A church wedding for a secular couple. Guest Post by Nick Thorne.

There is something strange about an increasingly common phenomenon: secular couples having church weddings. Of course there’s a certain logic to it – many couples who hold no religious beliefs still feel that a church is the proper place for a wedding. Family expectations of a traditional wedding can exert pressure. For most people in Britain today the church plays no significant role, and more often than not, the desire to have a church wedding stems from a conservative taste in décor and an insistence on tradition, rather than from any religious sentiment. Understandably, churches resent merely being used as a pretty venue, and as they have what the couple wants, they use their advantage to insist on keeping some of the religious formalities. This creates an absurd situation in which just about everyone concerned is obliged to say things that they don’t mean, on an occasion for which honesty is absolutely crucial. 

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It begins with the rule that you have to be a member of the parish in order to be married in that particular church. Many secular couples will not be a part of any parish and have often not been to church for years. In order to be allowed to get married in church, they have to turn up on a Sunday for a certain period before their wedding. That seems fair, but what does it actually achieve? The priest has to pretend to be convinced by the couple’s religious fervour, despite knowing full well that in virtually every case, the couple will never set foot in the church again after their wedding. And the couple know that they are deceiving the priest, an uneasy feeling to have during their wedding preparations.

During the church service itself on the wedding day the priest introduces the party to a short overview of Christian teaching on marriage. There’s a vague allusion of the commitment to have children, but there’s certainly no mention of St Paul’s teachings in the New Testament, that a man should strive for celibacy. While it’s a step forward that such fundamentalist texts have been quietly dropped, you’re left wondering whether there is anything specifically “Christian” in the priest’s preamble at all. And if there isn’t, why bother with the whole charade in the first place?

In the marriage vows, the couple have to repeat after the priest, that they are entering into a union together in the presence of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This seems somewhat problematic if the couple in question doesn’t hold a Christian belief. A marriage has to be founded on an honest commitment between two people – a system which forces the couple to begin their life together by professing a belief they do not hold is absurd. 

It will be interesting to see how this phenomenon evolves over the coming decades. As the older generation passes away, the proportion of religious believers and church goers will decrease further, but many will still like the idea of a church wedding. Perhaps churches will become even laxer in the demands they place on secular couples. Perhaps certain Christian denominations or priests will allow their churches to be used for secular weddings, or communities will be able to purchase or take over churches as they become vacant. In any event, it is difficult to see how the strange contradictions of church weddings for secular couples can continue much longer.

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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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