The recent ruling by Judge Vaughn Walker finding California's Proposition 8 to be in violation of the US Constitution has heightened the ongoing national debate over marriage equality. The people who are opposed to marriage equality are outraged by the decision.
This statement from Kelly Boggs of the Southern Baptist Convention is fairly typical in its attempt to portray marriage as an institution immutably fixed by religious tradition.
If you change any aspect of a mathematical or chemical equation, you not only alter the equation, you also affect its outcome. A judge's recent ruling on marriage changes the entire concept of matrimony. If it is allowed to stand, it will also influence the outcome of marriage and its impact on society.
Baptist First Person
But, contrary to Boggs, marriage throughout human history has always been a changing and flexible concept and institution. Both marriage and religion in America have from the colonial period to the present been diverse, changing and controversial.
At some point in the distant past groups of migrant hunter-gatherer humans began to coalesce into more structured societies with fixed customs and rules. Interrelated matters of sexual contact, reproduction, child rearing and property were issues confronting all such societies. Anthropologists attempt to make inferences about the societies of the distant past by studying the pre-agrarian societies to be found at present. That however, doesn't give us any assurances of historical reality.
The first historical documentation we have of the cultural developments which have influenced the western cultures in which most of us have spent our lives come from the development of written language in the Eastern Mediterranean. In Jewish, Egyptian, Greek and Roman societies there were forms of something that can be called marriage. We can find periods in the histories of those societies during which polygamy seems to have been very prevalent. The idea of monogamous/companionate marriage was developing in the Roman world at about the same time as Christianity was emerging. The Stoics among other groups promoted it. It is not an entirely a Christian invention, even though it is explicitly articulated by the New Testament.
Setting aside the fact of religious diversity in American society, the Christian religious heritage alone reveals that the theology of marriage has undergone many changes. It has never been a static institution.
Contemporary conservative Christians who see a need to maintain one man-one woman marriage as the foundation of society in general must gloss over a wide array of attitudes toward marriage in the New Testament, beginning with the significant anti-family perspective found in the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus. The basic picture which emerges from these stories is one in which Jesus calls disciples to form alternative social structures to those of the patriarchal family. Jesus’s command to “call no man father, for you all have one Father in heaven” (Matthew 23:9) undermines the basic social unit in the ancient world in order to establish an egalitarian ethos.
Not marriage, but discipleship is the norm here, a norm which is explicitly counter-cultural. According to Luke 20:34, Jesus says “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” More stridently, in Luke 14, Jesus says “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” However, Jesus also sometimes reaffirms Mosaic commands to honor father and mother. It is possible that Jesus himself had ambivalent or confused ideas about the relation of Jewish law on family to his own form of counter-cultural expression.
Paul similarly sees the Christian community as an alternative social structure to the traditional family, and he is likewise ambivalent about the role of marriage in the Christian community. He sees celibacy as a preferential state, but makes allowances for marriage as a second-best alternative for those who do not have the strength to endure the hardship of sexual abstinence: “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” (1 Corinthians 7:10-11)
In the generation after Paul, Christian communities pulled Paul’s ambivalence about marriage into completely opposite directions. In the non-canonical Acts of Paul and Thecla, a young woman captivated by Paul’s preaching renounces her suitor and defies her parents’ order to marry. She then goes through a series of incidents where men attempt to woo her, but she stands fast in her new independence from patriarchal control and goes on to preach the Christian message and is martyred for its cause. On the other hand, a group of letters written by Christians intent on realigning the Christian community with the mores of the Roman Empire, the Pastoral Epistles of Timothy and Titus, reassert marriage as a qualification for ministry: “Now a bishop must be above reproach, the husband of one wife ... He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way; for if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how can he care for God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:2-5) Because the Acts of Paul and Thecla did not become official scripture and the Pastoral letters ascribed to Paul did, the canonical Bible has obscured the ambivalence in Paul’s teaching about marriage, skewing much harder toward a pro-marriage stance than is warranted. Nevertheless, the diversity of New Testament perspectives on marriage and family means that all Christians of necessity must decide for themselves how they will pursue family life within the bounds of their faith.
Christian theology about marriage continued to evolve and change during the medieval period. It was not until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that marriage was formally declared to be a sacrament by the Catholic Church. Only at the Council of Trent in the 16th century was canon law changed to require the presence of a priest or a deacon at a marriage ceremony for it to be considered sacramentally valid. By that time various Protestant groups were already moving in other directions--de-emphasizing the sacramental nature of marriage, for example.
Marriage In America
The first colonists in North America began to chart their own courses in matters of marriage and family from the beginning. For a few generations beginning in 1630, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay declared marriage to be a civil contract and prohibited the English practice of deputizing members of the clergy to marry people, though eventually the practice crept back in to the New England tradition. Dutch law and custom prevailed in New York. The southern colonies were more influenced by the customs of the Church of England but they leaned more in the direction of mutual contracts than English law. In general in most places it was only the well-to-do that went to the trouble and expense of legal contracts and formal ceremonies. For people pushing back the frontier common law marriage was the more likely course. Marriage customs and practices in colonial America and in the early days of the republic were characterized by a very high level of diversity. In contrast to the structured practices in Europe, America generally observed no clear line between the religious and the civil. In practice marriages came into existence by virtue of the recognition of the couple's neighbors that a marriage existed.
During the colonial period in America, church and state in metropolitan Britain were moving toward more structured rules for marriage that applied only to England and Wales. The Marriage Act of 1753 was intended to curtail the practice of clandestine marriage. This Act required that, for a marriage to be valid and recognized by the state, it had to be performed in an Anglican church by an Anglican priest in the presence of at least two witnesses. The ceremony also had to be registered, and could not take place without either advance notice (in the form of reading out the banns for a stated period before the celebration of the marriage, or by securing a license that allowed the holder to waive one or more of the Act’s requirements). The Act did not apply to Jewish marriages or those of Quakers, whose marriages continued to be governed by their own customs, but were nevertheless recognized under English law. No other marriages were recognized--including those of Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, or any other Protestant denominations except the Quakers and the Church of England.
Nancy F. Cott was one of the witnesses for the plaintiffs in the recent Prop 8 trial. In her book Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation she describes a picture of great diversity in American marriage practices. While people’s attitudes toward the institution were certainly influenced by religious beliefs and traditions, American law and custom has always had a strong tendency to provide means of marriage outside the formal structure of organized churches.
The issuance of a formal license to marry is a fairly recent innovation. Marriages practices were so unstructured that even in states that had passed laws prohibiting inter-racial marriages, they were openly tolerated in various communities. Beginning in the middle of the 19th century the first laws requiring a license to enter into a legally valid marriage, primarily for the purpose of blocking inter-racial marriages, were adopted in some states. They were unknown prior to that. In 1923 Congress adopted the Uniform Marriage and Marriage License Act which went into national effect in 1929. It was only at that point that they became a general requirement.
Religious diversity was enshrined in the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. With the passage of time more and more people have chosen to exercise the option of not being religious. Thus American society has always been a mosaic of people from different cultures following different customs. Historically Christianity has enjoyed a dominant position.
Laws regulating marriage and family relations have generally been the province of state rather than federal law. Monogamy as promoted by most of the Abrahamic faiths was clearly the expectation of most of the European immigrants who composed the dominant majority in the new nation. From the early days of the new republic tensions have been growing between the proponents of the diverse religious traditions and the developing civil law. The various states were influenced by their residents to follow differing paths. There are several issues that have been the subject of legislative debate and law through out the nation's history. Divorce, marital property, the rights of wives, and inter-racial marriage have all followed different paths in different states.
George W. Bush made the following statement in announcing his proposed campaign to pass a constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage,
"After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence, and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization. Their actions have created confusion on an issue that requires clarity."
This statement is a clear contradiction of what has been the historical reality about marriage and the law in the US. It is an institution that has always been in a contentious process of change.
Religion and Inter-racial Marriage
The very first marriage to take place in a British colony in North America was an inter-racial marriage. It was in Jamestown between Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Inter-racial marriage had not been an issue in England since there was very little in the way of diversity there. However, it did become an issue in Virginia and other southern colonies. In 1662, Virginia doubled the fine for fornication involving persons of different races. In 1664, Maryland became the first colony to ban interracial marriages. By 1750, all southern colonies, plus Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, had outlawed interracial marriages.
This was not a matter of the state following previously established religiously established practices. It was basically a civil creation. By the 1920s 38 states had anti-miscegenation laws. After WW II they began to be repealed outside of the south. The famous case that ultimately resulted in a Supreme Court opinion declaring all such laws unconstitutional was the trial of the Lovings who were an inter-racial couple in Virginia. The statement made by the Virginia trial judge captures the essence of the religious position that had been developed by southern protestant churches to support the practice.
Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
Those churches have of course now repented of this position. At the time people in the south thought that this decision would destroy the very institution of marriage.
Marriage and Gender Equality
The colonists that came to North America did bring with them very firm laws and traditions on the relationship between husbands and wives. English common law which was eventually incorporated into US law followed the doctrine of coverture. It considered the wife to be a femme covert which meant that her legal identity and her rights to independent legal status became subsumed beneath her husband's legal identity. Church and state shared a common position on this matter.
American law began a very long and tortuous road toward gender equality that slowly and reluctantly modified and relaxed these strictures. Today US marriage and property law generally views marriage as a full and equal partnership between the two parties. It allows for dissolution of marriage by mutual consent. This is at some variance from many traditional positions on marriage. Here for example is the present position of the Southern Baptist Convention on marriage.
God has ordained the family as the foundational institution of human society. It is composed of persons related to one another by marriage, blood or adoption.
Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. ... The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God's image. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation... Children, from the moment of conception, are a blessing and heritage from the Lord. Parents are to demonstrate to their children God's pattern for marriage.
SBC
Who Speaks For Religion In America?
Religious institutions are by their nature and function somewhat conservative. One of their purposes is to preserve basic core values and teachings and pass them on to new generations. They also have the function of adapting those values to assist people in meeting new challenges and circumstances. At any given historical point some religious groups focus more on preservation of tradition while others focus on life in a changing world.
At this point in the US we have a broad spectrum of religious views on the areas related to gender and human sexuality. The formal governing bodies of the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka Mormons, are three denominations that have been very visible in promoting decidedly socially conservative positions in the American culture wars. They formed a politically active coalition in the campaign to pass Prop 8. In rather sharp contrast there are other churches that have been more willing to adapt their practices to changing views about gender and sexual orientation. The Episcopal Church and The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have all made substantial changes in their practices in recent years. Both have now opened all levels of their clergy to women and gays and lesbians. There is an increasing acceptance of various forms and ceremonies for the blessing and validation of gay and lesbian partnerships. While none of these groups have yet taken the step of equating those partnerships to full matrimony, that step is being openly discussed and the prospect of its eventual occurrence seems plausible.
The United Church of Christ has a long history of LGBT advocacy, including advocacy for marriage rights. In 2005, the general synod adopted the resolution "Equal Marriage Rights for All". Because of the governance process of the denomination, the policy about equal marriage is determined at the congregational level. Some ministers and congregations may enthusiastically support marriage equality, while others may firmly reject it. The General Synod, aware of the diversity in views, included in the resolution language calling for congregations to engage in education and dialogue about marriage equality. UCC LGBT Ministries has developed extensive resources to facilitate this process such as the seminar, Called to Equality. ( http://www.ucccoalition.org/... ) "
So, do the conservative voices who claim that the very idea of marriage equality in civil marriage is an offense to religious values have the right to speak for religion in America? That really doesn't seem to be a defensible position. Religion in America is, and always has been, a very diverse proposition. Within all of the church organizations mentioned above there are voices of dissent on the official positions. There are Roman Catholics who firmly support marriage equality and full gender inclusiveness. There are conservatives who are pulling out of the Episcopal Church. The answer to the question is that there is no such thing as a single American religious position. American civil institutions, including marriage, are ultimately controlled by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
All citizens, be they religious or non-religious have a civil right to engage in the political debate over marriage equality and to attempt to persuade others of the validity of their views. However, the contention that marriage is something that by its essential nature that cannot be changed simply does not hold up under historical scrutiny. It has been changed many times and in many ways and it surely will be again.
This diary was prepared by a religious issues sub-group of GLBT and Friends at Daily Kos. The members are:
commonmass
dirkster42
BFSkinner
mofembot
musing85
penny8611
smellybeast
Richard Lyon
sbereldkos
We will be exploring other issues and producing more diaries related to LGBT issues and religion.