Blessed be our rights: 20 American Christian churches, ranked on LGBTQ+ support

When it comes to spirituality, researchers have found most lesbian, gay, and bisexual folks feel pretty much the same as everyone else: A majority believe people have a soul, they experience awe in nature, and more of us believe in either the existence of God or some kind of inexplicable supernatural force than those who don't. But when it comes to faith in religious institutions, a majority of those same queers say churches do more harm than good, which is why we've put together this list of 20 major Christian churches, from the do-gooders to the do-harmers. And sorry, we don't know how transgender, nonbinary, pansexual, asexual, intersex, or people of other marginalized gender and sexual identities responded to that survey, because, shocker, researchers didn't include them. It should also be noted that not even half of the lesbian, gay and bi adults who were surveyed in the U.S. by the Pew Research Center in 2024 — just 48 percent — said they identify with any religion, whether it be Christian, Jewish, Muslim or another faith. That's a soul-crushing distance from the 73 percent of Americans who identified as religious and aren't members of the LGBTQ+ community.But did the queers leave their church, or did their church leave them? And why? Earlier research shows LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. who quit Christianity reported being bullied in childhood more frequently than people who remained Christian. That's according to a 2023 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA. Almost two-thirds of LGBTQ+ people who were raised Christian no longer identified as Christian, and had become atheist, agnostic, or nonreligious as adults.Yet those UCLA scientists also found more than five million of us across America still clinging to religion: Their 2020 survey counted an estimated 1.5 million Protestants, 1.3 million Roman Catholics, 1.3 million who report belonging to another Christian religion, 425,000 who identify with another non-Christian religion, as well as 131,000 Jews, 107