Southern Baptists plan to vote this week on acting to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage 10 years ago this month.
The step is part of a growing effort by evangelicals nationwide to reverse Obergefell, and coincides with a renewed campaign in state legislatures to challenge the widely accepted view that same-sex marriage has become an established civil right.
While the Southern Baptist Convention has long opposed gay marriage, the vote at its annual meeting in Dallas will be the first time that the largest Protestant denomination in America will ask representatives of its tens of thousands of member churches to work to end it.
Conservative Christian activists hope to build on their movement’s success in overturning Roe v. Wade, the now-defunct Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, in 2022, and to apply the legal and political strategies that proved effective for that victory. Public support for legal gay marriage remains high, with more than two-thirds of American adults supporting it. As with abortion, activists hope to gain political power despite their minority viewpoints.
“Christians are called to play the long game,” said Andrew T. Walker, an ethicist at a Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky who wrote the resolution. He leads the Southern Baptist Convention’s resolution committee, which coordinates proposals from Baptists around the country to be put for a vote at the annual meeting.
“There are burgeoning embryonic efforts being discussed at the legal-strategy level on how to begin to challenge Obergefell,” he said. “How do we take the lessons from Roe that took 50 years? What is the legal strategy to overturn Obergefell at some point in the future?”
Activists are aware that their mission may take years. But the resolution calling for this concrete action shows “a deepening of Southern Baptist thinking on this issue,” and a recognition of the need for a long-term strategy similar to the one that ended a constitutional right to abortion, said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
He said “there’s a great deal of engagement” on this issue between Southern Baptist leaders and lawyers with the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian legal advocacy group that worked to overturn Roe.
“As in Roe, it is not just a matter of arguing for or against abortion,” he said. “It is also the larger pattern in terms of constitutional interpretation.”
The Southern Baptist resolution, titled “On Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family,” reflects a movement within conservative Christianity to see that laws align with their set of Biblical values, and a political commitment to pursue those goals.
The resolution calls for overturning not just Obergefell, but also any laws and policies “that defy God’s design for marriage and family,” potentially including the Respect for Marriage Act, a law that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed in 2022 mandating federal recognition for same-sex marriages. The resolution also specifically calls for the restriction of commercial surrogacy.
Lawmakers have a duty “to pass laws that reflect the truth of creation,” it says, “and to oppose any law that denies or undermines what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”
The measure also reflects an alignment with other Republican goals, and calls for laws that would “strengthen parental rights in education and healthcare, incentivize family formation in life-affirming ways, and ensure safety and fairness in female athletic competition.”
To go into effect, the resolution needs to pass by simple majority vote. Organizers say it is widely expected to pass.
Passing the measure could be used as evidence to prove to politicians that culturally unpopular positions have support. Public opinion on gay marriage shifted drastically over the past 30 years toward overwhelming support. Last summer during his presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump had the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman removed from the Republican Party platform.
“It now seems the case in many sectors of American society that same-sex marriage is just as American as baseball and apple pie,” Mr. Walker acknowledged. “I understand the political will is probably minute or miniscule.”
Of the nine Supreme Court justices, only Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have suggested that the court should reconsider Obergefell, which was decided by a 5-4 majority. Chief Justice John Roberts, now a swing vote, issued a strong dissent in the Obergefell ruling.
In his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that overturned Roe, Justice Thomas directly argued that the rationale the court used to negate a right to abortion should be used to overturn cases that established rights to same-sex marriage, consensual same-sex relations and contraception.
Next month Mathew Staver, a Southern Baptist and the chairman of the Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal group, plans to ask the Supreme Court to hear a case about Kim Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015.
That request will directly ask the court to overturn Obergefell, he said. Mr. Staver has been trying for two decades to use the courts to stop gay marriage, ever since states began to legalize it in 2004.
Earlier this year his group worked with legislators in Idaho on the language of a resolution that passed the Idaho House of Representatives calling on the Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell.
Republican lawmakers, at times drawing on certain Christian principles, introduced similar measures calling for Obergefell’s reversal in states like Michigan, Montana and South Dakota, and partially passed them in North Dakota and Idaho.
“That begins to show a sentiment from legislative officials, and it just begins to build a momentum,” Mr. Staver said.
And while efforts like the S.B.C. measure and the resolutions in the states have been largely independent of each other, he said, “that momentum results in more coordination” between ideologically aligned groups, which was effective in overturning Roe.
The Southern Baptist Convention, a largely conservative network of churches, has taken a rightward turn in recent years, particularly on issues of marriage, family and sex. It has also struggled following revelations of widespread sexual abuse of women and children, and the mishandling of those allegations over decades.
The annual meeting is often regarded as a bellwether for broader evangelical sentiment on various political and cultural issues, even though it technically represents the views of only the 10,000 or so members who typically attend and vote, not of all 13 million members.
Last year, Southern Baptists voted to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization, passing a resolution that Mr. Walker and Mr. Mohler proposed as part of a push to advance the “fetal personhood” movement. The vote greatly worried many other evangelicals who rely on fertility treatments to have children and who believe I.V.F. is life-promoting.
In 2023, Southern Baptists decided to expel several churches with female pastors, including one of the denomination’s largest and most prominent congregations.
An attempt to further expand restrictions on women in church leadership gained traction in 2023, but did not pass a second required vote in 2024. That effort is expected to be revived this week.
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.
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