May 13, 2005

Marriage Wars, Part 4: Get me to the church on time!
by Jeff Langstraat

Actually, don’t make me go anywhere near a church. I’ve already informed most of my family (the parents are gonna be the hardest on this one) that under no circumstances will my funeral be held in a church. Neither will any wedding I might (hypothetically) have. Even if it’s done by a Justice of the Peace in my own backyard, though, I would still be married.

This, then, is the topic for today: Marriage and religion. Oy! It’s not as if we haven’t hashed that one out before. I know, I know. Here we go again. To start, I’m not going to take on any religion’s marriage rules. However, if you’re one of those folks who believes God gave marriage as a fully formed institution to two people named Adam and Eve 6000 years ago, then there’s a lot more that’s above your head than just the arguments I’m making here. It’s not my place to define a particular religion’s approach to marriage, and it’s not the state’s place either. Nor should it be any religious groups place to define the state’s marriage laws. That is my starting point.

Who exactly is doing the marrying?

Because, in the United States, clergy perform so many civil marriages, there is a tendency to conflate religious and civil marriage into one entity. One of the tasks marriage equality proponents have had to tackle is making clear that civil marriage is the goal. We have been successful in some places. (The increasing rates of approval for marriage equality in Massachusetts and New Jersey come to mind.) However, the conflation of religious and civil marriage remains. This signals that there is much work to do.

Part of this work is doing the tedious chore of teasing out the different aspects of marriage. (I call it tedious because it has to be repeated so bloody often.) When a member of the clergy marries a couple, s/he is actually performing two ceremonies simultaneously: the religious marriage rite, the part everyone seems fixated on; and the civil marriage, the one that matters legally. That’s why the line “By the power vested in me by the state of …” is so important. Even if it doesn’t appear in an actual wedding ceremony, this phrase’s place in our cultural imagination reminds us of the state’s central role in regulating marriage. The clergy member is allowed to perform the civil ceremony because the state has invested him/her with the ability to do so. The clergy member is acting as a proxy for the state, as well as a member of his/her religious body.

One significant implication of this is that it undercuts an argument I’ve seen some marriage equality advocates try to make. Their claim is that because the state recognizes some religious marriages (let’s say those from the Catholic Church, where only opposite-sex pairing is acceptable) and not others (say, a Pagan marriage between two women), the state is discriminating against the second religion. That argument doesn’t work. In large part, this is because the Pagan priest(ess) would still be able to perform legal wedding ceremonies; it’s not the religion of the people entering into a marriage, it’s the gender. The state does not recognize any religion’s marriages. Religion is not being considered. There’s quite simply no religious discrimination because there’s no religion being favored. The state only recognizes its own marriages, and it allows clergy to solemnize them as long as the marriage meets the state’s entry requirements. Sorry….

That does bring us to the thornier issue of the religious aspect of marriage. In large part, as I discuss below, a particular religion’s views toward marriage should be fairly irrelevant from the state’s point of view. Here, though, I’d like to deal a little bit with the “marriage is a religious thing” argument.

It is true that many religions (if not most) include some kind of ceremony for joining two (or more) people to form what we might call a marriage. However, the shape, rules, and meanings attached to these relationships varies widely across time and space. The only real constants in a universal history of “marriage” and “the family” would be variety and change.

Any argument that posits “marriage” as a singular entity, unchanged since it was received from the Almighty Himself, is playing on very thin historical and intellectual ice, and should be treated accordingly. There’s one part of it I want to take up here, and that’s the “Marriage is religious.” Above I tackled the issue of religious and civil marriages being combined in one ceremony. That’s one reason for the conflation. People think their religious ceremony is what the state recognizes, failing to remember that the state recognized the ceremony because it was simultaneously a civil ceremony. So, people retain this idea of marriage itself as religious.

There’s another side to this, though, and that’s the argument that the state basically stole control over a religious institution. First of all, marriage is a social institution. There is nothing inherently religious about it. Second, this assumes that religion (in particular, the Church) retained control over marriage from its inception until the state took it away. Not so much, as it turns out:

[Early] Christianity, as we know, wanted nothing to do with marriage for centuries. When asked, some priests might come by and say a blessing as a favor, just as they’d say a blessing over a child’s first haircut. No one considered marriage sacred, as celibacy was: marriage was one of those secular and earthbound forms rendered unto Caesar. But as centuries rolled by, an increasingly powerful Church saw that marriage was central to ordering Europe’s civil and political life—not so much those few called to sainthood, sacrifice and martyrdom, but the many ordinary folk who needed to be told how to behave.

And so, the Church launched a battle for power over marriage’s rules, a battle that lasted roughly a thousand years. Today we have the peculiar impression that Catholicism has always had one vision of marriage, but for every marriage rule eventually imposed on Europe, the Church’s own debates were abundant. It first formally ruled on marriage in 774, when on pop handed Charlemagne a set of writings that defined legitimate marriage and condemned all deviations. After another five hundred years of struggle, the Church came up with a marriage liturgy and imposed it’s new and radical rules—the ballooning incest rules, the one-man-one-marriage rule, and most controversial, the girl-must-consent rule—on the powerful clans…

It was not until 1215 that the Church finally decreed marriage a sacrament—the least important one, but a sacrament nonetheless--and set up a systematic canon law of marriage, with a system of ecclesiastical courts to enforce it--and had a fair amount of people willing to observe those rules. By 1215, the year that the Fourth Lateran Council issued its matrimonial decrees, the Church had “broke[n] the back of aristocratic resistance…after lengthy battles with the nobility, kings included.”

What is Marriage For?
E. J. Graf, pp 195-196.

It took less time for civil authorities, particularly post-Reformation, to begin rebelling against religious controls over marriage than it did for the Church to solidify its thinking on the subject. Again, from Graf’s What is Marriage For?:

Rather [than a sacramental moment], the Protestants insisted, marriage was—by definition—a secular status conferred by an outside authority. No Protestant group had the power to control that public recognition, or was prepared to spend a thousand years building that power. So, they handed off marriage to their running mates for power, the rising nation-states. In 1525 Zurich flatly denied that private vows were valid, instead insisting that a marriage legally [emphasis added] required at least “two pious, honorable and contestable witnesses [The Catholic Church followed suit in 1563]…For the first time in history, individuals and families no longer had the power to say who was married. And the real winners in this marriage battles—the nation-states—didn’t hold back as much as religious authorities might have in using their power over marriage. [p. 201]

On the Puritans’ way to what is now New England, they spent some time in Holland. No doubt, they didn’t enjoy the amenities Amsterdam offers today, but they did pick up a thing or two from their Dutch hosts. Among these things was the notion that marriage was a matter to be left to civil authorities. As Nancy Cott writes:

Secular rather than religious authorization of marriage has been a consistent tradition in the United States….Because the United States established no national church, but said it would separate church and state and observe religious tolerance, state control flourished. The author of the preeminent nineteenth-century legal treatise on marriage and divorce showed his commitment to state authorization by calling marriage a “civil status”.

pp. 5-6

The notion that marriage is religious is only partially right. Marriage has religious components, but societal control over the institution is held by the state, not any religious body. The notion that marriage is inherently religious is patently false. The notion that religious marriage rules should take precedence over constitutional principles when dealing with the issue of marriage rights is absurd.

God in the Public Sphere

Above I laid out a brief sketch in an attempt to untangle some of these relationships. There’s a bigger elephant in the room, though, and that is this: these debates always get into questions surrounding the relationship between church and state, religion and politics. I’m going to try and lay out my own approach to these questions here. They won’t be universally shared, of that I’m sure. Of this, though, I’m also pretty sure: a secular state is one of the best ways to avoid a sectarian society.

Notice, I said a secular state. Many folks will claim that we “Godless, feminist, ACLU, faggot-loving, commie-pinko liberals” want to “purge God from the Public Sphere!” (…cue ominous music and terrifying scream.) Not so. Indeed, I find it ironic that people claim there is no room for God in public life, when I can’t enter the public sphere without being bombarded with God-talk. I may want to have less of it shoved in my face all the time, but I’m not advocating its complete exclusion from society. I do, however, want to purge any deity from the state.

Overall, our society is more secular than perhaps at any time in its history. One explanation for this can be found in its increasing religious diversity, including people who are part of no religious faith. Since the public sphere is where all citizens come together to deliberate on the issues concerning society, an increase in religious diversity would imply there is less people have in common religiously. Other common features may become more important. Commercial interests may create media products tailored to wider rather than narrower audiences. Previous forms of dominant God talk will disappear from the Public Sphere. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. For one, it opens up spaces for people who do not share conceptions of God. If specific God-talk is less prominent, it’s likely because any particular conception of God is less dominant.

So, the proliferation of god-concepts, gods, and godless in American society has influenced the loss of dominance for a particular type of God-talk. That’s not the same as “purging God from the public sphere.” If we think of it in democratic, terms, that result is actually a positive. Different types of (non)God(s)-talk are more prominent than they were in earlier periods. This proliferation is also a reason the state must remain godless.

In a pluralistic society, with a basic freedom being that of religious choice, the state may not play favorites. That’s what Jefferson wrote:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

This wall is intended to protect the practice of religion. To accept one religion’s teaching, solely on religious bases, is to establish that religion. It also potentially serves to interfere in the practices of other people’s religions because the institutionalization of one religion’s pre- and pro-scribed practices may interfere with the pre- and pro-scriptions of another religion. The state isn’t allowed to play religious favorites.

State, and social, respect for religion does not mean allowing religion to set policy. It means not interfering in religious policy. To respect religion is not to impose more restrictive regulations approved by a particular religious group, but to provide wider leeway so people are free to engage in the religious practices they find meaningful.

Another part of the reason the state cannot play religious favorites is that religions deal with issues that are simply out of the purview of the state’s authority. The state and its organizational capacity can only deal with this plane of existence. (It cannot assume there are others.) The metaphysical and supernatural aspects of religion are none of the state’s business. And even in those circumstances when religious concerns involve the here and now (like in certain perspectives that recognize each person’s divinity and the presence of God in the other), such concerns are beyond what the state should worry itself with. The only thing it should concern itself with is the reality we all share, the physical and natural world, without a specific religious understanding of that…the reality and nature of the soul and divinity is none of the state’s business. Arguments based on these assumptions have no role in the state’s policy agenda.

So, to recap what I’ve laid out here:

• While marriage may have a religious component, (society-wide) control over marriage rests with the state. The state does not recognize religious marriages, nor does it place impositions on the marriage rules of religious groups.
  
• Marriage has been a widely varying social institution, and claims of a purely religious origin are highly problematic, to say the least. In the American context, control of marriage has historically been in the hands of civil authorities.
  
• While different religions will arrive at various conclusions dealing with the propriety of allowing queer folks to get hitched, those views should be given no more significance in policy debates than any other. Respect for religion doesn’t mean religion deserves more respect in the public sphere than other perspectives.
  
• Religion and the state are best kept at arms length from each other, in large part because they deal with different issues. Primary concerns of religion (especially the metaphysical aspects) are of no concern to the state; when other shared concerns are involved, though (like behavior pro- and pre-scriptions), the state should provide wider leeway (respecting religious diversity) rather than more restrictive policies.
  

Marriage Wars: The Series

In our previous episodes:

Part 1: Marriage vs. Civil Unions. A discussion of the marriage vs. civil unions debate, with an underlying emphasis that the contemporary political scene, particularly the anti-Gay industry’s dominance within Republican leadership, makes avoiding marriage equality controversies a non-starter.

Part 2: Finessing the Fags. Starting from the point that marriage equality politics are here to stay, I try to lay out an approach for Democrats that allows them to start shaping the debate in ways that don’t fuck over gays and might eventually fuck over Republicans.

Part 3: What’s so Civil about it? Looks at marriage equality’s legal status as a civil right. Includes a discussion of the place of this movement within civil rights movements historically and the propriety of comparisons.

Tune in tomorrow for: What’s love got to do with it?……or……You’re getting what?!

Posted by in Bio-Power, Body, Catholicism, Christian Fundamentalism, Civil Rights, Culture War, Democracy, Domesticity, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, History, Identity Politics, Marriage, Politics, Queer, Religion, Sexual Politics
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Found inMay 13, 2005 02:56 PM

Say it loud, say it proud!