Are There Folks Who Oppose Homosexuality But Support Same-Sex Marriage?

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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, they have 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.

But, beginning around 1990, those lines began moving toward each other. By 2012, they crossed at right around 45%, and they’ve continued moving in opposite directions since. In 2022, 63% of Americans thought same-sex relations were not wrong at all—up 52 points in 49 years. Meanwhile, the share who thought it was always wrong dropped to 29%, a decline of 45 points. Today, about 70% of Americans are generally fine with homosexual behavior, compared to less than 20% in 1973.

What about same-sex marriage? This question has been only been asked with regularity since 2006. But there are five response options ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

Again, the responses should probably be collapsed into three categories because that’s where most of the movement has occurred. But there has been a huge shift in opinion on this issue in just the last 16 years. In 2006, only 15% strongly agreed that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, while 35% strongly disagreed. In total, about 35% were in favor and 50% opposed in 2006, with the remainder taking a neutral position.

That’s obviously changed significantly. By 2022, 45% strongly agreed with same-sex marriage, and another 20% agreed. In total, about two-thirds of Americans now favor same-sex marriage. In contrast, the strongly disagree share dropped to just 12%, and the disagree share fell to 8%. The neutral share is now about 15%.

Let’s combine these measures. I created two variables with two categories: people who supported or opposed same-sex marriage, and people who said homosexual relationships were either not wrong or wrong. A heat map shows this trend over time, so I created one for various years between 2006 and 2022.

In 2006, about half the sample opposed same-sex marriage and believed homosexuality was wrong. Meanwhile, 31% took the opposite position. However, 9% supported same-sex marriage but still thought homosexuality was wrong. Over time, most of the movement occurred in two squares (wrong + oppose, not wrong + support). Essentially, the average American became far more supportive of both homosexuality and same-sex marriage as time passed.

The totally opposed portion was 52% in 2006, but it dropped to 41% in 2010, 33% in 2014, 22% in 2018, and 20% in the most recent data. Meanwhile, the share of people in favor of both rose commensurately, from 31% to 71% over the same period. It’s staggering to see such a large shift in just 16 years.

But what about the share of folks who were conflicted on this? It’s never been large. In 2006, about 16% were in the "not wrong + oppose" or "wrong + support" categories. By 2022, that figure had dropped to 9%. The specific position held by that Roger Williams fan I mentioned earlier is increasingly rare, held by only 7% of the sample in 2022.

Which religious traditions are the most conflicted or unified on this issue?

Only one group in the U.S. remains clearly opposed to homosexuality: evangelicals. In data from 2021 and 2022, 55% opposed same-sex marriage and believed homosexual behavior was wrong. Black Protestants were next closest at 27%, followed by mainline Protestants at 20%, Catholics and other faith groups at 15%.

In contrast, large majorities in many groups supported same-sex marriage and saw nothing wrong with homosexual behavior: 91% of the non-religious, 76% of those from other faith groups, 75% of Catholics, and 73% of mainline Protestants. A slim majority of Black Protestants (56%) were also in this category, but only 29% of evangelicals were.

The bottom-right square—those who support same-sex marriage but believe homosexuality is wrong—is most interesting to me. Among mainline Protestants, Catholics, and other faith groups, only 7% fall into this category. However, it’s more common among evangelicals and Black Protestants, at 14%.

To understand this better, I restricted my sample to people who said homosexuality was wrong and created a dichotomous dependent variable. Those who favored same-sex marriage were coded as 1, while those who opposed it were coded as 0. I wanted to see what factors might predict this conflicted position.

In this case, I was very much disappointed in the result of the regression analysis. Only one variable was statistically significant: church attendance. As attendance increased, people became more likely to oppose same-sex marriage. No other variables—race, education, age, gender, belief in a literal Bible, being an evangelical, or identifying as a Republican—made any difference. In short, that guy I met was just an outlier.

While null results can feel unsatisfying, they’re often helpful. Yes, some people are fine with same-sex marriage despite disapproving of homosexuality, but they’re becoming increasingly rare. And there’s no single factor that predicts this viewpoint. Sometimes, people just hold views that defy expectations. I love being a social scientist!

Code for this post can be found here.