I'd guess that this is mostly a backlash against transgenderism.
Before Obergefell, the most salient identity components of "LGBT+", for most Americans, were Lesbian and Gay, who could be portrayed as generally normal and tolerable.
After that decision, Trans became more salient, as Bisexuals and other niche identities really don't provide fodder for GLAAD and Human Rights Campaign activism, media interest, etc. Since it's much harder to portray sterilizing/mutilating healthy teenagers (mostly girls) or allowing extremely masculine men in dresses to use women's locker rooms as normal and tolerable, there's been a backlash.
As to why it's spilled over to SSM which isn't exactly a trans issue: the idea of treating LGBT as a coherent whole rather than a group of loose allies has stuck. There are some activists who use names like "Gays Against Groomers" and "LGB Drop The T" in an effort to distance their causes from the trans stuff, but they haven't had a whole lot of success.
Yes, trans is a big part of it, but I don't think it's the only part.
I'm actually part of the trend here, but in addition to trans, there were also things like Masterpiece Cakeshop. Or, for example, I recall in 2020 Cory Booker running for President arguing for eliminating tax-exempt status for churches that refuse to perform gay marriages, to resounding applause.
More broadly, what has happened is that the left's original argument: "How does gay marriage affect YOU?" -- which was honestly persuasive to me as a conservative young man -- has plainly fallen apart. The alarmists were correct, and I was wrong, mea culpa. It affects us because the left MAKES it affect us, they wield it as a cudgel against us, and I'm not exactly sure where it ends.
I imagine if they succeeded in eliminating churches' tax-exempt status, there would be some further push to punish and penalize Bible-believing churches and other Christian organizations.
I've been on a similar journey, and am not sure where I'll end up.
I remember been a teenager in the 90s and expressing mild curiosity about gay Christians. At that time people responded: "if we allow that before you know it we'll have polygamy." I'd thought their response was ridiculous and ignored them. Now I'm not so sure.
The trouble with progressivism is that there's no end game. It's always about "more."
Bisexual is the largest group amongst the LGBTQ community so I would hardly call them “niche”.
You may have a point with trans issues being the reason behind a decrease in approval for same-sex marriage, but I disagree heavily with how you’ve framed the issue.
I posted that in a hurry. Probably should have phrased it as "other, more niche identities..." to make it clear that "niche" was referring to the identities that fall under the plus sign in the acronym (Queer, Intersex, Two-Spirit, add your favorite, etc ) and not referring to bisexuals.
That said, you prompted an interesting thought: Bisexuals are sort of the anti-Trans, in that Trans are small in number but account for ~all of the discourse, whereas Bisexuals are numerically dominant but ~no one talks about Bi issues.
Andrew Sullivan has written very persuasively about how the trans issue is a very big negative for gays/lesbians, and that some trans activists are actively homophobic. (You aren't gay, you are really a woman inside).
Andrew Sullivan also tricked conservatives into supporting LGBT movements for years, insisting it would only strengthen their political position. It only made them completely lose ground after the courts mandated it.
Now that it has gone past his comfort zone, he flips the script to say “the left has gone too far”. It is all so tiresome.
Is this a true reversal or is this a reflection of the percentage of people who have left the church between 2018-2022? If those who are affirming left because of disillusionment with the church over treatment of LGBTQ people or politics it would mean the traditionalists who remained would now comprise a higher percentage in those faith circles. What percentage of evangelicals or mainliners left the church between 2018 and 2022?
I came here to ask the same question. Speaking as one of the 3% (weekly mainliners), my experience is that queer-affirming people have left my church. For a host of reasons but this one is on the list. Families whose children are discovering sexuality that differs from the traditional definition are not finding support in the church because the church is still struggling with the basics, like marriage. I also wonder with Karen whether that is driving the change, at least in the mainline congregations.
I've known quite a few people who fit the description you're offering. However, the explanation I've heard is not that the liberal church is unwelcoming (they actually think it is welcoming) but more like "I'm just not interested in church anymore."
This is one of the questions I'm most interested in right now. Why are people who decide their church is too conservative not go to a more-liberal church like they used to? Clearly some still do, but most just leave.
When you’ve been part of a conservative church your whole life and then begin to question one thing, you start questioning everything. If my church was wrong on gay marriage, what else are they wrong on? Once you start on that path of deconstruction, yes, you might find a more liberal and affirming church, but you might also decide that the whole religion thing doesn’t fit into your worldview anymore.
Like Tyler says in his comment, I think it's much more culturally acceptable to not attend church. But more broadly, and as Robert Putman started documenting in Bowling Alone back in the 1990s, Americans have gotten more and more antisocial with each passing decade. I think y'all don't go to church (even one you like and agree with) for the same reason that you don't go to the Lions Club or the bowling alley--you've just stopped doing things in groups of people in general. Which see: The entire set of scholarship on loneliness in the USA.
Yes, I think about the Putnam context a lot and I'm always inserting it into discussions of declining church attendance.
I'd also think about extrinsic vs. intrinsic religiosity. 20th century Mainline churches (and to a large degree, the Roman Catholic Church) were generally pretty very heavy on the extrinsic sort. It was a place to go, a community to belong to, a part of the culture where you contemplated, for a few minutes each week, what you understood as a legendarium of half-believed myths from your ancestors.
That's all lost and not coming back anytime soon. What's left is mostly people with intrinsic religiosity that attend conservative churches out of genuine belief in the core Gospel message of salvation.
Of course, in the 18th-19th century, there appear to have been some very motivated liberal Christians in the form of Unitarians with a lot of intrinsic religiosity, writing beloved hymns like "Nearer My God, To Thee." But there's no 21st century equivalent of this phenomenon, probably because the entire Christian backdrop of society is much weaker. Nowadays, that sort of person is doing New Age stuff with crystals and burning sage.
Good question. Perhaps because it’s become more culturally acceptable to not attend? People might have felt pressure from their family to attend some church rather than reject it completely.
People can be quite committed to progressivism. Certainly enough to wake up on Sunday morning.
The most devout churches I've seen tend to be a mix of conservative and liberal. For example the Bruderhof support a lot of social justice initiatives (both personally and politically) but are extremely conservative in their lifestyles.
In my frequent work with LGBTQ folk and parents of LGBTQ children (youth or adult), they don’t go to more liberal churches because they are culturally different and don’t feel at home or they feel so hurt by the church they are reluctant to try again. But most crave creedally orthodox and fully affirming spaces.
By “culturally different” I mean that I work primarily with folk from conservative low church evangelical culture and for them to visit a mainline church often feels quite foreign because there are differences in forms of worship, differences in vocabulary, symbols, and people. So much of our connection to faith is *familiarity* and losing what feels like home to stay at a “hotel”, no matter how nice it is, leads many to feel as if they have no home anymore. But they want that familiarity, only one that is fully affirming. There is a need for church plants for this population.
It’s not a contradiction. We often make assumptions and judgments about people we don’t understand and don’t have real relationships with. I hope you will have the chance to truly get to know some devout LGBTJesus followers. In the meantime, here’s Matthew Vine’s who is gay and affirming sharing the gospel: “Yesterday, Today, and Forever: The Heart of Christianity.”https://youtu.be/-2OVF85eDqw?si=lTwfyxrteQkHrygP
1: The faithful core. Millions have left Christianity in the last 10 years. I would be willing to bet a large number of those were more liberal in their beliefs(which lead to their departure). Those that remain have more biblical views.
2:The collapse of media. The gay rights moment was essential a top down media propaganda campaign (with a Supreme Court dictate at the end) Every movie, celebrity, TV show, and musician was pushing it. Now nobody trusts any of those people and doesn’t care what they think you should think. Alternative conservative media sources don’t support the lgbt movement.
On the Catholics, there's simultaneously been an increase in weekly Mass attenders supporting same-sex marriage and a decrease in support for SSM among those Catholics who aren't going to church as often. I wonder if this might be because regular attenders know more about Catholic doctrine, and less-regular attenders are influenced by pop culture (and Evangelical-dominated) views of what "traditional" churches believe.
In a previous life, I did a lot of proselytizing for evolution education, and something I ran into a lot was Catholics who thought that the official position of their faith was that evolutionary biology was in conflict with Scripture. Now, that's not the case now and it wasn't then--Catholicism is very clear that an old Earth and evolutionary theory are compatible with church teachings--but many American Catholics I spoke with thought it was. But not the Catholics who attended Mass regularly, who knew what the Church had to say. It was as if the US Catholics who didn't attend Mass much just accepted what, say, Jerry Falwell had to say about evolution as if he and (at the time) John Paul II were in agreement on that. (I saw a similar pattern with LDS, where very active members of the church knew that the LDS church accepted evolution, but the less active members of the church thought that their position was the same as American evangelicals.)
I think that in the US in particular there are spillover effects like this, where outspoken popular figures are assumed to be voicing the position of "the church," and then those who are members of that church but don't actually go are more easily swayed to the popular view of what the faith says rather than what the faith actually does say.
As a Catholic convert, I can tell you that most Catholics are only cultural or lukewarm. It’s hard to imagine those who irregularly partake in the sacraments S being more aligned with the Church’s position on SSM than those who do.
Catholics who support same-sex marriage believe that if same-sex attraction is “natural”, the Church should permit SSM. However, this understanding of “natural” is secular, not Catholic. Secularism views “natural” as observable phenomena in the natural material world. If a person is believed to be “born this way”, it is natural. If what is natural cannot be changed, “natural" is equated with "good.”
In stark contrast, Catholic theology contradicts secular “naturalism”, viewing what is natural, what is good, is God’s will. Women’s childbirth is “naturally” painful and men must “toil the land”, but these are not natural because they are not God’s will. are punishments for Adam and Eve’s disobedience, manifestations of a fallen world
In Catholicism, the purpose of a thing is its meaning. The purpose of marriage is mirroring God’s love (to will the good of the other) and generative nature—unity and multiplicity, feminine and masculine. Sex both is unitive and procreative. God didn’t gift us sex solely for intimate bonding and sating lust. Sex therefore must be opened to life and confined within marriage. Sexual behavior outside of marriage is an abuse of sexuality, defying God’s generative design and purpose for marriage. It is repurposing God’s gift for one’s own will. Hence adultery, contraception, and masturbation are deemed sinful.
How can SSM, being inherently sterile by design, fulfill the twin purposes of marriage? How could SSM reflect God’s generative nature when it is missing that life-giving essence? That being said, hetero married couples who are closed to life (by free will, not infertility) are also in error, misappropriating marriage and sexuality.
Within the framework of purpose = meaning, if the Church sanctioned SSM, sexual sin ceases altogether. The purpose of sex is no longer both unitive and procreative. Therefore marriage ceases to reflect God’s generative nature, undermining any theological objective to premarital sex and adultery, etc.
This is a radical position in the modern world but we are against the world. When the Church and the world start converging, we have to ask who are we really following.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, and I apologize for the misunderstanding.
I took Ryan’s data to be referring to same-sex marriage as a secular, civic issue—not as support for same-sex marriage in the church, as a religious sacrament, which would obviously be at odds with Catholic teaching. Indeed, a same-sex civil marriage would not be considered a sacramental marriage at all, as it violates the conditions for a sacramental marriage you lay out above.
But it is my understanding that one can have this understanding of sexual morality, but not think that the secular state should enforce it through the force of law. As a parallel to other things you write about in your comment, one can believe that adultery is very wrong without thinking that it should be illegal.
So I was interpreting Ryan’s data about opposition to same-sex marriage to mean opposition to same-sex marriage as a secular legal construct, and proposing an explanation for why the most faithful American Catholics (in terms of Mass attendance) might be more likely than their non-attending co-religionists to not oppose the secular legal construct of “same-sex marriage,” which is what his data shows. And while I agree that there are many cultural Catholics, I do not think that they comprise the majority of weekly+ church attenders. And while regular Mass attendance isn’t everything, it’s still an important indicator.
I hope this helps to clarify. Thanks again for prompting me to do so.
As someone who (along with others, such as Putnam) thinks that nearly all political shifts are reactions to some other earlier political shift, the timing of this backlash fits the rise of wokeness.
For several decades the gay rights movement had a certain amount of message control: "we're normal people who just want the same things everyone else wants." But around 2020 they lost control of the message and it became something like "I want to be able to identify around gender and act sexually any way that feels right/true to me so long as it's consensual"... and "you're a bigot if you disagree."
I'm not arguing ethics, but just messaging. If this isn't a message designed to provoke a backlash I don't know what is. It's reminiscent of the 60s flag-and-bra-burning era.
Why it's hitting the surveys presented here in such an uneven way seems to me likely a result of fragmentation and bubbles in the post-Babel period. We should expect events to increasingly hit different demographic groups differently based on their media bubbles.
Thank you for this very sad but essential, article, Ryan! As a progressive who has been a lifelong supporter of same-sex marriage and LGBT civil rights, this makes me very sad indeed! Support for same-sex marriage has declined across the board with evangelical and mainline Protestants and young Catholics. While I strongly condemn the homophobes and transphobes on the right, the cause of this regression in support of gay marriage has been cause by the woke radicals on the left. The bigots and religious fanatics on the right simply took advantage of it. American society and people in general can only take so much social change. But if it’s too much, too fast as those on the radical left are trying to force on us now, with biological men using the same locker rooms as and competing with female athletes, gender-affirming care being practiced on minors with often disastrous results and kids being taught gender ideology is schools, of course average everyday Americans aren’t going to like that. It’s no surprise to me that Republicans and majority white Christian denominations are seeing a drop in support for same-sex marriage given these developments. Where did everything go so wrong and why has public opinion shifted so much? The answer is clear: the hijacking of the LGBT Movement by woke radicals and the birth of identity politics, political correctness and gender ideology in mainstream American society. Not to mention the anti-religious elements of the movement and the double standards applied to straight and LGBT people. I’m all for LGBT people having equal rights, protection from discrimination and hate crimes against them being prosecuted. I’ve known several excellent LGBT individuals personally. I don’t want to see the community get hurt. But these crazy fanatics who’ve taken over the movement and every major LGBT organization and NGO have subverted what the struggle for LGBT liberation was all about in the first place. It was about LGBT people obtaining human rights, being able to integrate into society and being treated like anyone else. But now its all about LGBT people getting special treatment and being able to get away with bad behavior and forcing weird and unscientific ideas about sex and gender on society as well as infringing on the first amendment and religious freedom. This is exactly why support for gay marriage in the country as a whole has decreased and gone completely backwards. As someone on the left who loves LGBT Americans and wants them to be happy and safe, I strongly condemn the woke establishment of LGBT activism! These nutcases have done immeasurable harm to LGBT people, American citizens and to this country!
You and I may be on opposites sides of the political fence, but I agree with everything you said in this post. Would add one thing: The Democrat Party "High Command" and the "Woke Establishment" of LBGTQ activism are one and the same, and the "middle ground" between left and right on social issues and most others is long gone.
There have been a lot of controversies settled by law. While the GSS did not exist, if people in the 1850's were polled about the propriety of slavery, a lot would say OK but once a done deal by the 1890s, nobody would approve it. In my own lifetime, being older than Ryan, when people polled in the 1950s, much of Dixie thought it OK for business owners to have full autonomy of who they would serve in their restaurants, house at their hotels, and hire for their businesses. That same forty-year interval, 1990, only a few confirmed racists would. I could say the same about smoking on planes or workplaces with attitudes of what is proper shifted in response to mandated behavior, though on a much shorter interval. Gay marriage probably falls into that category. When the law did not require it, and each man did that which was right in his own eyes, low percentages approved. Once accommodation to those couples are enforceable, those minority approvals are history, unless new and different mandates can overturn what exists now. Our political realities hold out the possibility of reversing the law, which will reverse the public attitude in response.
How strange. I have been reassured by countless conservatives that nobody is homophobic or wants to ban gay marriage anymore, and that the party of Trump is the most LGBT-friendly one ever, bigly.
“Gay marriage” is a contradiction in terms. The word marriage precludes the possibility of two men or two women because a marriage is a union between a man and a woman.
Also, I suspect that the large shift in disapproval among infrequent Catholics is due to the tradcath movement, which is more about grievance politics than actual religious practice.
I’m very much in tradville over here, and while I am aware that annoying online people exist, the *only* issues with a political valence that *ever* come up in my community are abortion first and foremost (lots of prayer vigils and diaper/bottle drives for the local maternity homes) and, to a much lesser extent, immigration (encouragement to love the immigrant and welcome them in, which is relevant in our trilingual-not-counting-Latin parish).
Our spiritual lives revolve around mass, adoration, and our prayer lives, and our parish social life (at least for the women) revolves around our mom’s group, our sewing circle, coffee and kids playtime after mass, and the monthly potluck.
Granted this is just my parish, but your comment is so far removed from my experience idk what to do with it.
Rosemary, your parish sounds lovely! I am glad that your church has a thriving community and is focusing on what matters.
When I say ''tradcath'', I am referring to an online youth movement that professes to support traditional Catholicism, but has little to do with religious practice. It is merely an aesthetic guise for culture war grievances.
That is why I suspect that the online ''tradcath'' movement is the source of Ryan seeing a large number of young, low-attendance Catholics suddenly not support gay marriage.
That’s hilarious. As the parent of teenagers who are on the trad side of things culturally, I can say that Rosemary knows what she’s talking about and the professor of media and gender studies is getting confused by looking on Tik Tok for clues to a movement that is very offline. Think about it for a minute: if you really want to recover a lost tradition and culture—and if you think even such things as facing east or west make a big difference to that recovery—are you going to be fixating on social media on a tiny screen? You really can’t let the Internet, be your guide to a movement that considers Internet culture to be one of the worst things that has happened to humanity. And I say this as a Gen X parent who is very pragmatic about Internet culture and would prefer that my kids took their phones with them all the time.
RJM, you are fixating on the Tradcath movement that Rosemary is describing, which is indeed offline.
I am referring to a completely different phenomenon that is occurring online.
You are far too old and disconnected to understand the impact of online subultures on young people. The majority of people under 25 spend hours on social media on a tiny screen.
I do not approve of that, but it is ridiculous to assert that the high levels of screen time immersed in specific subcultures among young people would not have any impact on their belief systems, actions or identities.
If “civil unions” as an alternative were offered as an alternative to same-sex marriages (as they were in Massachusetts and may be other places in the early 2000s), I wonder how that would affect the poll numbers.
Your data confirms that the LGBTQ lobby has overplayed its hand, especially by pushing transgenderism aggressively. Most people don't like to be pushed into accepting change they don't agree with.
"Support" for SSM and homosexual behavior in my view translates into opporition to "discrimination" against a class of people. I don't know of anyone, other than LGBTQ persons and some of their avocates, who thinks SSM and homosexuality are good for society and wants more of it.
Forty years ago queers were a marginalized and mistreated group. Mainline christian churches began moving to take them in out of compassion and protect them. Evangelicals and catholics did not. Today, LGBTQ persons as a group are no longer marginalized. They have money to advance their agenda. Anti-discrimination laws to protect their interests and equality. And enormous political power that extends to governance of the nation and the mainline churches, all of which are in long-term decline. In contrast, catholic membership is stable, and evangelicals are growing, particularly the non-denominationals.
I am amazed at how fast the culture has changed since 2018, based on your data and analysis that is confirmed by recent nationwide Gallop polling. "Wokeness" may be on the way out.
You are saying the queer people group are no longer marginalized? Can you rethink that statement and ask some queer people in your life? You might be biased to not see their marginalization. Your privilege?!
I don't believe queer people as a group are marginalized today for reasons stated In my post above. On an individual basis, I realize many if not most queer people think they are marginalized, mainly because their sexual behaviors and choices are not generally acceptable in our society. Discriminaion is no longer allowed in this country. But freedom of association is a different story.
Perhaps the hope (consciously or sub-consciously) was that after churches made the effort to accept gay marriage, it would result in opening the doors to a whole segment of society and increase the rolls of active church members. When than didn't happen, or when the change caused more people to leave than the number of new people who joined, there was a sense that the church had made a poor decision.
The other unmentioned, though rather obvious social factor is simply that of the pandemic which has produced a number of inflections in our social reality. It's not just church; it has also seen the emergence of identity politics (aka "woke"), the rise of social media (see Haidt et al), and also populist/elite battle and with it the discrediting of liberal framing about society. While the data certainly points to specific religious shifts, it may be more the case that we are seeing a symptom of a larger cultural change. I would think that a test of this hypothesis would be to look at non-Christian religions, and perhaps that of the Nones generally; were we to find comparable shifts that map religiously, then we might be seeing the religious doubting of same-sex marriages, or we may be seeing religious communities responding to this broader cultural shift--it may not be sex-specific, but contextually part of a broader reconsideration.
I think there's solid support for same-sex marriage. But somehow homosexuals are fearing for their lives in Bishop Budde's opinion. The mainline tack toward affirmation just isn't logically where the church should be. I don't think the Bible has a lot to say about homosexuality because there wasn't the prosperity to allow for it. everybody had to produce babies. So, it comes down to what everyone thinks is right now that there is tremendous prosperity. But a lot of people want to say the Bible says we should be for or against. That seems wrong to me on both sides. We should respect people, but we shouldn't have the language police or ostracize someone for not approving of it.
If we had great historical survey data, I think you could see this, but we don't have any data. We don't ask the right questions to flesh out this nuance today, much less in the past. And so we see people at the margin answer a question that's not being asked.
No doubt I've read the New Testament more than the Old. But I really don't think they are in much disagreement. I've never felt the need to run away and not look back from the gay men that I've meet. If someone doesn't believe what they are doing is wrong, then I sort of think Paul said it wasn't a sin. Personally, I'm with Paul and think that I consider it to be a very bad idea.
This synchs with my experience in the mainline UCC church. Some churches which have been Open and Affirming for years are downplaying their ONA stance and have received increased public backlash for flying rainbow flags. I notice that instead of a more ecumenical relationship among churches to respectfully disagree about theology, there is a push to draw a formal line of demarcation, making Xians feel pressured and shamed to take an anti-LGBTQ stance. Example: At my former church last year, a member of 40+ years left the church over its 20+ year ONA designation and joined a local evangelical church that requires affirmation to their marriage definition of ‘one man, one woman’ for membership. When I responded that not all people have to agree on this point to be part of our church, she was not persuadable, citing the Bible. Caveat, there were many sermons about the biblical basis for Open and Affirming at this church.
These stories from the Mainline are really hard for me to comprehend. I remember the UCC running TV ads about its pro-LGBT stance when I was in college, 20+ years ago, so it's been integral to the brand for at least that long.
If I were to model people leaving a church like the UCC for reasons of an LGBT stance, I would expect an initial flood that continuously slows until it approaches an asymptote as, at some point, the last holdouts depart and there's simply no one left in the church who has reservations about LGBT. What's wrong with this model?
I'm familiar with the "reconquista" idea in the PCUSA, but my sense is that at this point it's still demographically irrelevant in the PCUSA and effectively nonexistent in the other Mainlines. Maybe that will be different in 20-40 years, but if there are hints of rightward cultural micro-moves in the Mainlines today, I don't think "reconquista" has anything to do with them.
In my experience, Catholics who attend mass regularly (especially more than once a week) aren’t (generally) the ones who flagrantly enjoy beating up on other people with their superior correct views.
They are in regular communion with Jesus, not intellectually (or emotionally) genuflecting to the Magisterium.
I'd guess that this is mostly a backlash against transgenderism.
Before Obergefell, the most salient identity components of "LGBT+", for most Americans, were Lesbian and Gay, who could be portrayed as generally normal and tolerable.
After that decision, Trans became more salient, as Bisexuals and other niche identities really don't provide fodder for GLAAD and Human Rights Campaign activism, media interest, etc. Since it's much harder to portray sterilizing/mutilating healthy teenagers (mostly girls) or allowing extremely masculine men in dresses to use women's locker rooms as normal and tolerable, there's been a backlash.
As to why it's spilled over to SSM which isn't exactly a trans issue: the idea of treating LGBT as a coherent whole rather than a group of loose allies has stuck. There are some activists who use names like "Gays Against Groomers" and "LGB Drop The T" in an effort to distance their causes from the trans stuff, but they haven't had a whole lot of success.
Yes, trans is a big part of it, but I don't think it's the only part.
I'm actually part of the trend here, but in addition to trans, there were also things like Masterpiece Cakeshop. Or, for example, I recall in 2020 Cory Booker running for President arguing for eliminating tax-exempt status for churches that refuse to perform gay marriages, to resounding applause.
More broadly, what has happened is that the left's original argument: "How does gay marriage affect YOU?" -- which was honestly persuasive to me as a conservative young man -- has plainly fallen apart. The alarmists were correct, and I was wrong, mea culpa. It affects us because the left MAKES it affect us, they wield it as a cudgel against us, and I'm not exactly sure where it ends.
I imagine if they succeeded in eliminating churches' tax-exempt status, there would be some further push to punish and penalize Bible-believing churches and other Christian organizations.
I've been on a similar journey, and am not sure where I'll end up.
I remember been a teenager in the 90s and expressing mild curiosity about gay Christians. At that time people responded: "if we allow that before you know it we'll have polygamy." I'd thought their response was ridiculous and ignored them. Now I'm not so sure.
The trouble with progressivism is that there's no end game. It's always about "more."
I'm not sure what to do with that.
Bisexual is the largest group amongst the LGBTQ community so I would hardly call them “niche”.
You may have a point with trans issues being the reason behind a decrease in approval for same-sex marriage, but I disagree heavily with how you’ve framed the issue.
I posted that in a hurry. Probably should have phrased it as "other, more niche identities..." to make it clear that "niche" was referring to the identities that fall under the plus sign in the acronym (Queer, Intersex, Two-Spirit, add your favorite, etc ) and not referring to bisexuals.
That said, you prompted an interesting thought: Bisexuals are sort of the anti-Trans, in that Trans are small in number but account for ~all of the discourse, whereas Bisexuals are numerically dominant but ~no one talks about Bi issues.
Andrew Sullivan has written very persuasively about how the trans issue is a very big negative for gays/lesbians, and that some trans activists are actively homophobic. (You aren't gay, you are really a woman inside).
Andrew Sullivan also tricked conservatives into supporting LGBT movements for years, insisting it would only strengthen their political position. It only made them completely lose ground after the courts mandated it.
Now that it has gone past his comfort zone, he flips the script to say “the left has gone too far”. It is all so tiresome.
Huh???
Is this a true reversal or is this a reflection of the percentage of people who have left the church between 2018-2022? If those who are affirming left because of disillusionment with the church over treatment of LGBTQ people or politics it would mean the traditionalists who remained would now comprise a higher percentage in those faith circles. What percentage of evangelicals or mainliners left the church between 2018 and 2022?
The evangelical share dropped by 4.6% between 2018 and 2022.
Mainline was down 1.2%
Catholic down by <1%
Nones rose by 3.8%
But support for SSM dropped by 9 point for evangelicals.
8 points for mainline
5 points for Catholics.
That, mathematically, can't be the only explanation.
I came here to ask the same question. Speaking as one of the 3% (weekly mainliners), my experience is that queer-affirming people have left my church. For a host of reasons but this one is on the list. Families whose children are discovering sexuality that differs from the traditional definition are not finding support in the church because the church is still struggling with the basics, like marriage. I also wonder with Karen whether that is driving the change, at least in the mainline congregations.
The evangelical share dropped by 4.6% between 2018 and 2022.
Mainline was down 1.2%
Catholic down by <1%
Nones rose by 3.8%
But support for SSM dropped by 9 point for evangelicals.
8 points for mainline
5 points for Catholics.
That, mathematically, can't be the only explanation.
I've known quite a few people who fit the description you're offering. However, the explanation I've heard is not that the liberal church is unwelcoming (they actually think it is welcoming) but more like "I'm just not interested in church anymore."
This is one of the questions I'm most interested in right now. Why are people who decide their church is too conservative not go to a more-liberal church like they used to? Clearly some still do, but most just leave.
When you’ve been part of a conservative church your whole life and then begin to question one thing, you start questioning everything. If my church was wrong on gay marriage, what else are they wrong on? Once you start on that path of deconstruction, yes, you might find a more liberal and affirming church, but you might also decide that the whole religion thing doesn’t fit into your worldview anymore.
I think that's right in terms of their inner explanation.
But prior to the 90s people like that *would* go to the more-liberal church. Why the change?
Like Tyler says in his comment, I think it's much more culturally acceptable to not attend church. But more broadly, and as Robert Putman started documenting in Bowling Alone back in the 1990s, Americans have gotten more and more antisocial with each passing decade. I think y'all don't go to church (even one you like and agree with) for the same reason that you don't go to the Lions Club or the bowling alley--you've just stopped doing things in groups of people in general. Which see: The entire set of scholarship on loneliness in the USA.
Yes, I think about the Putnam context a lot and I'm always inserting it into discussions of declining church attendance.
I'd also think about extrinsic vs. intrinsic religiosity. 20th century Mainline churches (and to a large degree, the Roman Catholic Church) were generally pretty very heavy on the extrinsic sort. It was a place to go, a community to belong to, a part of the culture where you contemplated, for a few minutes each week, what you understood as a legendarium of half-believed myths from your ancestors.
That's all lost and not coming back anytime soon. What's left is mostly people with intrinsic religiosity that attend conservative churches out of genuine belief in the core Gospel message of salvation.
Of course, in the 18th-19th century, there appear to have been some very motivated liberal Christians in the form of Unitarians with a lot of intrinsic religiosity, writing beloved hymns like "Nearer My God, To Thee." But there's no 21st century equivalent of this phenomenon, probably because the entire Christian backdrop of society is much weaker. Nowadays, that sort of person is doing New Age stuff with crystals and burning sage.
Good question. Perhaps because it’s become more culturally acceptable to not attend? People might have felt pressure from their family to attend some church rather than reject it completely.
People can be quite committed to progressivism. Certainly enough to wake up on Sunday morning.
The most devout churches I've seen tend to be a mix of conservative and liberal. For example the Bruderhof support a lot of social justice initiatives (both personally and politically) but are extremely conservative in their lifestyles.
In my frequent work with LGBTQ folk and parents of LGBTQ children (youth or adult), they don’t go to more liberal churches because they are culturally different and don’t feel at home or they feel so hurt by the church they are reluctant to try again. But most crave creedally orthodox and fully affirming spaces.
Can you say any more about what you mean when you say "they are culturally different"?
By “culturally different” I mean that I work primarily with folk from conservative low church evangelical culture and for them to visit a mainline church often feels quite foreign because there are differences in forms of worship, differences in vocabulary, symbols, and people. So much of our connection to faith is *familiarity* and losing what feels like home to stay at a “hotel”, no matter how nice it is, leads many to feel as if they have no home anymore. But they want that familiarity, only one that is fully affirming. There is a need for church plants for this population.
Are you aware of any church in the U.S. that's fully affirming, creedally orthodox, with an evangelical culture?
It’s not a contradiction. We often make assumptions and judgments about people we don’t understand and don’t have real relationships with. I hope you will have the chance to truly get to know some devout LGBTJesus followers. In the meantime, here’s Matthew Vine’s who is gay and affirming sharing the gospel: “Yesterday, Today, and Forever: The Heart of Christianity.”https://youtu.be/-2OVF85eDqw?si=lTwfyxrteQkHrygP
If you encounter any evidence that this reaction transcends "internet engagements" and results in different real-world behavior, I'd love to know.
I think there two factors at play here:
1: The faithful core. Millions have left Christianity in the last 10 years. I would be willing to bet a large number of those were more liberal in their beliefs(which lead to their departure). Those that remain have more biblical views.
2:The collapse of media. The gay rights moment was essential a top down media propaganda campaign (with a Supreme Court dictate at the end) Every movie, celebrity, TV show, and musician was pushing it. Now nobody trusts any of those people and doesn’t care what they think you should think. Alternative conservative media sources don’t support the lgbt movement.
The evangelical share dropped by 4.6% between 2018 and 2022.
Mainline was down 1.2%
Catholic down by <1%
Nones rose by 3.8%
But support for SSM dropped by 9 point for evangelicals.
8 points for mainline
5 points for Catholics.
That, mathematically, can't be the only explanation.
Yet another fascinating analysis. Thanks, Ryan!
On the Catholics, there's simultaneously been an increase in weekly Mass attenders supporting same-sex marriage and a decrease in support for SSM among those Catholics who aren't going to church as often. I wonder if this might be because regular attenders know more about Catholic doctrine, and less-regular attenders are influenced by pop culture (and Evangelical-dominated) views of what "traditional" churches believe.
In a previous life, I did a lot of proselytizing for evolution education, and something I ran into a lot was Catholics who thought that the official position of their faith was that evolutionary biology was in conflict with Scripture. Now, that's not the case now and it wasn't then--Catholicism is very clear that an old Earth and evolutionary theory are compatible with church teachings--but many American Catholics I spoke with thought it was. But not the Catholics who attended Mass regularly, who knew what the Church had to say. It was as if the US Catholics who didn't attend Mass much just accepted what, say, Jerry Falwell had to say about evolution as if he and (at the time) John Paul II were in agreement on that. (I saw a similar pattern with LDS, where very active members of the church knew that the LDS church accepted evolution, but the less active members of the church thought that their position was the same as American evangelicals.)
I think that in the US in particular there are spillover effects like this, where outspoken popular figures are assumed to be voicing the position of "the church," and then those who are members of that church but don't actually go are more easily swayed to the popular view of what the faith says rather than what the faith actually does say.
Okay, but gay “marriage” conflicts with church teaching very explicitly.
As a Catholic convert, I can tell you that most Catholics are only cultural or lukewarm. It’s hard to imagine those who irregularly partake in the sacraments S being more aligned with the Church’s position on SSM than those who do.
Catholics who support same-sex marriage believe that if same-sex attraction is “natural”, the Church should permit SSM. However, this understanding of “natural” is secular, not Catholic. Secularism views “natural” as observable phenomena in the natural material world. If a person is believed to be “born this way”, it is natural. If what is natural cannot be changed, “natural" is equated with "good.”
In stark contrast, Catholic theology contradicts secular “naturalism”, viewing what is natural, what is good, is God’s will. Women’s childbirth is “naturally” painful and men must “toil the land”, but these are not natural because they are not God’s will. are punishments for Adam and Eve’s disobedience, manifestations of a fallen world
In Catholicism, the purpose of a thing is its meaning. The purpose of marriage is mirroring God’s love (to will the good of the other) and generative nature—unity and multiplicity, feminine and masculine. Sex both is unitive and procreative. God didn’t gift us sex solely for intimate bonding and sating lust. Sex therefore must be opened to life and confined within marriage. Sexual behavior outside of marriage is an abuse of sexuality, defying God’s generative design and purpose for marriage. It is repurposing God’s gift for one’s own will. Hence adultery, contraception, and masturbation are deemed sinful.
How can SSM, being inherently sterile by design, fulfill the twin purposes of marriage? How could SSM reflect God’s generative nature when it is missing that life-giving essence? That being said, hetero married couples who are closed to life (by free will, not infertility) are also in error, misappropriating marriage and sexuality.
Within the framework of purpose = meaning, if the Church sanctioned SSM, sexual sin ceases altogether. The purpose of sex is no longer both unitive and procreative. Therefore marriage ceases to reflect God’s generative nature, undermining any theological objective to premarital sex and adultery, etc.
This is a radical position in the modern world but we are against the world. When the Church and the world start converging, we have to ask who are we really following.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, and I apologize for the misunderstanding.
I took Ryan’s data to be referring to same-sex marriage as a secular, civic issue—not as support for same-sex marriage in the church, as a religious sacrament, which would obviously be at odds with Catholic teaching. Indeed, a same-sex civil marriage would not be considered a sacramental marriage at all, as it violates the conditions for a sacramental marriage you lay out above.
But it is my understanding that one can have this understanding of sexual morality, but not think that the secular state should enforce it through the force of law. As a parallel to other things you write about in your comment, one can believe that adultery is very wrong without thinking that it should be illegal.
So I was interpreting Ryan’s data about opposition to same-sex marriage to mean opposition to same-sex marriage as a secular legal construct, and proposing an explanation for why the most faithful American Catholics (in terms of Mass attendance) might be more likely than their non-attending co-religionists to not oppose the secular legal construct of “same-sex marriage,” which is what his data shows. And while I agree that there are many cultural Catholics, I do not think that they comprise the majority of weekly+ church attenders. And while regular Mass attendance isn’t everything, it’s still an important indicator.
I hope this helps to clarify. Thanks again for prompting me to do so.
As someone who (along with others, such as Putnam) thinks that nearly all political shifts are reactions to some other earlier political shift, the timing of this backlash fits the rise of wokeness.
For several decades the gay rights movement had a certain amount of message control: "we're normal people who just want the same things everyone else wants." But around 2020 they lost control of the message and it became something like "I want to be able to identify around gender and act sexually any way that feels right/true to me so long as it's consensual"... and "you're a bigot if you disagree."
I'm not arguing ethics, but just messaging. If this isn't a message designed to provoke a backlash I don't know what is. It's reminiscent of the 60s flag-and-bra-burning era.
Why it's hitting the surveys presented here in such an uneven way seems to me likely a result of fragmentation and bubbles in the post-Babel period. We should expect events to increasingly hit different demographic groups differently based on their media bubbles.
God created marriage, therefore, He also gets to create the rules for it, which are pretty well defined in Genesis.
Thank you for this very sad but essential, article, Ryan! As a progressive who has been a lifelong supporter of same-sex marriage and LGBT civil rights, this makes me very sad indeed! Support for same-sex marriage has declined across the board with evangelical and mainline Protestants and young Catholics. While I strongly condemn the homophobes and transphobes on the right, the cause of this regression in support of gay marriage has been cause by the woke radicals on the left. The bigots and religious fanatics on the right simply took advantage of it. American society and people in general can only take so much social change. But if it’s too much, too fast as those on the radical left are trying to force on us now, with biological men using the same locker rooms as and competing with female athletes, gender-affirming care being practiced on minors with often disastrous results and kids being taught gender ideology is schools, of course average everyday Americans aren’t going to like that. It’s no surprise to me that Republicans and majority white Christian denominations are seeing a drop in support for same-sex marriage given these developments. Where did everything go so wrong and why has public opinion shifted so much? The answer is clear: the hijacking of the LGBT Movement by woke radicals and the birth of identity politics, political correctness and gender ideology in mainstream American society. Not to mention the anti-religious elements of the movement and the double standards applied to straight and LGBT people. I’m all for LGBT people having equal rights, protection from discrimination and hate crimes against them being prosecuted. I’ve known several excellent LGBT individuals personally. I don’t want to see the community get hurt. But these crazy fanatics who’ve taken over the movement and every major LGBT organization and NGO have subverted what the struggle for LGBT liberation was all about in the first place. It was about LGBT people obtaining human rights, being able to integrate into society and being treated like anyone else. But now its all about LGBT people getting special treatment and being able to get away with bad behavior and forcing weird and unscientific ideas about sex and gender on society as well as infringing on the first amendment and religious freedom. This is exactly why support for gay marriage in the country as a whole has decreased and gone completely backwards. As someone on the left who loves LGBT Americans and wants them to be happy and safe, I strongly condemn the woke establishment of LGBT activism! These nutcases have done immeasurable harm to LGBT people, American citizens and to this country!
You and I may be on opposites sides of the political fence, but I agree with everything you said in this post. Would add one thing: The Democrat Party "High Command" and the "Woke Establishment" of LBGTQ activism are one and the same, and the "middle ground" between left and right on social issues and most others is long gone.
There have been a lot of controversies settled by law. While the GSS did not exist, if people in the 1850's were polled about the propriety of slavery, a lot would say OK but once a done deal by the 1890s, nobody would approve it. In my own lifetime, being older than Ryan, when people polled in the 1950s, much of Dixie thought it OK for business owners to have full autonomy of who they would serve in their restaurants, house at their hotels, and hire for their businesses. That same forty-year interval, 1990, only a few confirmed racists would. I could say the same about smoking on planes or workplaces with attitudes of what is proper shifted in response to mandated behavior, though on a much shorter interval. Gay marriage probably falls into that category. When the law did not require it, and each man did that which was right in his own eyes, low percentages approved. Once accommodation to those couples are enforceable, those minority approvals are history, unless new and different mandates can overturn what exists now. Our political realities hold out the possibility of reversing the law, which will reverse the public attitude in response.
How strange. I have been reassured by countless conservatives that nobody is homophobic or wants to ban gay marriage anymore, and that the party of Trump is the most LGBT-friendly one ever, bigly.
“Gay marriage” is a contradiction in terms. The word marriage precludes the possibility of two men or two women because a marriage is a union between a man and a woman.
Also, I suspect that the large shift in disapproval among infrequent Catholics is due to the tradcath movement, which is more about grievance politics than actual religious practice.
Goodness. How many tradcaths do you know?
I’m very much in tradville over here, and while I am aware that annoying online people exist, the *only* issues with a political valence that *ever* come up in my community are abortion first and foremost (lots of prayer vigils and diaper/bottle drives for the local maternity homes) and, to a much lesser extent, immigration (encouragement to love the immigrant and welcome them in, which is relevant in our trilingual-not-counting-Latin parish).
Our spiritual lives revolve around mass, adoration, and our prayer lives, and our parish social life (at least for the women) revolves around our mom’s group, our sewing circle, coffee and kids playtime after mass, and the monthly potluck.
Granted this is just my parish, but your comment is so far removed from my experience idk what to do with it.
Rosemary, your parish sounds lovely! I am glad that your church has a thriving community and is focusing on what matters.
When I say ''tradcath'', I am referring to an online youth movement that professes to support traditional Catholicism, but has little to do with religious practice. It is merely an aesthetic guise for culture war grievances.
That is why I suspect that the online ''tradcath'' movement is the source of Ryan seeing a large number of young, low-attendance Catholics suddenly not support gay marriage.
Here is a deeper explanation of the online Tradcath youth subculture for reference: https://therevealer.org/the-coquette-catholic-trend/
That’s hilarious. As the parent of teenagers who are on the trad side of things culturally, I can say that Rosemary knows what she’s talking about and the professor of media and gender studies is getting confused by looking on Tik Tok for clues to a movement that is very offline. Think about it for a minute: if you really want to recover a lost tradition and culture—and if you think even such things as facing east or west make a big difference to that recovery—are you going to be fixating on social media on a tiny screen? You really can’t let the Internet, be your guide to a movement that considers Internet culture to be one of the worst things that has happened to humanity. And I say this as a Gen X parent who is very pragmatic about Internet culture and would prefer that my kids took their phones with them all the time.
RJM, you are fixating on the Tradcath movement that Rosemary is describing, which is indeed offline.
I am referring to a completely different phenomenon that is occurring online.
You are far too old and disconnected to understand the impact of online subultures on young people. The majority of people under 25 spend hours on social media on a tiny screen.
I do not approve of that, but it is ridiculous to assert that the high levels of screen time immersed in specific subcultures among young people would not have any impact on their belief systems, actions or identities.
So you deny the existence of online subcultures affecting young adults' identities? Interesting
If “civil unions” as an alternative were offered as an alternative to same-sex marriages (as they were in Massachusetts and may be other places in the early 2000s), I wonder how that would affect the poll numbers.
Your data confirms that the LGBTQ lobby has overplayed its hand, especially by pushing transgenderism aggressively. Most people don't like to be pushed into accepting change they don't agree with.
"Support" for SSM and homosexual behavior in my view translates into opporition to "discrimination" against a class of people. I don't know of anyone, other than LGBTQ persons and some of their avocates, who thinks SSM and homosexuality are good for society and wants more of it.
Forty years ago queers were a marginalized and mistreated group. Mainline christian churches began moving to take them in out of compassion and protect them. Evangelicals and catholics did not. Today, LGBTQ persons as a group are no longer marginalized. They have money to advance their agenda. Anti-discrimination laws to protect their interests and equality. And enormous political power that extends to governance of the nation and the mainline churches, all of which are in long-term decline. In contrast, catholic membership is stable, and evangelicals are growing, particularly the non-denominationals.
I am amazed at how fast the culture has changed since 2018, based on your data and analysis that is confirmed by recent nationwide Gallop polling. "Wokeness" may be on the way out.
You are saying the queer people group are no longer marginalized? Can you rethink that statement and ask some queer people in your life? You might be biased to not see their marginalization. Your privilege?!
I don't believe queer people as a group are marginalized today for reasons stated In my post above. On an individual basis, I realize many if not most queer people think they are marginalized, mainly because their sexual behaviors and choices are not generally acceptable in our society. Discriminaion is no longer allowed in this country. But freedom of association is a different story.
Perhaps the hope (consciously or sub-consciously) was that after churches made the effort to accept gay marriage, it would result in opening the doors to a whole segment of society and increase the rolls of active church members. When than didn't happen, or when the change caused more people to leave than the number of new people who joined, there was a sense that the church had made a poor decision.
The other unmentioned, though rather obvious social factor is simply that of the pandemic which has produced a number of inflections in our social reality. It's not just church; it has also seen the emergence of identity politics (aka "woke"), the rise of social media (see Haidt et al), and also populist/elite battle and with it the discrediting of liberal framing about society. While the data certainly points to specific religious shifts, it may be more the case that we are seeing a symptom of a larger cultural change. I would think that a test of this hypothesis would be to look at non-Christian religions, and perhaps that of the Nones generally; were we to find comparable shifts that map religiously, then we might be seeing the religious doubting of same-sex marriages, or we may be seeing religious communities responding to this broader cultural shift--it may not be sex-specific, but contextually part of a broader reconsideration.
I think there's solid support for same-sex marriage. But somehow homosexuals are fearing for their lives in Bishop Budde's opinion. The mainline tack toward affirmation just isn't logically where the church should be. I don't think the Bible has a lot to say about homosexuality because there wasn't the prosperity to allow for it. everybody had to produce babies. So, it comes down to what everyone thinks is right now that there is tremendous prosperity. But a lot of people want to say the Bible says we should be for or against. That seems wrong to me on both sides. We should respect people, but we shouldn't have the language police or ostracize someone for not approving of it.
If we had great historical survey data, I think you could see this, but we don't have any data. We don't ask the right questions to flesh out this nuance today, much less in the past. And so we see people at the margin answer a question that's not being asked.
Quite obvious that you have never read the Bible. It condemns homosexuality in no uncertain terms.
No doubt I've read the New Testament more than the Old. But I really don't think they are in much disagreement. I've never felt the need to run away and not look back from the gay men that I've meet. If someone doesn't believe what they are doing is wrong, then I sort of think Paul said it wasn't a sin. Personally, I'm with Paul and think that I consider it to be a very bad idea.
Read Romans chapter 1. You don't really know Paul that well.
Feel free to block me from substack as well. My subscription ends tomorrow.
This synchs with my experience in the mainline UCC church. Some churches which have been Open and Affirming for years are downplaying their ONA stance and have received increased public backlash for flying rainbow flags. I notice that instead of a more ecumenical relationship among churches to respectfully disagree about theology, there is a push to draw a formal line of demarcation, making Xians feel pressured and shamed to take an anti-LGBTQ stance. Example: At my former church last year, a member of 40+ years left the church over its 20+ year ONA designation and joined a local evangelical church that requires affirmation to their marriage definition of ‘one man, one woman’ for membership. When I responded that not all people have to agree on this point to be part of our church, she was not persuadable, citing the Bible. Caveat, there were many sermons about the biblical basis for Open and Affirming at this church.
These stories from the Mainline are really hard for me to comprehend. I remember the UCC running TV ads about its pro-LGBT stance when I was in college, 20+ years ago, so it's been integral to the brand for at least that long.
If I were to model people leaving a church like the UCC for reasons of an LGBT stance, I would expect an initial flood that continuously slows until it approaches an asymptote as, at some point, the last holdouts depart and there's simply no one left in the church who has reservations about LGBT. What's wrong with this model?
I'm familiar with the "reconquista" idea in the PCUSA, but my sense is that at this point it's still demographically irrelevant in the PCUSA and effectively nonexistent in the other Mainlines. Maybe that will be different in 20-40 years, but if there are hints of rightward cultural micro-moves in the Mainlines today, I don't think "reconquista" has anything to do with them.
In my experience, Catholics who attend mass regularly (especially more than once a week) aren’t (generally) the ones who flagrantly enjoy beating up on other people with their superior correct views.
They are in regular communion with Jesus, not intellectually (or emotionally) genuflecting to the Magisterium.