Is Same-Sex Marriage A Settled Issue In The US?
(ANALYSIS) The Religion Guy’s Answer: Not yet, and not quite, even as President Trump’s agenda instead puts the news spotlight on transgender issues. Though the Supreme Court’s historic 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision to legalize gay and lesbian marriage nationwide was by a narrow 5 to 4, the law appears very unlikely to change. And yet dissent continues and U.S. public opinion is shifting just a bit.
This past Monday a never-say-die bid occurred in “red” Idaho, which went 67% for Trump. The state House of Representatives voted 46-24 to send the state Senate a proposed plea to the Supreme Court to “restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.”
The apparent hope is that an eventual lawsuit would prod the current, more conservative Supreme Court to reconsider Obergefell.
By coincidence, that same day the Substack column of political scientist Ryan Burge, U.S. religion’s top trend-meister, crunched numbers from the University of Chicago’s standard General Social Survey.
Support for same-sex marriage increased at an astonishingly rapid rate, from 31% in 2004 to 68% in 2018. But since then a slight decline, driven by Republicans, tells Burge that any further increases have “hit a brick wall.”
Drama in 2023
On the religious aspect, 2023 brought dramatic decisions by both Pope Francis and the Church of England to let clergy bless same-sex couples. But technically that did not alter their marriage doctrine, on which a contentious moral debate continues among U.S. Protestants.
Since the 2018 apex of support, Burge noted, major U.S. religious blocs have been evolving. Evangelical Protestants went from 45% same-sex support down to 36%, “Mainline” Protestants from 75% down to 67%, Black Protestants held steady at 54% then 55%, Catholics from 73% down to 68%, followers of non-Christian religions from 70% up to 75%, and non-religious Americans from 85% up to 88%.
Remarkably, support among active weekly worshippers in the relatively liberal Mainline Protestant groups has plummeted from 75% to a mere 50%. Regular churchgoers among self-identified evangelicals went from 31% down to 22%. As Burge summarizes things, Christian support is generally slipping after the strong, steady 21st Century rise.
In official policy-making during this era, all the major U.S. Mainline denominations have switched to morally affirm or allow same-sex relationships and openly gay and lesbian clergy. The last to move, last year, was the huge United Methodist Church. That happened due to the largest U.S. church schism since the Civil War as the UMC lost 7,631 conservative local congregations, roughly a fourth of the denomination.
‘Mainline’ war no more
Though the Mainline wars are over, there’s ongoing tension elsewhere. A current example is the small schism off the Christian Reformed Church because it defined traditional beliefs on sexuality as mandatory doctrine and enacted a clampdown.
Dissent against those decisions is focused on teachers and students at Calvin University, which is controlled by a board of CRC delegates. [Disclosure: The Religion Guy was a longtime member of a Christian Reformed congregation, since disbanded.]
At a November Calvin debate between two theologians, CRC conservative Jeffrey Weima said the Bible is clear that sexual acts are limited to heterosexual marriage (per Old Testament law upheld by the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:18-27 and I Corinthians 6:9-11). David Lincicum from the University of Notre Dame proposed what has emerged as liberals’ central argument. Yes, we agree on what the Bible said but it’s “not a text written in our time,” and “love requires” Christians to move beyond Paul’s “culturally limited” teaching.
Two recently issued books pursue the evolving Protestant debate.
Notable authors
“The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality Within the Biblical Story” (Yale) features fascinating father-and-son co-authors, Richard Hays and Christopher Hays. Richard, a prominent New Testament professor and later dean at Duke University’s Divinity School, famously opposed same-sex behavior in “The Moral Vision of the New Testament” (1996, HarperOne). But in this new book, published months before he died January 3, he profusely apologized for that stance.
Meanwhile, Christopher is an Old Testament professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent evangelical school that expects teachers, students, and staff to shun “unbiblical sexual practices,” including homosexual conduct.
The Hayses do not grapple with sexuality texts so much as challenge the classic doctrine that God is immutable (biblical proof text in Malachi 3:5: “I the Lord do not change”). Like Lincicum they note, for instance, that the Bible accepted slavery but eventually Christianity viewed abolition as God’s will. (Southern Baptist exegete Thomas Schreiner responded that the Bible regulated society’s deeply ingrained slavery “but never endorsed or commended it.”) If biblical rules can change, the Hayses wrote, then moral judgments rely far more upon contemporary experience.
The second book of interest has equally notable authorship. Rebecca McLaughlin, a married mother of three, depicts her “lifelong history of same-sex attraction” and yet concludes “the Bible leaves no room for followers of Jesus to pursue same-sex sexual relationships.”
The academic magnum opus defending Christianity’s 2,000-year-old tradition remains “The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics” by Robert Gagnon (2001, Abington). Instead, McLaughlin, a Briton with a theology degree and a literature Ph.D., takes a more popular approach in “Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Relationships? Examining 10 Claims about Scripture and Sexuality” (Good Book Co.), a finalist in the new Christianity Today magazine “book of the year” awards. She concisely answers standard arguments the Protestant Left has employed over past decades:
Answering the Left
“Christians should just focus on the Gospel of God’s love” (as in the Hays book).
“Jesus was silent on same-sex relationships” (which ignores what he taught about marriage in Mark 10:6-9 and Matthew 19:4-6).
“God’s judgment on Sodom isn’t a judgment on same-sex relationships.” (Conservatives often agree it isn’t).
It’s “inconsistent” to obey Old Testament law on sexuality but not kosher diet. (The latter change for Gentile converts to Christianity was by direct revelation from God contained in Scripture).
“Paul condemns exploitative same-sex relationships, not consensual ones” or else denounces “excessive lust.” (Then why didn’t he say so?).
The English word “homosexual” in I Corinthians translations is a “misinterpretation.” (Patheos last year re-posted a 2018 column arguing this though, as above, liberals admit what Paul was referring to).
“The “trajectory of the Bible is toward rejecting slavery and affirming same-sex marriage.” (See above.)
“Unchosen celibacy yields bad fruit.” (Traditionalists insist that, nonetheless, Scripture requires those with same-sex attraction to avoid such relationships).
This article was first published at Patheos.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.