The interesting politics of marriage

The question as to whether homosexual couples should be allowed to engage in ‘civil marriage’ has caused consternation in the church.

Some faith groups have not only happily welcomed the proposals by the coalition government, but are actively lobbying for it. Quakers, liberal Jews and Unitarians have had meetings with civil servants to discuss the issue.

Last week, the Archbishop of York voiced his disapproval, suggesting a rather unnecessary parallel between dictators and David Cameron.

His argument quoted in the press was primarily that we should not want to redefine very clear social structures that have been in existence for a long time and that "it is not the role of the state to define what marriage is".

The first part of the argument is one based on the authority of history and the need to conserve existing institutions and forms of relationship. But we already have civil partnerships, and while the church upholds that this is not marriage, the social structures that Sentamu is talking about have already been redefined. Given that he doesn’t oppose civil partnerships among his own clergy, this part of his argument is hypocritical.

However the next part is important and cannot be trivially rejected, but it does need more unpacking. It gets complicated because the Anglican Church is established and so has to deal with the awkward nature of its development in relation to marriage and the state. Let’s make some stops on the development of the modern understanding of marriage in church-state relations. What follows is a simplification but will suffice for our purposes.

In around 110 AD we have extracts of a letter from the Bishop of Antioch, Ignatius to the Bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, in which he writes that "[I]t becomes both men and women who marry, to form their union with the approval of the bishop, that their marriage may be according to God, and not after their own lust."

This approach brings marriage into relationship with the church as an institution. The promise a husband and wife make to each other is not just a promise to themselves, their community and a bishop: it is a promise before God.

So far so good. However, in Calvin’s Geneva, at the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, the Marriage Ordinance imposed "the dual requirements of state registration and church consecration to constitute marriage".

In reaction to the Lutheran view that marriage was a worldly good rather than a sacrament, the Council of Trent (during the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation) defined Catholic marriage as "the conjugal union of man and woman, contracted between two qualified persons, which obliges them to live together throughout life".

It required that the marriage ceremony is officiated by a priest and two witnesses. The tension between the role of the church and state in instituting marriage starts to make its presence felt.

In England, and because of the religious tension between Protestants and Catholics the Marriage Act 1753, which was the first instance where marriage was defined in statute, required the ceremony to be held in an Anglican church. Exemptions were made for Quakers and Jews (certain parallels with today immerge), but not for Roman Catholics.

This meant that the Roman clergy would recommend what seems to be a utilitarian solution and sent their parishioners to be married in an Anglican church to get their marriage legally recognised, but to have already had a Roman ceremony. Pragmatic indeed.

Marriage was controlled by the Church of England until the Act of Marriage in 1836 was passed, and introduced the concept of civil marriage. One reaction to the proposal is recorded in the Times, where the then Bishop of Exeter is quoted as having said the act would allow marriage to

“... be celebrated without entering into a consecrated building, may be contracted by anybody, and will be equally valid, whether it takes place in the house of God, or in the house of a registering clerk, one of the lowest functionaries of the state. The parties may take one another for better and for worse, without calling God to witness their plighted troth.”

Here we are then. The two points come to a head. The state has long taken the right to define how marriage functions, while still allowing the church to work its way and honour its view of marriage as to be witnessed by God as defined by Genesis 2:24: ‘A man will leave his father and mother, and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh,’ and in Matthew 19:4-6 where Jesus gives them his personal endorsement saying: ‘what God has joined together, let no one separate.’

This then means that if we Christians argue that marriage is only marriage if recognised by God as he defines it in his revelation to us, then the problem of what we may or may not be blessing depends on our attitude to God’s revelation. This however, pits the tension between sexual orientation, and the relationship between the church, the state and their citizenry in painful tensions. What is clear is that homosexual marriage will clarify the established nature of the Church of England. This is the argument Sentamu should be engaging in.