A decade ago, when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges to permit same-sex marriage nationwide, many evangelicals worried about what the legal redefinition of marriage would mean for the church and the country.
While some predictions—that the Obergefell ruling would lead to a decline in marriage rates and an increase in divorce rates—did not pan out, the concern that it would lead to schisms among American Christians has proven prescient, according to political scientist Mark Caleb Smith.
One of the clearest impacts of the 2015 ruling on the Christian landscape has been the way it forced denominational reckonings. Congregations have hotly debated whether to perform same-sex marriages and ordain gay clergy—and whether their fellowship can withstand disagreement on LGBTQ issues.
Despite some recent calls to overturn the ruling and support for same-sex marriage slowing, even conservative Christian legal experts expect Obergefell v. Hodges to stand, leaving evangelicals to continue to reckon with the issue.
While public sentiment around same-sex marriage changed quickly—a fifth of Americans who opposed it prior the Obergefell decision had changed their minds by 2018—the culture of conservative evangelical churches has not changed significantly.
In surveys by Lifeway Research, evangelical pastors are as likely to oppose same-sex marriage today as they were prior to Obergefell v. Hodges, with fewer than 1 in 12 in favor.
The latest Gallup polls show that just 24 percent of weekly churchgoers consider same-sex relations morally acceptable. The demographic—which is more likely to be conservative—remains one of the staunchest holdouts against same-sex marriage, and overall levels of support have stalled in the past few years.
At the peak, around 2022 and 2023, just over half of Americans who identify as evangelicals said same-sex couples should have the right to marry, but their churches and pastors haven’t moved toward LGBTQ inclusion as mainline traditions have.
When asked whether they would perform a wedding for a same-sex couple “if your religious group allowed it,” 90 percent of evangelical ministers said no, political scientist and statistician Ryan Burge found in a national survey. Black Protestants were similar, with 84 percent responding that they would not officiate a gay wedding.
Among mainline clergy, only 30 percent would not perform a gay wedding.
Obergefell v. Hodges became a flash point that likely accelerated already-present divisions in certain denominations. The Episcopal Church ordained an openly gay bishop in 2003, which led to some dioceses leaving to form the Anglican Church in North America. Similar disagreements led hundreds of congregations to exit the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Presbyterian Church (USA).
An example from the last two years is the slow rupture of the United Methodist Church, which is the largest denominational split in the United States for decades and has led to a new Methodist denomination, the Global Methodist Church.
Other debates are ongoing.
“If you look at Calvin University and the Christian Reformed Church, they’re still in the middle of a pretty strong debate over these kinds of issues,” said Smith, director of the Center for Political Studies at Cedarville University. “Once Obergefell happens and every state has to issue marriage licenses … it forced churches to deal with it in a way that they really had not been forced to necessarily before.”
In the last couple years, Republican support for same-sex marriage has dipped.
“It’s not a huge downturn, but it’s noticeable,” Burge said. He surmises that the decline may be driven by opposition to transgender issues “dragging the numbers down” for other groups: “You can find polling data on sports issues, on gender transition for minors, on using pronouns in schools, that kind of stuff. None of that’s popular,” he added. “That might be part of the backlash too.”
While President Donald Trump made transgender issues a focus of his campaign, he shows no such inclination to go after same-sex marriage.
In 2015, when Kentucky clerk Kim Davis was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, then-candidate Trump responded matter-of-factly: “The decision’s been made, and that is the law of the land.”
If anything, the GOP’s stance has softened on the issue during Trump’s tenure, and in 2020 he picked the first openly gay person to hold a Cabinet-level position in an acting capacity. The culture of the broader Republican Party has also softened: Previous iterations of the Republican Party platform contained references to marriage as an institution between “one man and one woman,” while the 2024 platform pivoted away from such language. It contained one reference to the “sanctity of marriage” without defining it.
Charles Moran, former president of the Log Cabin Republicans, a GOP group that represents LGBTQ interests, celebrated the change as the Republican Party showing it has “caught up with where society is” and saying that “it talks about serving the sanctity of marriage; that includes our marriages, too.”
“You have to wonder too how much Donald Trump’s politics are playing into this as someone who certainly seems to excuse some of these certain cultural issues like sexuality, LGBT rights,” said Daniel Bennett, an associate professor of political science at John Brown University.
Bennett noted that many evangelical institutions have held to a traditional view of marriage, despite the larger shifts in public opinion: “A lot of the more conservative churches and institutions, like Christian colleges and universities … have very clear statements of expectations on gender and sexuality that affirm a more conservative or traditional sexual ethic, even with the culture moving in that direction.”
“It’s not as if these conservative institutions are being swayed by public opinion,” he added.
Obergefell also shifted the legal landscape for religious freedom cases, according to Miles S. Mullin II, vice president for the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Mullin wrote that those who warned Obergefell v. Hodges would be a “slippery slope” have been proven right in the last ten years, citing the 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, which expanded antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ individuals.
“In the years following Bostock,” he wrote, “virtually every significant First Amendment legal battle would revolve around SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) issues as Americans with religious convictions regarding traditional marriage struggled to defend their First Amendment rights.”
In recent months, some groups have brought up the idea of pushing for the court to revisit its decision, with some pointing to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overturned the right to an abortion, as a playbook for revisiting the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Conservative lawmakers have introduced measures in a handful of states asking the Supreme Court to strike down Obergefell v. Hodges. In May, an Oklahoma Republican lawmaker filed a resolution requesting the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. Clerk Kim Davis’s lawyers are also still pushing for the Supreme Court to reconsider her case—and Obergefell.
Those efforts have also made their way into the church: At its gathering in June, the Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution supporting efforts to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges.
“We should still overturn Obergefell,” Andrew Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote for The Gospel Coalition. “Regardless of how long it takes, we shouldn’t stop arguing against same-sex marriage.”
Walker said that prior to 2015, opponents of Obergefell were at a rhetorical disadvantage, with critics framing them as arguing “against something” versus promoting a positive. “There’s a valuable lesson for Christians and conservatives when waging intellectual combat in the culture war: Don’t merely defend ideas. Defend people.”
The focus going forward, Walker argued, should be on the impact same-sex marriage, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy has on children.
For now, state-led efforts may be more symbolic than substantive.
“I think we’re a long way from that,” said John Bursch, senior counsel and vice president of appellate advocacy with Alliance Defending Freedom. Bursch argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of states that had prohibitions against same-sex marriage.
Bursch doesn’t see widespread grassroots support for overturning Obergefell. He contrasted the efforts with the large grassroots movement that sprung up in opposition to abortion in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, the decision legalizing abortion nationwide.
“There was an immediate counter-response … you saw the March for Life spring up—and 40 Days for Life, and Students for Life, and Americans United for Life—and all these different groups who were basically spreading the gospel of life among the culture.”
That advocacy made it “politically acceptable for the court to go back and revisit Roe, and that’s how you get Dobbs,” Bursch said. “There was no similar reaction in the immediate aftermath of Obergefell. There was no ‘March for Marriage’ or ‘40 Days for Marriage’ or ‘Students for Marriage’ or anything like that. So what you saw is that support for same-sex marriage culturally continued to grow.”
Smith also believes revisiting Obergefell judicially is a long shot.
“This is probably the most conservative court that we’ve had, depending on how we define that term, for a long, long, long time. And on that court, there are probably only two members who are at all interested in that conversation,” Smith said, referring to Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito.
But among the rest of the justices, including the more conservative members, Smith sees no appetite for revisiting Obergefell: “That just looks like a nonstarter, even within a very, very traditional court.”
