Evangelicals Step Up for Marriage Equality

National Equality Marchers

Brent Childers used to call himself a “Jesse Helms Republican” who justified his homophobic beliefs through biblical interpretation. But last weekend, as he marched in the Equality March in Washington, D.C., he stood alongside his lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender friends in support of their full human rights. As executive director of Faith in America, Childers works full time to incorporate an inclusive message of LGBT human equality into the Christian dialogue. His organization’s mission is to educate the public about the emotional and physical harm cased by “religion-based bigotry.”

Childers’s change of heart isn’t unique, either. It represents a growing shift in support of LGBT rights among evangelicals in the United States. The work of Faith in America also shows that progressive people of faith are developing LGBT supportive organizations to question and ultimately undermine the Religious Right’s ideological monopoly on biblical interpretation.

In the most recent national survey done by the Pew Research Center, more Americans than ever recorded (57 percent) support civil unions. Thirty-nine percent of this support comes from white evangelicals, and even though that’s not a majority, it shows there are definite inroads being made into that community. Given increasingly divergent opinions in the white evangelical community, a “biblical” opposition to gay marriage is becoming less tenable among them and simply a matter of their interpretation and personal opinion.

National Equality Marchers

There is additional hopeful news. Young evangelicals are measurably diverging from the condemning views of their church elders on LGBT rights. In a recent survey conducted by Public Religion Research during the 2008 presidential election cycle, 58 percent of young white evangelicals supported some form of legal recognition of gay partnerships, whether in the form of civil unions or marriage. Twenty-six percent supported full marriage rights.

The promise of this rising evangelical support of LGBT human rights cannot be overstated. If trends continue, evangelicals can no longer be counted on as a solid unwavering base of the Religious Right. And without the support of young evangelicals the Religious Right will become even more of a reservoir of aging bigots than a dynamic and growing grassroots movement. [READ MORE]