The Southern Baptist Convention has called for overturning the 10-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage as part of a resolution that summarized many of the denomination’s social positions and goals.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, meets annually and votes on statements representing the sentiments of those attending the meeting.

The resolution, which is non-binding on churches but was approved by more than 10,000 Southern Baptists attending the annual meeting in Dallas, also criticized “willfull childlessness” and expressed concern about declining fertility rates.

The resolution also criticized the “normalization of transgender ideology.”

Resolution No. 5, titled “On Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage and the Family,” touched on a variety of issues.

It called for overturning the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide and other court decisions that “defy God’s design for marriage and family,” the resolution said.

“Legal rulings like Obergefell v. Hodges and policies that deny the biological reality of male and female are legal fictions, undermine the truth of God’s design, and lead to social confusion and injustice,” the resolution said.

The resolution included harsh language about fertility treatment methods: “Commercial surrogacy often treats children as products and women as a means to an end, and may entail the destruction of embryonic life, violating the dignity of human life and distorting God’s design for procreation within marriage.”

Another paragraph targeted “the normalization of transgender ideology — especially the participation of biological males in girls’ sports and the medical transition of minors — represents a rebellion against God’s design for male and female, inflicts unjust harm on children and women, employs coercive language control, and undermines fairness, safety, and truth.”

The resolution also urged legislators to embrace traditional family views.

“We affirm the duty of lawmakers to pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life and family — and to oppose any law that denies or undermines what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”

It elaborated on the kinds of laws it wants legislators to pursue.

“We call for laws that affirm marriage between one man and one woman, recognize the biological reality of male and female, protect children’s innocence against sexual predation, affirm and strengthen parental rights in education and health care, incentivize family formation in life-affirming ways, and ensure safety and fairness in female athletic competition.”

For years, the Southern Baptist Convention called for overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed legal access to abortion nationwide. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court did overturn Roe v. Wade, with a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that eliminated what had previously been a federal right to abortion. The laws on abortion are now decided on a state-by-state basis.

With 12.7 million members, the SBC is the smallest it has been since 1974. Still, in 2024, an average of more than 4.3 million people worshipped weekly in a Southern Baptist congregation. There are 46,876 Southern Baptist churches nationwide.

Alabama has the fourth-most Southern Baptists by state: Texas ranks first (2,409,860), then Georgia (1,135,843), Tennessee (1,083,684), Alabama (933,549), North Carolina (884,663), Florida (764,853), South Carolina (602,129), Kentucky (520,424), Virginia (507,760) and Mississippi (502,416).