Research published in the Journal of Homosexuality has investigated how a person’s and a country’s religious orientation can influence their view of homosexuality, and can affect one’s level of homonegativity — which can be defined as “an aversion to homosexuality as a social practice or way of life.”

The necessity for research stems from data collected by the World Values Survey, which discovered a decrease in negative views towards homosexual behavior in western cultures. However, this decrease in homonegativity is not universal to all countries. For example, Eastern cultures such as China have demonstrated the same levels for several years.

“This high level of cross-country variance leads us to the fundamental question: How can the varying degrees of homonegativity be explained? In focusing primarily on religion and religiosity as determinants of homonegativity, this article takes a specific perspective, while well-known determinants of homonegativity such as age or education are controlled for,” researchers Sebastian Jackle and George Wenzelberger wrote in their study.

The study examined 79 countries and assessed their homonegativity in relation to religiosity. The researchers took into account participants’ reports on whether they believe themselves to be religious or not, how much of an influencing factor God is in their life, and the characteristics of both the individual participants and the country itself in relation to its current and past political positioning.

The socioeconomic status of the participants was found to be a factor, as it was discovered that students and those from more urbanized areas displayed low levels of homonegativity, whereas housewives and those in a lower socioeconomic class displayed high levels. Countries that had previously been under communist control had more homonegative views. These findings demonstrated that the individual characteristics of a person and a country’s political history can influence homonegativity.

Religiosity, as the researchers suspected, was another important factor. The study found those who label themselves as religious or who attribute great importance to God in their lives tend to have more negative views towards homosexual behavior.

But there were differences among the religions. The result of the religiosity analysis suggests that those who practice Islam express the highest levels of homonegativity, whereas Buddhists demonstrate the least.

“The results indicate that there are clear differences in levels of homonegativity among the followers of the individual religions: Muslims make up the homonegative end of the scale, whereas Buddhists and atheists are on the other extreme,” Jackle and Wenzelberger wrote in the study.

“Regarding religiosity, we find that religious people are, in general, more homonegative,” they added. “This effect is, however, conditioned by religious affiliation. More concretely, the religiosity of a Muslim affects his or her attitudes toward homosexuals more negatively than would the religiosity of a Buddhist.”

The researchers noted that the participants’ levels of homonegativity and religiosity were assessed through a self-report method, which they said could have compromised the validity of the research as participants may have answered in a socially desirable manner due to the controversial topic of homosexuality.