Lie back & think of England: the church, the state & all the interesting bits of gay marriage

"Religion in its quintessence is a relation between God and man; it is perversion to make it a relation between man and man…"  - A Modern Utopia, H.G. Wells

My brother became a swinger, recently.

That is, he’s joined a swing dance club at uni with a lady friend of his. Once upon a social gathering, Group A were making much of this as a topic of fun, as any right minded group of friends and siblings would do. Group B were digesting the momentous-whether-you-like-it-or-not news that the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill  - which proposes to introduce gay marriage in England and Wales - had been approved by the House of Commons by a pretty nifty margin of votes. One of the people at said gathering, not so heartened at the news as myself, got their conversational wires a bit crossed. The new law, they said, was like if my brother decided that he wanted to dance only with men, so everyone else in the club had to as well. Rubbish, said we, as quite clearly the proposed laws merely make it possible that he can do so if he so chooses, whilst taking an important step toward stopping the objections of others from preventing him. The new law allows those denominations at are okay with it – Quakers, Liberal Jews, Unitarians etc – to hold same sex marriage ceremonies in their places of worship. But - in what is a messy but entirely appropriate compromise by a state in terms of meeting the needs and aspirations of two of its constituent communities - other religious groups that have objections are exempt.

Now, we could rehash the tired arguments about scriptural support or condemnation for homosexuality and so on. However, I propose we could acknowledge that marriage - whatever certain people have construed it to have been – is now both a religious and a civil construct. Rightly, the secular state has decided it’s not its job to decide one way or another if a given religious group should permit such a thing. Rather, it has laid the groundwork so that they can, if they feel they can get on board with what most people clearly regard as an idea whose time has come (also, this).

For me, there’s a more interesting nugget of religious-flavoured intrigue in the devilish detail of the new law.  

 

 While in theory it’s up to individual religious groups – or their high level decision making bodies – to choose, the law actually specifically bans the Anglican Church from performing same sex marriages. The reason for this special mention is that as the Established, ‘official’, church it is intertwined with civil structures, and may thus have been open to legal claims that it is bound to marry all-comers. Given that the bill still has to make its way through the House of Lords, it’s worth pointing out a specific form of this state-church fraternisation. The House of Lords includes 26 bishops of the Church of England, the so-called Spiritual Peers, or Lords Spiritual. Even if we leave aside the issue of an unelected upper house, a majority of polled Britons disagree with the political power vested in these bishops.

 

Indeed, the distribution of faiths or no-faiths as revealed in the recent census (See Table, below) would seem to beg the question of whether it is appropriate or representative for not only a single religion, but a single denomination, to have access to the legislature by right. Representatives of other faiths have beenappointed to the House of Lords, but none are there by right in the same way, and in any case I’m not sure sharing out the suspect entitlement is necessarily the best way to approach this issue. 25% of 26 Lords Spiritual of No Religion, anyone? Rather, the million dollar question is how comfortable you feel with the idea that anyone should automatically get to play a direct role in matters of state, purely on the basis of which church they represent? 

Christian	Buddhist	Hindu	Jewish	Muslim	Sikh	Other Religion	No Religion	Religion Not Stated
59.3	0.4	1.5	0.5	4.8	0.8	0.4	25.1	7.2

 

Percentage of People in England and Wales that Identify as a given religion (or lack thereof)

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