Opposing Gay Marriage May Seem like a Lost Cause. History Suggests It Isn’t.

Jan 13, 2023 by Jill

by Keith Simon, TGC:

A friend—a faithful Christian and a professor who specializes in political history—recently shared that after listening to Joe Rogan discuss gay marriage with Matt Walsh, he walked away discouraged. While Walsh articulated the biblical view of marriage as well as can be expected given the circumstances, Rogan “won” because his arguments, as silly as they were, resonate deeply with the cultural moment.

When our collective moral framework is built around two principles—personal freedom and not causing harm—it’s nearly impossible to convince people that the definition of marriage shouldn’t be expanded to include same-sex couples. To oppose including those couples is now indistinguishable from bigotry.

This partly explains why, in December, the Respect for Marriage Act passed both houses of the U.S. Congress with bipartisan support. Thirty-nine Republicans in the House and 12 in the Senate joined every Democrat to codify it into federal law. Support for gay marriage is so widespread that it’s easy to forget how recent it is. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned same-sex marriage and limited the definition of marriage to the union of a man and a woman, after it had passed Congress with overwhelming majorities. A lot can change in 26 years.

According to Ryan Burge, as recently as 2010 most Americans didn’t support same-sex marriage. Today, the majority do—including 52 percent of self-identified evangelicals.

Considering the swift, large-scale shift in opinion, my friend asked a question many faithful Christians are asking: Is it time to give up on gay marriage? This isn’t asking whether we should give up on our biblical conviction that marriage is between one man and one woman. That isn’t up for grabs. The question is whether we should keep trying to make a persuasive public argument for the biblical definition of marriage.

With the moral revolution moving so fast, why spend limited resources on a losing battle?

Before giving up, consider that another revolution—the sexual revolution—had every bit as much momentum as the current one, and yet it has run aground on the rocks of reality.

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