Southern Baptists voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to call for the overturning of the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, with strategists citing the successful effort that overturned the right to legal abortions as a possible blueprint for the new fight.
The denomination has long opposed gay marriage, but Tuesday was the first time its members have voted to work to legally end it. Expanding on conservatives’ success in overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the vote signals growing evangelical ambitions to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that was handed down 10 years ago this month.
“What we’re trying to do is keep the conversation alive,” said Andrew Walker, an ethicist at a Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky who wrote the resolution.
Mr. Walker leads the Southern Baptist committee that gathers proposals from Baptists around the country to be debated and put to a vote at the meeting. Baptists, he said, are taking the long view, inspired by the tactics of the anti-abortion movement. Roe v. Wade granted a constitutional right to abortion that stood for nearly 50 years before activists and legal strategists defeated it, powered by support from Christian conservatives.
The Baptists’ vote against Obergefell took place at the end of the first day of the denomination’s annual meeting, which is being held this year at a convention center in Dallas. Attracting thousands of pastors and church members from large and small congregations across the country, the meeting is being closely watched as a snapshot of evangelical sentiment on a range of political, theological and cultural issues.
The measure opposing same-sex marriage was part of a sweeping and unusually long resolution under the title, “On Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family.” It includes calls for defunding Planned Parenthood, for “parental rights in education and healthcare,” and ensuring “safety and fairness in female athletic competition,” a reference to the debate over transgender women in women’s sports.
The resolution is nonbinding, but suggests that evangelicals have long-term ambitions to dismantle an institution that many Americans now accept as a basic right. Southern Baptists who supported the resolution acknowledged that same-sex marriage has wide support.
“It puts Southern Baptists on the record,” said Denny Burk, the president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which advocates for distinct roles for men and women. “We know that we’re in a minority in the culture right now, but we want to be a prophetic minority.”
The resolution also echoes the language of pronatalism that has taken hold in many conservative circles, including those influencing the second Trump administration. The resolution that passed on Tuesday criticizes the pursuit of “willful childlessness” and refers to the country’s declining fertility rate as a crisis. That language goes beyond Baptists’ traditional support of general “family values,” embracing a cultural agenda that encourages larger families as a matter of civilizational survival. Baptist theology does not oppose birth control per se.
Other resolutions passed on Tuesday called for banning pornography, and condemning sports betting. “We denounce the promotion and normalization of this predatory industry in every athletic context,” the gambling resolution stated. It called on corporations involved to “cease their exploitative practices,” on policymakers to curtail sports betting, and on Christians to refuse to participate.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, and is often seen as a bellwether for conservative evangelicalism writ large. Like many Christian denominations, it is broadly in decline, with about 12.7 million members in 2024, a 2 percent decline from the year before. But church attendance and baptisms were up, suggesting an ongoing vitality in the pews.
Passing the resolution against same-sex marriage could suggest to policymakers that conservative Christians have the will to sustain long-term opposition to positions without much popular support, including from some conservative politicians.
Last year, the convention adopted a resolution opposing the use of in vitro fertilization, frustrating many Republicans who wanted to reassure voters that their opposition to abortion would not endanger widely popular fertility treatments. President Trump called himself the “father of I.V.F.” during the 2024 campaign, and said he wanted to make the treatments free for all Americans.
On Wednesday the delegates, called “messengers”, will consider whether to abolish their own public policy arm, which its critics say is out of step with conservative Baptists in the pews. They will also discuss a constitutional amendment cracking down on women pastors, which failed to pass last year but seems to have gained support.
Some messengers in the room said the mood at the convention feels steadier this year, after several years of bruising internal battles. Speakers on the main stage and from the floor have often mentioned unity. Many messengers are weary after contentious debates over issues on which the denomination broadly agrees.
About 10,500 messengers have registered for this year’s meeting, a downtick from years past when hot-button disputes drew high numbers of church leaders and members to make their voices heard. The proceedings on Tuesday consistently ran ahead of schedule. It was a distinctly unusual development for a sometimes rowdy, chaotic gathering at which any participant is invited to speak from the floor, and which attempts to conform to Robert’s Rules of Order sometimes devolve into exasperation or laughter.
Clint Pressley, the pastor of a large church in North Carolina, was easily elected to a second term as president of the denomination on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Pressley, an affable preacher who has largely avoided controversy, told messengers in an address on Tuesday morning that although the denomination has “found ourselves in a little bit of a storm the last little bit,” its convictions and churches are largely solid.
“It is good to be a Southern Baptist,” he concluded.
