The War Within Religion: Towards a More Nuanced Resolution of Religion–Equality Conflicts.

This article examines conflicts between religious liberty and gender equality, including LGBTQ equality, focusing on the "culture wars" paradigm prevalent in the United States, Israel, and other countries. It argues that this paradigm is incomplete because it overlooks significant internal conflicts within conservative religious communities, where leaders employ nuanced, intermediate strategies—termed social-impact regulation—to manage and mitigate these tensions by varying responses based on the nonconformist’s role (e.g., teacher vs. student) and the sphere of nonconformity (public vs. private). Drawing on qualitative interviews with Catholic and Orthodox Jewish educational leaders and an experimental study with Jewish Orthodox participants in Israel, the article demonstrates that these factors causally influence decisions to exclude or tolerate sexual nonconformity and affect compliance with court rulings. The findings suggest that legal approaches to religion–equality conflicts should consider these intermediate religious solutions, proposing three normative models—demanding, rejecting, and intermediate—that incorporate social-impact regulation differently, each with distinct implications for religious autonomy and equality protections.