[Clip] What is the reaction when you present your findings on the global fight against LGBTI rights?

Artpic - One Change in the World - The Podcast
One Change in the World
[Clip] What is the reaction when you present your findings on the global fight against LGBTI rights?
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It depends, of course, very much on the audience. So if you talk to people who are already working in the field of social organization, especially progressive LGBTI organization, the reaction I got was very often that people were surprised at how much insight we got into the world. And also how much more conservative groups, and with how much detail we can actually talk about their way of seeing and their strategies. And so these groups are interested in our findings for that reason. As a sociologist of religion, I have another audience as well, which I sometimes present as findings. Theologians working in the Orthodox Christian tradition, or also theologians and scholars working in the Catholic tradition. And they are also interested in that because they realize that there are certain topics that have invaded their religious space as being really, really prominent for the traditional family, being against LGBTI rights. Where very often they feel that that’s actually not exclusively what our faith or our religion is about. And so there is in some quarters of these religious constituencies the sense that they are being colonized by the culture wars. And our research basically shows how that is happening. And that there are indeed groups that do that work of mainstreaming a conservative Christian worldview into something that then becomes very narrow, focused only on gender and sexuality and family, and forgets about other issues such as solidarity or poverty or hospitality. So that was also an interesting experience how these two different constituencies read the book in different ways.

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