“Divinely Ordained Union of Husband and Wife”
” A Traditional Institution”
“A place where a “consumptive couple do their consuming”
“The weakest contract-at-will”
“A form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided”
“Civil Union”
It seems impossible that these disparate statements could be made about the same institution, and yet, that is exactly the sad situation in which this culture finds itself. After all our history it seems we have come to a place when we no longer know what constitutes marriage.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures there are currently six states that allow marriage licences to be issued to same-sex partners: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York, along with the District of Columbia. California’s licenses have been put on hold but the same-sex marriages that took place before Proposition 8 are still recognized. Five additional states grant same-sex union status and there is much pressure on the national level to force all states to accept any state’s recognition. Yesterday the Pentagon gave permission for chaplains to perform same-sex marriages for gay service personnel.
While all this may seem as if it is suddenly arriving on the scene, Bryce Christiansen, author and teacher at Southern Utah University says we shouldn’t be so surprised.
Far from being some astonishing development reflecting unprecedented new attitudes among homosexuals, homosexual weddings constitute the predictable (not natural, but entirely predictable) culmination of cultural changes that have radically de-natured marriage.¹
He then enumerates the individual attacks on marriage that have occurred in the last generation, initiated not by homosexuals, but by the very people who claim to support the institution-marriage traditionalists.
Once defined by religious doctrine, moral tradition, and home centered commitments to child rearing and gender complementarity in productive labor, marriage has become a deracinated and highly individualistic and egalitarian institution, no longer implying commitment to home, to Church, to childbearing, to traditional gender duties, or even (permanently) to a spouse.²
After the great cultural seismic activity of the 1960’s, through media onslaught, legislation, judicial mandate, erosion of religious underpinnings and personal responsibilities, the culture became more comfortable with” failed” marriages. So comfortable, in fact, that the de facto definition of marriage was no longer, “one spouse for life”, but “one spouse at a time”. A major alteration in the definition of marriage had taken place. All led by those who called themselves traditionalists.
It might have been that the Church, armed with the clear teaching of Scripture on the subject, could have done for our culture what it had done countless times for other cultures – reestablish the essential nature as well as the permanence of the marriage bond. Christ’s teaching in the first 12 verses of chapter 10 of Mark’s Gospel leaves no doubt as to the nature as well as the permanence of marriage.
And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of you heart he (Moses) wrote you this precept.
But from the beginning of creation God made them male and female.
For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to wife;
And they two shall be one flesh.
And then he added that statement heard at countless weddings,“What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”
Yet, rather than finding her voice on the subject, the Church’s silence left the impression that marriage had a malleable quality to it, thus laying the foundation for the current problem.
Silence wasn’t the Church’s only contribution to the problem. Catholic philosopher, David Carlin notes that the clergy began
accommodating to the latest moral and intellectual fashions in the surrounding secular culture. So far from struggling against secularist elements of culture, [they] embraced them, attempting to incorporate them into a ‘modernized’ version of Christianity.³
If the church was not able, or willing, to hold clear definition of it’s own sacraments, and defend those definitions in a hostile culture, there were others who were glad to fill the void. Homosexuals, polygamists,and cultural libertarians are no longer waiting on the side lines to see the foundations crumble further. They saw the opportunity created by the low appraisal of marriage exhibited by the traditionalists and they are presenting their definitions to the culture. As Christensen accurately states,
“It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.” (Emphasis in the original)
So what can be done? Defense of Marriage Initiatives are an appropriate, stop-gap measure. But no solution will have any significance without a rollback of the “progressive delegitimization of marriage” by reestablishing the Biblical standard from the pulpits, in the pews, in our families and personal standards, however personally humbling that might be. Otherwise we had better be prepared to increasingly hear:
“I now pronounce you, man and man.”
“I now pronounce you man and woman and woman.”
“I now pronounce you . . . “
¹Bryce Christensen, “Why Homosexuals Want What Marriage has Now Become”, The Family in America April 2004, p.1
²Ibid
³David Carlin, “Open or Closed Religion?”, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, 10 March,2004 http://www.catholic.net cited in Christensen
Crusaders Church of Bloomington 