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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?