The Irony and the Ecstasy: Church Losing Grip on Marriage
Pacific News Service, Commentary, Fenton Johnson, Posted: Feb 19, 2004
Editor's Note: The lines of cheerful same-sex couples waiting to get hitched in San Francisco shows that the battleground of the gender wars has shifted from sex to love.
Every priest and politico takes for granted that she or he knows what we mean when we say "marriage," but some definition of terms will help. The most unqualified definition comes, not surprisingly, from the Roman Catholic Church, which declares that two individuals -- OK, a man and a woman -- establish the sacrament of marriage when they have sex. The priest enters the picture to "celebrate" the marriage -- that is, to declare and bless in public what has or will be ratified in private. No sex, no marriage, which is how generations of royalty made their cases for annulment of inconvenient couplings. Since in the absence of witnesses penetration was almost impossible to prove, the contention that a marriage had not been consummated provided an escape route for kings and princes eager to shed their wives.
The definition points up the irony of the current battle over same-gender marriage. Long ostracized as outcasts -- only recently was same-gender sex unequivocally declared outside the realm of state punishment -- we gays and lesbians are now petitioning the state to ratify our relationships. Meanwhile, in supporting efforts to make marriage an institution defined by the state, the church is arguing against its own theology, as well as conceding that it has lost once and for all the power to define marriage. Unable to enforce increasingly outdated and impractical prescriptions on sexual behavior, the church pressures the state to step in -- relying on political manipulation to replace its squandered moral authority.
Which is unfortunate, because that ancient conception of marriage as ratified in the fact of mutually agreeable sexual congress has much to be said for it. Imagine, for example, if instead of preaching sin and damnation regarding what its own theology recognizes as an extraordinary gift, the clergy focused instead on the importance of mutual respect and affection between sexual partners. Instead of condemning same-gender sex, what if the clergy spoke instead of the responsibility to recognize the power inherent to all sexual expression, and the importance of using that power with restraint and consideration?
I am not advocating abstinence, though from my experiences as a battle-scarred veteran of middle-aged dating I have come to appreciate the usefulness of Victorian notions of intentionality -- i.e., that a man should consider and declare his intentions before acting on them. Writing as a fairly regular churchgoer, I would be thrilled to hear a sermon addressing the role of thoughtfulness in dating rituals. After nearly 20 years of teaching college undergraduates, I know they are far more likely to listen to someone who speaks of tenderness and grace than someone who speaks of mortification and hell.
Roman Catholic sociologist the Rev. Andrew Greeley recently drew attention to surveys that indicated that today's younger priests are more conservative and more doctrinaire than their recent predecessors. This is hardly surprising, since for over 20 years the Roman church has discouraged seminarians whose views vary from its increasingly conservative party line. The result is a clergy more concerned with preserving and enhancing temporal power than with helping its congregants sort our ways through emotional and spiritual challenges.
In the ideal, I would prefer to hear these questions engaged in the pulpit rather than the legislature. I am aware of the abuse of power that followed the medieval church's seizure of monopoly on the definition of marriage, and I see good reason to believe that vesting similar power with the state will ultimately produce similar abuses. In the ideal, I would prefer, as then-Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano suggested during that state's same-gender marriage brouhaha, that the state get out of the marriage business altogether. I can imagine instead a system in which the state would recognize its stake in stable households by using monetary incentives and rights of adoption and citizenship to reward those relationships, whatever their composition, that demonstrated longevity. Under this model, society would leave the definition and consummation of marriage where it belongs, i.e., between the persons involved, who might or might not seek church sanction.
But we live in the world of realpolitik, and the images of the lines of cheerful couples lined up outside San Francisco's City Hall have convinced me that the shift in the battlefield of the gender wars from sex to love is a good one. What will be left to gays and lesbians is the challenge of retaining our historical commitment to affirming the widest range of community participation, including that of unmarried people, whom mainstream culture so often ignores or ostracizes -- witness the current presidential campaign, in which no candidate's definition of family includes single people. As for the clergy, they might take their cue from the gay community -- shifting the object of their attention from the bathhouse to the family, defined as the embodiment and expression of love.
PNS contributor Fenton Johnson is author of "Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey Among Buddhist and Christian Monks" (Houghton Mifflin).
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