ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the hybrid sociological-philosophical methods used to study a US-based movement of conservative Christians who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) and their allies, who aim to end a form of spiritual violence the authors call “sacramental shame,” to recover from its harms, and to motivate perpetrators of this violence to renounce shaming treatment of LGBTI people and see it as incompatible with Christian love. The chapter explains how the authors came to working definitions of the key concepts that frame their study, and how they integrated qualitative sociological methods of data collection and analysis with conceptual analysis and moral argumentation from philosophy. It concludes by highlighting the methodological limitations of the study and how the authors attempted to mitigate or navigate those tensions. The chapter argues that by integrating these sociological and philosophical methods the researchers were able to offer a nuanced portrait of how victims experience the spiritual violation of sacramental shame and provide empirically grounded, dynamic accounts of how people find the motivation to love other people well as they forge an understanding of Christian love as necessitating social justice.
