At their annual convention in Dallas on Tuesday, Southern Baptists voted overwhelmingly to endorse efforts to end marriage equality in the United States.

In an exceptionally long resolution titled “On Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family,” the gathering of delegates called on the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision granting the right to same-sex couples to marry.

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The resolution was a laundry list of demands that aligned with the goals of the Trump administration, including defunding Planned Parenthood, advocating for “parental rights in education and healthcare,” and ensuring “safety and fairness in female athletic competition,” a reference to trans women and girls in sports.

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Leaders of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination acknowledged there is widespread support for marriage equality now, but said conservatives’ successful fight to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion, gave them hope.

“It puts Southern Baptists on the record,” Denny Burk, president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which advocates for distinct roles for men and women, told The New York Times. “We know that we’re in a minority in the culture right now, but we want to be a prophetic minority.”

Andrew Walker, author of the anti-marriage equality resolution and an ethicist at a Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky, said Baptists are taking the long view in their effort to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges; it took 50 years to end the right to abortion.  

“What we’re trying to do is keep the conversation alive,” he said.

The “Gender, Marriage, and Family” resolution was infused with the “pronatalist” language embraced by the Trump administration, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and the online “manosphere” alike. The resolution depicted the country’s declining fertility rate as a crisis and criticized the pursuit of “willful childlessness.”

Elon Musk, the former advisor to the president, has echoed those sentiments, but sometimes in terms the Baptists would take issue with.

The denomination’s pro-natalist views stand in conflict with a vote last year in opposition to in vitro fertilization, but align with Baptists’ overwhelming opposition to abortion, which leaves no room for compromise on the fate of discarded embryos.

Donald Trump has called himself the “father of IVF.”

The 10,000 Baptist leaders gathered at the Dallas Convention Center also passed resolutions on Tuesday that urged outlawing pornography and sports betting.

“We denounce the promotion and normalization of this predatory industry in every athletic context,” the gambling resolution stated. It demanded corporations associated with online and other forms of betting “cease their exploitative practices,” and called on Christians to refuse to participate.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, but like many Christian faiths, it is broadly in decline. The group claimed 12.7 million members in 2024, down 2 percent from the year before.   

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