The Tony Jones Blog at Patheos
Welcome, Washington Post readers. If you’ve read Lisa Miller’s column about my views on marriage, I invite you to read the eBook in which I’ve collected my posts on the matter. It’s $.99 on the Amazon Kindle. It’s about 3,300 words.
If you’re unfamiliar with ebooks, they’re quite easy to read — for instance, you can download a FREE Kindle reading app to your PC, Mac, tablet, or smartphone. (Or, you could buy a Kindle — I was given one as a gift, and I love it!)
This brings me to the end of my series, “There Are Two Marriages.” Before my concluding thoughts, I want to thank so many of you for contributing to the conversation in the comments (and some of you on your own blogs). I’d also like to invite you to join me for a video chat discussion on Google+ at 10am CDT on Thursday, September 15 (tomorrow). If you go to my profile on Google+ at that time, you can join my hangout, and we can talk about these marriage posts.
This is a tricky issue, to be sure. And I’m not sure that I’ve worked through it perfectly.
I am well aware that, in the past, the US government did have an interest in what happens in the bedroom. We learn that in 10th grade when we read The Scarlet Letter. (Yeah, yeah, I know that’s set in colonial America, but it’s a commentary. Get it?) The proliferation of early 20th century American laws against sodomy, adultery, and the like shows that the state did at one time think it could legislate and litigate what citizens did in private.
The Problem for Clergy
Whether one has a high view of ordained clergy, as many of my friends do, or a low view, as I do, performing marriage ceremonies that result in a legally binding contract is an extremely problematic role for a clergyperson to be in. When I was talking to Doug Pagitt about this last week, something became clear to us: there’s a higher bar to being a notary public than there is to being a member of the clergy.
To wit, a notary must pass and exam, take an oath, and renew her license annually. As a result, a notary is able:
to administer oaths and affirmations, take affidavits and statutory declarations, witness and authenticate the execution of certain classes of documents, take acknowledgments of deeds and other conveyances, protest notes and bills of exchange, provide notice of foreign drafts, prepare marine or ship’s protests in cases of damage, provide exemplifications and notarial copies, and perform certain other official acts.
What a notary cannot do is bind two persons in marriage. That’s left to a clergyperson who, in many states, is not even required to prove his ordination or his standing in an ecclesial community.
The Church’s Interest in Marriage
Yesterday, I argued that the state’s interest in marriage has nothing to do with sex. The church, on the other hand, has a great interest in sex between human beings. Put more sensitively, it matters to a pastor whether and how a member in the church is being intimate with another person. That intimacy affects the individual spiritually and emotionally, and intimacy between persons affects the dynamics of the community.
In other words, the church can go where the state cannot — into the bedroom.
A church is a semi-private organization, and as such, it has a vested interest is how its members treat one another. If two members are being sexually intimate, or are considering that kind of intimacy, the other members of that community have a compelling reason to solemnize that intimacy in a ceremony that gives the imprimatur of the community.
Further, the church community carries within it the very designs of God for humanity. The state cannot justifiably speak to God’s design for sexuality and intimacy, but the church can.
The Government’s Interest in Marriage
The State of Minnesota, or any state for that matter, doesn’t care if a married couple has sex, doesn’t have sex, or has sex with partners outside of the spousal relationship. When Anna Nicole Smith married octogenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall, the State of Texas did not care if they ever had intercourse. They were two mentally competent adults who, though 62 years apart in age, were allowed to marry with no questions asked.
As a society, we have decided that the government should stay out of the bedroom. Scarlet letters are no longer stitched to the blouses of adulteresses, and virtually all laws against adultery have been repealed or long-since ignored. Whether a couple consummates their marriage is of no interest to the state — if it were, there would be follow-ups to the issuance of a marriage license — just like you’ve got to pass an eye exam to get your driver’s license renewed every few years, married couple would have to check in with the state and show off their children, or otherwise prove that they were having intercourse.
Marriage Is Not Broken – It’s Changing
Marriage has a long and convoluted history. For most of that history, marriage has been about the acquisition or exchange of property and the production of progeny for the purpose of protecting that property. But, at least in the West, that’s not what marriage is about anymore.
If you look around at popular culture, it seems that marriage is about formalizing and cementing a romantic attraction. Of course, this isn’t much of a justification to bind yourself to someone in the many ways that we do in modern marriage. This has also likely been the reason that so many marriages end these days.
If you ask conservatives who are fighting against the (inevitable) acceptance of gay marriage, they’ll tell you that marriage is primarily about procreation and rearing of children — a booklet handed to me at the Minnesota State Fair by the the anti-gay-marriage people (who were subsequently glitter bombed) goes on at length about how one-man-one-woman marriage is all about the children.
The problem with that argument is that we allow celibate, infertile, post-menopausal, and otherwise non-child-producing couples to get legally married without batting an eye. So, at least according to the government, marriage isn’t really about producing children. It’s about two (oppositely gendered) persons who’d like to legalize their partnership and accrue the 515 benefits afforded to married persons in Minnesota state law (PDF).
See all the posts in this series here.
Historical Background
Christianity has a long and distinguished history of differentiating between the realm of God and the realm of creation. Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world. And the Apostle Paul expands this idea in the book of Ephesians, writing about the spiritual realm as opposed to the physical.
In The City of God, Augustine took the occasion of the fall of Rome to the Visigoths to write a lengthy treatise on the differences between the City of Man and the City of God. Augustine was no fan of the former, and he uses the first dozen chapters of the book to criticize Roman culture, politics, and mores.
A thousand years later, Martin Luther said much the same thing his doctrine of two kingdoms. God rules the earthly kingdom — all secular and ecclesiastical authority — though the imperfect vehicle of humankind. The spiritual kingdom, on the other hand, is ruled exclusively by God’s gospel of grace.
The two realms idea of Augustine and Luther were adopted by political theorists from John Calvin:
There are two governments: the one religious, by which the conscience is trained to piety and divine worship; the other civil, by which the individual is instructed in those duties which, as men and citizens, we are bound to perform.
to John Locke:
There is a twofold society, of which almost all men in the world are members, and from that twofold concernment they have to attain a twofold happiness; viz. That of this world and that of the other: and hence there arises these two following societies, viz. religious and civil.
I got married on July 13. In a church, by a pastor, surrounded by family and friends. We wore wedding clothes. We had a reception. You can see the pictures. It really happened.
But we didn’t make it legal.
This week, in a series of posts, I’m going to try to unpack what I think is a very important point in the debate over marriage in our country right now. People say that marriage is broken, or that marriage is up-for-grabs. Neither is true. Actually, there are two marriages in America.
On the one hand, there’s legal marriage. It’s sanctioned by the state, and it’s available to any two adults who desire to enter into a legally binding contract with one another (some states limit this contractual opportunity to opposite-gendered persons). Legal marriage affords the married couple as many as 515 benefits that are not afforded to non-married persons, and it is officially incentivized by our government. And legal marriage has nothing to do with sexual intimacy.
On the other hand, there’s sacramental marriage, which is defined by communities of faith. This marriage accrues neither governmental benefits nor tax incentives. However, sexual intimacy is of great interest to this marriage, since the sacred texts of all religions have lots to say about sex. Sacramental marriage is about what God wants — and that is, of course, a matter of interpretation and debate among Christians. Nevertheless, it is sacred in a way that legal marriage is not and, as such, it is the more important version of marriage.
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