The Southern Baptist Conference has misplaced 3.6 million individuals over the last 20 years and faces an ongoing sexual abuse disaster. At its June 2025 annual assembly, then again, neither of the ones problems took up as a lot time as debatable social problems, together with the denomination’s stance on same-sex marriage.
The gang known as for the overturning of Obergefell v. Hodges – the Ideally suited Courtroom determination that legalized same-sex marriage – and the advent of regulations that “affirm marriage between one man and one woman.”
Messengers – Southern Baptists’ phrase for delegates from native church buildings – additionally requested for regulations that might “reflect the moral order revealed in Scripture and nature.”
Additionally they decried declining fertility charges, industrial surrogacy, Deliberate Parenthood, “willful childlessness,” the normalization of “transgender ideology,” and gender-affirming hospital treatment.
This detailed listing concentrated on ladies’s and LGBTQ+ rights used to be justified via an attraction to a God-ordained created order, as outlined via Southern Baptists’ interpretation of the Bible.
On this created order, intercourse and gender are synonymous and are irrevocably outlined via biology. The heterosexual nuclear circle of relatives is the foundational establishment of this order, with the daddy dominant over his spouse and youngsters – and youngsters are a need if husbands and better halves are to be devoted to God’s design for the circle of relatives.
The answer, On Restoring Ethical Readability via God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Circle of relatives, handed simply in a denomination that used to be taken over from extra reasonable Southern Baptists via fundamentalists within the early Nineties, in large part in accordance with ladies’s growth in society and within the denomination.
Southern Baptists have been at all times conservative on problems with gender and sexuality. As I used to be getting into a Southern Baptist seminary within the early Nineteen Eighties, the denomination appeared poised to embody social growth. I watched the takeover firsthand as a scholar after which as a professor of girls and gender research who research Southern Baptists. This new answer is the most recent in a protracted historical past of Southern Baptist opposition to the growth of girls and LGBTQ+ other people.
Opposing LGBTQ+ rights
Right through the past due Sixties and early Seventies, many Southern Baptists started to embody the ladies’s motion. Girls began to wait Southern Baptist seminaries in report numbers, many claiming a decision to function pastors. Whilst Southern Baptist acceptance of LGBTQ+ other people lagged some distance at the back of its nascent embody of girls’s rights, growth did appear imaginable.
Then in 1979, a gaggle of Southern Baptist fundamentalists arranged to wrest keep watch over of the denomination from the moderates who had led it for many years.
Any hope for growth on adjustments referring to LGBTQ+ rights within the denomination briefly died. Around the subsequent 20 years, advances made via ladies, equivalent to being ordained and serving as senior pastors, eroded and disappeared.
The SBC had handed anti-gay resolutions within the Seventies defining homosexuality as “deviant” and a “sin.” However beneath the brand new fundamentalist rule, the SBC changed into much more vehemently anti-gay and anti-trans.
In 1988, the SBC known as homosexuality a “perversion of divine standards,” “a violation of nature and natural affections,” “not a normal lifestyle,” and “an abomination in the eyes of God.”
In 1991, they decried govt investment for the Nationwide Lesbian and Homosexual Well being Convention as a contravention of “the proper role and responsibility of government” as a result of its encouragement of “sexual immorality.”
Predictably, around the years, the conference spoke out in opposition to each and every effort to advance LGBTQ+ rights. This integrated supporting the Boy Scouts’ ban of homosexual scouts, opposing army provider via LGBTQ+ other people, boycotting Disney for its toughen of LGBTQ+ other people, calling on companies to disclaim LGBTQ+ other people home spouse advantages and employment nondiscrimination to offer protection to LGBTQ+ other people, and supporting the Protection of Marriage Act that restricted marriage to a lady and a person.
Focused on same-sex marriage
The gender and sexuality matter, then again, that has gained probably the most consideration from the conference has been marriage equality. Since 1980, the SBC has handed 22 resolutions that contact on same-sex marriage.
The SBC handed its first answer in opposition to same-sex marriage in 1996 after the Hawaii Ideally suited Courtroom indicated the chance it will rule in choose of same-sex marriage. The courtroom by no means determined the problem as a result of Hawaii’s Legislature handed a invoice defining marriage as between a person and a lady.
In 1998, the conference amended its religion observation, the Baptist Religion and Message, to outline marriage as “the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment.”
The denomination handed its subsequent answer in 2003 in accordance with the Vermont Common Meeting’s status quo of civil unions. The answer hostile any efforts to validate same-sex marriages or partnerships, whether or not legislative, judicial or spiritual.
In 2004, after the Massachusetts Ideally suited Courtroom allowed same-sex marriages in that state, the conference known as for a constitutional modification to outline marriage as between a person and a lady. It reiterated this name in 2006.
When the California Ideally suited Courtroom struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, the SBC handed every other answer in 2008 caution of the dire penalties of permitting lesbians and homosexual males to marry, as other people from different states would marry in California and go back house to problem their states’ marriage bans.
In 2011, the conference presented its toughen for the Protection of Marriage Act, adopted in 2012 via a denunciation of the usage of civil rights language to argue for marriage equality.
Delegates at a Southern Baptist Conference assembly in 2012 in New Orleans.
AP Photograph/Gerald Herbert
The answer argues that homosexuality “does not qualify as a class meriting special protections, like race and gender.”
When Obergefell used to be earlier than the Ideally suited Courtroom, the SBC known as at the courtroom to disclaim marriage equality. After Obergefell used to be determined in choose of same-sex marriage, the conference requested for Congress to move the First Modification Protection Act, which might have prohibited the government from discriminating in opposition to other people in response to their opposition to same-sex marriage. That very same answer additionally gives its toughen to state legal professionals basic difficult transgender rights.
Opposing transgender other people
Messengers of the Southern Baptist Conference concentrate to remarks via its president, Clint Pressley, right through the 2025 SBC annual assembly in Dallas.
AP Photograph/Richard W. Rodriguez
This used to be now not the primary time the SBC had spoken about transgender problems. As early as 2007, the denomination expressed its opposition to permitting transgender other people to represent a secure elegance in hate crimes regulation.
In 2014, the conference said its trust that gender is fastened and binary and due to this fact that trans other people must now not be allowed gender-affirming care and that govt officers must now not validate transgender identification.
In 2016, the denomination hostile get right of entry to for transgender other people to bogs matching their gender identities. In 2021, the conference invoked ladies’s rights – in a denomination well-known for its resistance to ladies’s equality – as a reason why to undermine trans rights.
In its answer opposing the proposed Equality Act, which might have added sexual orientation and gender identification as secure classifications, the SBC argued, “The Equality Act would undermine decades of hard-fought civil rights protections for women and girls by threatening competition in sports and disregarding the privacy concerns women rightly have about sharing sleeping quarters and intimate facilities with members of the opposite sex.”
This most up-to-date answer from June 2025 returns to the subjects of fastened and binary gender, a divinely sanctioned hierarchical ordering of gender, and marriage as an establishment restricted to at least one lady and one guy. Whilst claiming those ideals are “universal truths,” the answer argues that Obergefell is a “legal fiction” as it denies the organic fact of female and male.
Going additional, this answer claims that U.S. regulation on gender and sexuality must be in response to the Bible. The obligation of lawmakers, it states, is to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law – about marriage, sex, human life, and family – and to oppose any law that denies or undermines what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”
Via taking no motion on sexual abuse whilst focusing its efforts on problems with gender and sexuality, the conference affirmed its decades-long conservative trajectory. It additionally underlined its willingness to inspire lawmakers to impose those requirements on the remainder of the country.
