(ANALYSIS) Time for a little Baptist history lesson! The most important person in early American Baptist history was a guy named Roger Williams.

He was born in England in the early 1600s. He had a dramatic conversion to Christianity in his youth and started identifying as a Puritan.

This meant his faith was out of step with the Anglican Church, and he knew he could never rise up the ranks of the establishment religion. In December of 1630, he and his wife, Mary, boarded a boat and headed for the New World.

Long story short, Roger was a bit of a rabble-rouser. He wouldn’t stop writing and speaking about the Church of England and how corrupt it had become. That didn’t go over well in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and in 1635 he was convicted of sedition and heresy and banished.

In the spring of 1636, he started a settlement in Providence, Rhode Island. It became a refuge for folks who shared Williams’ worldview. By 1638, he established (along with a dozen families) the First Baptist Church in America (that’s literally its name and its description).

The enduring legacy of Roger Williams is his advocacy for a strong separation of church and state. His exile from the Massachusetts Bay Colony convinced him that the state should have no say on issues like heresy — those matters should be solely under the purview of the church.

In 1644, he wrote that there should be a “hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world.” That phrase may sound familiar—it’s the exact imagery Thomas Jefferson used when writing to the Danbury Baptists in 1802. It has since become an integral part of the Supreme Court’s views on matters related to religion.

I was recently talking to a guy who was a big fan of Williams and a strong believer in the separation of church and state. We discussed some implications of that doctrinal position, and he described how it shaped his views on same-sex marriage.

He told me he was fine with the state permitting two men or two women to get married, but he still firmly believed that homosexuality was sinful. His position was simple: marriage is a legal contract, and the government can set the terms of such an arrangement. But churches can choose to solemnize those unions — or not — based on their view of the Scriptures.

That got me wondering: Are there many people out there who favor same-sex marriage but believe that homosexuality is wrong? The GSS (General Social Survey) can certainly help us tease that apart.

Since 1973, it has included this question: “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex — do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?”

Here’s how the distribution of those responses has changed over time.

First off, I think the GSS needs to dispense with the four categories and just make it two: “always wrong” and “not wrong at all.” That’s clearly where all the movement has been over the last five decades.

The trend is exceedingly clear. In 1973, about three-quarters of those surveyed thought that homosexuality was always wrong, compared to only 11% who said it was not wrong at all.

To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.

Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.