Bible Website: Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Tops Trump’s Win In Searches For “End Times”

The Chicago Tribune reports:

As the 2016 presidential campaign built to a fever pitch during the summer and fall, then reached a widely unexpected conclusion with Donald Trump’s win, many people speculated — some jokingly and some with real concern — about whether the end times were near. But it turns out, according to data published by Bible Gateway on Tuesday, that the election didn’t cause the very most alarm about the end times in recent years. Gay marriage did.

When the Supreme Court decided in Obergefell v. Hodges on June 26, 2015, that gay marriage is legal nationwide, searches on the popular Bible website for “end times” climbed rapidly, peaking June 29 with significantly more searches than any other time in the past three years.

Readers looked at more than 1.7 billion excerpts of the Bible on Bible Gateway in 2016. Jonathan Petersen, the website’s marketing manager, told The Post that the site couldn’t share the exact number of searches for a given term, but more than five times the average number of people searched “end times” after the gay marriage decision came out. After the presidential election last month, on the other hand, three times as many people as usual looked up the Bible verses about what the end of the world might look like.