Paper short abstract:

The paper follows the issue of LGBT+ people’s experiences with religion and/or spirituality, exploring how they are conceptualising and constructing their narratives, while considering the larger picture of very specific spiritual landscape of Poland.

Paper long abstract:

Considering contemporary spiritual landscape of Poland, one can observe the historically conditioned domination of the Catholic Church, established and visible especially since socio-economical transformation of 1989. When the Church moved from the countercultural positions of heterodoxy to the well respected by the state orthodoxy (Concordate in 1993), it started providing its members a broad access to institutional structures, as well as having a real impact on forming their morals from a very young age.

The attitude of the Catholic Church in Poland differs from that in the world – it is largely against liberalisation. It also demonstrates hostility towards LGBT + people, for example seeing them as representatives of "gender ideology", "LGBT ideology" – created concepts that frame i.e. non-heterosexuality and non-cisnormativity as ruinous to social order.

Such climate doesn’t foster the development of religiosity/spirituality of LGBT+ people in the mainstream. They can be relegated to positions of disruptive elements that must conform or be excluded/punished. Hence, the attitudes in LGBT+ community towards religion and spirituality vary: outright rejection of organised religion, conversion to a different religion, pursuing independent spiritual path.

In this paper I want to explore those various ways of constructing LGBT+ persons spiritualities that meander amid the approaches of mainstream and the LGBT+ community itself. Thus, basing on ethnographic empirical research, I follow the narratives of LGBT+ people experiences of spirituality and/or religiosity: how do they conceptualise and construct their own stories? How does the larger picture of their environs shape those narratives?