There’s A Backlash Against Same-Sex Marriage Among Growing Group Of Christians
(ANALYSIS) Public opinion is a weird thing. On some topics, it’s incredibly stable over time. That was the case for abortion for decades.
I remember leading a discussion about that in graduate school when I was a teaching assistant. If you traced long term survey trends about the topic, the public’s views in the early 2000s didn’t differ that much from answers to those same questions 30 years earlier.
But there are other issues where viewpoints shifted incredibly rapidly. Support for same-sex marriage is clearly one of those topics.
The General Social Survey asked about this for the first time in 1988. The share of the sample agreeing that gay couples should have the right to marry was 11.7%. Then, they stopped asking the question for a long time. Then, they added it back to the core of the survey in 2004. I am guessing this was because the topic was center stage in the election between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Thirteen states had a constitutional amendment on the ballot to codify marriage being between one man and one woman. It passed in all 13.
In the 2004 GSS, 31% of people believed gay couples should have the right to marry. Two years later, it was 35%, then it jumped four more points by 2008. Just think about this — when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, 39% of the country favored same-sex marriage.
When he faced Mitt Romney for reelection in 2012, support for same-sex marriage was 49%. When he left office in 2016 it was 59%. A 20-point increase during the Obama administration. That’s probably why Obama changed his public stance on the issue in the Spring of 2012: The political winds have shifted.
Trump took his place in the Oval Office in 2016 when support for gay marriage was at 59%. Then it jumps a full nine points by the 2018 midterms. In a 14-year time period, support for same-sex marriage went from 31% to 68%.
That’s just a stunning shift in such a short period of time. And because of the velocity of the change, we cannot attribute that to generational replacement.
This isn’t a case of old conservative people dying and being replaced by young liberals. That process is downright glacial. No, instead this is lots and lots of people changing their minds. Probably at least 30% of the country.
However, I took a look at the data that the General Social Survey collected in both 2021 and 2022. While the LGBTQ+ community made huge strides in advocating for the rights of same-sex couples, that came to a screeching halt in 2021 and 2022.
Support for homosexual couples having the right to marry hit a brick wall at about 65%. The latest number stands at 67% — no different than it was four years earlier. Between 2014 and 2018, support rose 11 points. Between 2018 and 2022, it declined by a point.
Who is changing their mind here? Let me show you.
Partisanship is absolutely playing a role in this shift in recent years. It’s evident from this data that Democrats have always been more supportive of LGBTQ+ rights.
A majority of Democrats were in favor of same-sex marriage in 2008; it took another decade for Republican support to rise above 50%. You can see that the Democrat and Republican lines move in a pretty consistent trajectory from 2004 even through 2016.
For the Democrats, that line has continued to move upward even in the last two survey waves. The same is not true for the Republicans — their support has dropped from the 2018 highs.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
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.