided religious organizations. Those who found great spiritual support or sustenance in an organizational setting were committed attendees and sometimes members as well.    As I argued in chapter 1, the women whose stories form the core of this book are in many ways unremarkable in the broader context of religious patterns in the twenty-first-century United States. The idea that religious organizations in the United States function as competitors in an unregulated buyer’s market is widespread within the sociology of religion, and in a recent study of post-baby-boom Americans, Robert Wuthnow describes a common pattern of 5 Tiles in the Mosaic organizations as resources • Tiles in the Mosaic | 133 religious identity formation as “tinkering.”2 So approaching religious organizations as resources to be drawn upon when needed as part of a larger identity negotiation process, rather than as “package deals,” is not particularly unique to the women in this study. What is unique, however, is the extent to which they handle religion in this way, compared to the broader population and especially to women overall in the United States. Understanding, at least in the context of these twenty-nine women in L.A., where lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered women are religiously, and why they are where they are, thus accomplishes two goals: it sheds light on a striking pattern of religiosity in LGBT communities, and, as a magnified version of a common pattern, it allows for detailed exploration of an important national trend.    At the end of chapter 4, I wrote of bricolage as mosaic making. Not only the obvious bricoleuses were engaged in the process of building and maintaining a religious (or “spiritual”) mosaic; in fact, each woman in this study did so, with some mosaics being more monochromatic and others more colorfully diverse. The religious organizations described in chapter 3 provide tiles of varying shapes and sizes for some of these mosaics, and don’t appear at all in others . Yet even here the picture is more complicated than it first appears, because which aspects of a religious organization a particular woman found useful were inevitably influenced by her own heritage, personal history, previous experiences , and self-understanding. The development of these women’s “spiritual” identities—the subject of the next chapter—and the roles of congregations in that development—the subject of the following pages—are thus not processes that can be easily mapped, categorized, or predicted. They exemplify “religious messiness” and “multiplicities,” which Robert Orsi sees in religious spaces but which are also a central aspect of religious beliefs, practices, and identities.3 Like mosaics, identities may appear disjointed when viewed only in sections, even though when they are viewed in their entirety the disjunctions often meld into a cohesive whole. Invisibility To return to Mary Hunt’s “oft-sung hymn,” where are all the women ? One answer to this question is that queer women have been involved in congregations all along, but they have been invisible because they are involved in ways that fail to register in most studies. A good illustration of this point is a sociological study published by Darren Sherkat in 2002 that aimed to evaluate the religiosity of “non-heterosexuals” relative to heterosexuals.4 Since there are no nationwide surveys in the United States that ask well-defined, in-depth 134 | Queer Women and Religious Individualism questions about both sexual identity and religious beliefs and practices, the study’s author attempted to extrapolate from a national survey that asked questions about sexual behaviors and about religion. Assuming that anyone who had reported having a same-sex sexual...