The church and marriage--A strange cohabitation

In the 1600s a man named Roger Williams changed the way that we think about government today. A Puritan minister, Williams learned at the hand of Edward Coke, the prominent English lawyer who famously penned The Institutes of the Lawes of England, and also said (perhaps more famously to those outside of the legal world), "An Englishman's home is his castle." Coke would go on to redefine law as we know it today, creating in part how we understand habeas corpus, while Williams would walk a challenging path that would take him to the new world and back.

I just finished reading John M. Barry's Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul, so these thoughts are fresh in my head. I can't imagine a more critical figure to engage on the issues that we face today than Williams, who was faced with an understanding of church and government that was inextricably linked and who managed to courageously shine light on the fatal flaws in that system. He was a man fully of his time with ideas that nonetheless project far into the future. (A quick word on Barry's book: It is a stunning read, very engaging and perhaps the best history book I've ever stumbled upon. So go read it and judge the conclusions for yourself.)

Now, let's get back to the question at hand. No issue more entangles the church and the civil government in our day than the question of marriage. Historically speaking, the church catholic has judged that a man and woman should be joined together in marriage to their mutual benefit, joy and love, reflecting the tradition of couple-hood that emerged from the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve. One man, one woman. Nevertheless, the biblical witness at times allowed--and even blessed--levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25:5-10), polygamy (numerous, i.e. Genesis 30:4-9), marriage with prisoners of war (Numbers 31), and slave marriage (Exodus 21:1-6) to name a few.

The church, however, has focused mainly on the one man-one woman marriage dynamic, even playing a direct and influential role in the religious and civil ceremonies that bring these two together. In doing so, the church has made an ethical and theological statement about who should be participating in the marriage covenant. This much is obvious. But in deciding who can and cannot be married, the church has also made a statement on civil law. Marriage ceremonies put on by the church without a license from the state are null and void. In spite of the ethical and/or theological stance of the pastor, congregation or church body performing a wedding ceremony, the marriage itself requires the state.

Roger Williams would be especially unnerved right about now.

You see, Williams was as devout a Puritan as you would find. In fact, he believed so strongly in keeping the purity of the church that he considered it abhorrent to conflate the religious institutions with the civil government. He believed very strongly that God's will was not justification for a particular form of governmental rule and that history has shown that God does not bless certain theocracies over others--not, in the very least, through political power and earthly blessing. Williams believed all this not in spite of his faith but because of it. He believed that to bring together the church and the state would inevitably corrupt the fabric of the body of Christ of which the church serves as the visible extension on earth.

The modern litmus test for this church-state confrontation stands before us in Minnesota in the form of a marriage amendment. Church bodies and lobbying groups sound identical in their myriad statements. I have received nearly a dozen pamphlets, statements of concern and invitations to conferences in the mail from various organizations representing both the church and civil institutions in an attempt to sway my flock and myself on this issue. And today I confess myself chilled by what my church is doing. You see, I am not just a pastor in the ELCA, concerned by the statements I hear within our ranks, but I am also a member of the church catholic that seems to be talking more and more about the sanctity of marriage and the necessity of the church's role in the political sphere. I am uneasy because I see the church attempting to exert itself in the civil realm to the detriment of everything I believe the church to be.

We can only corrupt the religious realm when we enter into the area of civil law. I believe this as strongly as Roger Williams did in his day. When the church enters the political realm it tends to act offensively rather than gracefully, it tends to profess rather than confess, it tends to preach conformity to God's will rather than God's mercy, it tends to concern itself with keeping the world tidy instead of trusting that God works through the mysterious complexity of creation. When the church and the state mix, the civil governments tends to absorb the church and not the other way around. This is the danger before us today.

Now, don't get me wrong. The church is called to preach against injustice, to call upon others to act in the face hatred, and to call a thing what it is--sin is sin, grace is grace, love is love. But this is to be done outside of the political sphere, certainly not through it.

So go out and vote on a marriage amendment as an individual concerned with the civil law, and by all means let your religious convictions inform that decision, but please--for the love of God--keep my church out of it. We will make no stand, no statement, take no position on the civil matter of the law and instead we will preach Christ crucified and risen, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.