Separation of (Christian) Marriage and State

That seems to be what Daniel A. Crane, writing at Christianity Today, is advocating. Evangelicals are making a mistake, he says, in treating the controversy over same-sex marriage as a battle for the heart and soul of marriage. A better choice, he says, would be to more sharply distinguish civil marriage and ecclesiastical marriage:

Jesus’ treatment of the marriage issue is significant because it recognizes that the spiritual institution of marriage is quite distinct from the legal institution of marriage—even though the legal institution is directly ordained by God. …



The harms of equating the spiritual and legal institutions are large. Even if a union between the two were possible in a theocracy, it certainly wouldn’t be possible in a pluralistic democracy where hearts are arguably harder than they were in Moses’ day. The two institutions cannot merge, but what happens when the church treats them as though they were merged?

Sadly, recent history reveals the answer. Years ago many Christians began to view marriage solely through the legal lens. If no-fault divorce is the rule of the day, then Christians find it easier to break their marriage vows whenever they feel so inclined.

The example of divorce suggests that Christians have already lost much ground on marriage and the family by failing to distinguish secular family law clearly from God’s perfect plan for man and woman. This is why it is alarming to see many Christians insist that defeating legal recognition of same-sex marriage is necessary to preserving the institution of marriage. If that is true, it must be because marriage owes its definition and legitimacy to the state—a proposition that Jesus squarely denied and that should frighten anyone who takes seriously the Genesis prescription.



Paul J. Griffiths made a similar argument from a Catholic perspective in Commonweal a while back:

What is this alternative [to opposing civil same-sex unions] scenario? It is one in which the church’s practice of marriage gets increasingly disentangled from the legal regulation of civil unions by the state. It is very likely that the present deep entanglement of the two has acted as a solvent upon Catholic marriage practices. Sacramental Catholic marriage is already understood and practiced by most U.S. Catholics on the civil model of a contract dissolvable at the will of either partner. The almost non-existent difference between the divorce and separation rates of Catholics and non-Catholics serves as some evidence for this. When, as is now the case, civil marriage is acknowledged by the church and sacramental marriage is recognized by the state, it is difficult to see how things could be otherwise. Civil marriage is pagan, and this has increasingly meant that American Catholic marriage practices have become pagan as well.

Progressive disentanglement of the two, to the point, finally and ideally, where they have nothing to do with one another, is what Catholics may-and in my view should-now advocate. This should eventually mean that civil marriage on the dissolvable-contract model would not be acknowledged by the church; it might also mean that sacramental marriage would not be recognized by the state. The fundamental point is that the contract law governing civil marriage should become additional to and conceptually and practically separable from the church’s sacramental practice of marriage. Such an upshot would provide plenty of interesting difficulties for the church’s canon lawyers to sort out-and no doubt also for the state’s civil and constitutional lawyers. It would also create interesting and probably positive effects upon the church’s practices with respect to remarriage after divorce.



As the institutions of civil society move further away from a traditional understanding of marriage and the family, I think we can expect to see more of this kind of argument. This is similar to the case made by thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas that the West is increasingly a “post-Christian” culture, and that Christians should return to their roots as a minority living an explicitly “coutercultural” lifestyle. In a world of no-fault divorce and individualism, that might mean more strictly distinguishing Christian marriage and its demands of lifelong monogamy from its secular counterpart.