The Modern Crusade: Understanding Christian Views of Homosexual Marriage

Abstract

In this research project, I set out to investigate the foundation of Christian views concerning homosexual marriage. I analyzed survey data from the 2016 election cycle and sermon contents from two different Baptist churches generated over the past eight years to further my understanding of how Christians across America respond to the notion of homosexual marriage. I hypothesized that the Christian anti-gay movement in America is not holistically motivated by Biblical interpretation, but is also motivated by the morally-traditional views of ideologically conservative Christians. During my research, I found that Christians in survey sample do not have unified views of homosexual marriage. Instead, I found that only certain Christian groups, especially such denominations as Evangelicals and Baptists, were negatively correlated with an approval of homosexual marriage to a statistically-significant degree. Furthermore, after conducting my analyses, I found 1) that there are statistically-significant correlations between multiple independent variables which indicate ideological bias and opinions concerning homosexual marriage and 2) that there is strong evidence to suggest that those independent variables also affect individuals' actual Biblical interpretations, meaning Biblical interpretation would act as an intervening variable between Ideological Bias and Opinions Concerning Homosexual Marriage.