Same-Sex Marriage Opposition as Vibes

A Vibe Shift is happening, but we need more than vibes

Photo by Zoriana Stakhniv on Unsplash

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Last week,

Ryan Burge

released some interesting data that showed declining support for same-sex marriage among evangelicals, mainline protestants, and Catholics. That might not come as a shock to you, because you may just assume that those groups would naturally be opposed to SSM, but this decline is a reverse of a previous trend of increasing support for SSM over the previous decade or so among these same groups.

Just as the wider society came to rapidly embrace SSM starting during the Obama years, evangelicals and other Christians did as well. This has been my experience speaking with many evangelicals; even ones who recognize homosexuality as sin will often see SSM as a human rights issue. It seems like common sense to them that everyone should have the right to marry whomever they love so long as it’s consensual. But in the last couple years, that support has declined significantly. Among evangelicals, in 2018 there was 45% support for SSM. In 2022 it was down to 36%, most of that coming from weekly attenders. Why the shift? What’s happened that has led evangelicals to recognize that same-sex marriage is wrong? I would like to say that it comes from an increased awareness of natural law teaching and a robust understanding of the biblical sexual ethic. But I don’t think that’s the case. It seems to me that the better explanation is that this shift is a vibe shift, a backlash to the “LGBT/Woke Agenda.” And if that’s the case, then we should not be surprised when the vibe shifts back again. For the vibes are fickle and subject to every whim of trending topics. If we want evangelicals to understand why same-sex marriage is wrong¹, we need to be teaching a robust understanding of the human body, marriage, sex, and procreation grounded in the Bible and natural law.