Keywords

Homonegativity is not only a matter of growing scientific interest in the global social science community, but also of growing concern for public safety and political stability worldwide. According to the Human Dignity Trust (https://www.humandignitytrust.org/), the death penalty for homosexuality exists in the following regimes Afghanistan; Brunei; Iran; Mauritania; Nigeria; Pakistan; Qatar; Saudi Arabia; Somalia; Uganda; United Arab Emirates; and Yemen.

In research on this topic, Kollman (2016) and Han and O'Mahonney (2011) have already impressively demonstrated the extent of global ‘othering’ of LGBTQ+ communities. Extremist groups, from the far right (Bjorgo, 2014) to radical Islamists (Vidino & Meleagrou-Hitchens, 2022), are increasingly targeting LGBTQ+ victims. It is no wonder, then, that a publication that compares the security threat posed by homophobic and religiously motivated political extremism—from whatever source—in the countries of the European Union and beyond is an absolute necessity.

The basic research question of this publication is to estimate the extent of homonegativity in 88 countries and territories of the world (including the Republic of Austria) using the open data of the World Values Survey (integrating the data of the European Values Study) 2017–2022 and to examine the relationship between homonegativity and religiously motivated political extremism. For analytical reasons, the multivariate analysis also makes use of data collected in previous editions of the World Values Survey, in particular the World Values Survey 2010–2014.

Who are the homophobes in our society? The World Values Survey, the largest non-commercial and freely available survey of the world's population, provides a scientifically sound answer to this question and shows which social groups in the world are homophobic. Founded by the American political scientist Inglehart (1934–2021), the World Values Survey project now covers nearly 100 countries and 90% of the world's population, based on a representative sample of more than 400,000 respondents.

Our analyses were carried out using the latest and most advanced version of the SPSS statistical software package, SPSS 29. Due to the very large representative samples (e.g., >1000 in most countries), cautious conclusions can also be drawn for smaller subgroups. We have chosen to focus on members of the Orthodox and Muslim communities because several previous studies reviewed in this publication have already concluded that radicalised interpretations of Orthodox and Muslim religious doctrines lead to increased levels of homonegativity.

The items in the World Values Survey Wave 7 questionnaire that relate to homosexuality are acceptance or rejection of homosexual neighbours, whether homosexuality is justified or not on a 10-point scale, and opinions on whether homosexual couples are as good parents as other couples. Since the basic acceptance of homosexuality is assessed very differently by the religious communities in the world and is ultimately the responsibility of the religious communities themselves, the acceptance of homosexual neighbours is the decisive variable and indicator of homonegativity in our study, which ultimately needs to be interpreted in a scientific project to analyse homonegativity.

Now, it can be argued that these two questions do not adequately reflect the problematic nature of the issue, but obtaining comparative data from more than 80 countries on this phenomenon is equally important for the global debate.

The structure of this publication is now as follows. In Chap. 2, we look at the global clash of civilisations over homosexuality and the extent of hate crime and discrimination against LGBTQ communities around the world, drawing mainly on reports by the European Human Rights Agency, the OSCE, Europol and the EQUALDEX think-tank, and then analyse key statements by Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim religious leaders and discuss some key studies on religion and LGBTQ communities.

In Chap. 3, we review the main social science studies with high citation impact that have already used quantitative methods and existing opinion poll data to examine the relationship between homosexuality and religion.

After discussing these nine main approaches in quantitative social science, in Chap. 4 we turn to the methods of our own new study, discussing, among other things, the scope of the World Values Survey, the multivariate methods used, the significance tests, our parametric indicators, the error probabilities, and the transnational aggregate data at the national level that become important for quantitative analyses of the drivers and bottlenecks of tolerance of LGBTQ communities at the national level of countries and territories around the world.

In Chap. 5, we first analyse the extent of homonegativity in the world system, then address the question of whether there is a linear or non-linear relationship of homonegativity with the existential security of societies in the world, and finally present our research findings at the individual respondent level and at the national level with bivariate analyses. We then present our research findings based on partial correlations and factor analyses to examine the effects of secularism, attitudes towards democracy, tolerance and religious particularism, as well as attitudes towards gender equality, religion, political violence and national resilience, on homonegativity.

In Chap. 6, we then analyse the potential for anti-LGBTQ violence in the world system and present a parametric index of tolerant social gender norms and democracy, showing results for countries as a whole and for their Muslim and Orthodox populations. We also briefly refer to the very close relationship between homonegativity, phenomena such as anti-Semitism, and the United Nations Development Programme's index of restrictive gender norms.

Chapter 7 of our publication presents the conclusions.

Our study also refers to our electronically available statistical appendices, including country results for the parametric index of tolerant social gender norms and democracy, and anti-LGBTI hate crimes in European Union countries in 2021.