Where the traditions land

Population figures are each tradition's own most recent published count. Eligibility is set against the World Christian Database, the standard reference for global denominational data.

Why the disagreement

Historic Christian teaching on this question was essentially uniform until the second half of the twentieth century, and eight of the twelve seated traditions still hold that original position: Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostal, Seventh-day Adventist, LDS, and Jehovah's Witnesses all read the same handful of texts — Leviticus 18 and 20, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6 — the way most of church history has read them, and all eight distinguish the attraction from the act: none treats same-sex attraction itself as sin, only same-sex sexual acts.

The other four don't hold a different reading of those texts institutionally — each is currently split between two camps inside the same historic body. The Episcopal Church and other Western Anglican provinces affirm what the Global South majority still rejects. The ELCA affirms what the LCMS still holds as sin. The PCUSA affirms what the PCA still holds. The United Methodist Church voted in 2024 to affirm what the newly formed Global Methodist Church was founded to preserve. Same fracture, four different denominational families, all recent, all running between sister bodies rather than between traditions.

Solving the disagreement

The fracture inside Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, and Methodist bodies turns on two separable questions, and only one of them is the kind evidence can move. The first is historical: what practices did Leviticus, Romans 1, and 1 Corinthians 6 actually have in view when written — a factual question about ancient context that further scholarship can, in principle, clarify or complicate. The second isn't historical at all: whether a first-century prohibition binds a modern practice its authors may never have specifically envisioned, and how much weight "the text didn't anticipate this" should carry against "the text still applies." That's a question about how moral authority transmits across cultural distance, not a fact any manuscript discovery could settle — it's a commitment about how Scripture functions, made before anyone gets to the specific verses. Two people could agree on everything historical scholarship establishes and still land on opposite sides, because the actual fork is upstream of the history.

Sources

Same standing source per tradition on every post, not hunted per question.

• Catholic — Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Eastern Orthodox — Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (binding across all jurisdictions); The Longer Catechism of St. Philaret of Moscow (widely used, not binding on every jurisdiction)
• Oriental Orthodox — Catechism of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty (Amazon — no full free text found)
• Anglican — Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
• Lutheran — Book of Concord
• Reformed/Presbyterian — Westminster Confession of Faith
• Methodist/Wesleyan — Articles of Religion
• Southern Baptist Convention — Baptist Faith & Message 2000
• Pentecostal (Trinitarian) — Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths
• Seventh-day Adventist — 28 Fundamental Beliefs
• LDS — Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants
• Jehovah's Witnesses — What Does the Bible Really Teach?