With
the Archbishop of York firing a first shot across the bows of the Prime
Minister over same-sex marriage last weekend, there is a theme emerging from
opponents of the idea - the premise that
you can't change marriage.
According to the Archbishop, it is not "the role
of the state to define what marriage is. It is set in tradition and history and
you can’t just [change it] overnight, no matter how powerful you are."
The
Archbishop is undeniably right of course, when he points to our current
understanding of marriage being "a relationship between a man and a
woman" but what he fails to acknowledge is that definitions,
understandings and laws relating to marriage have been constantly changing
through human history, biblical history, and church history.
If
we go back to the bible, we find that for the bulk of biblical history,
marriage was polygamous and many wives were a sign of male success. Jesus never openly put an end to this model
of marriage and yet it is a model which few would advocate today - our
understanding of marriage has changed dramatically from the examples of
scripture.
Then
there are those family relationships where marriage is forbidden in the Book of
Common Prayer. Few people are aware that
they have changed over the years.
My
grandfather married his wife's sister after being widowed despite this being
forbidden in older copies of the Prayer Book.
From a theological understanding of marriage, the practise of a man
marrying his wife's sister was
considered wrong under Canon Law, and was formally prohibited by parliament in
the 1835 Marriage Act. It soon became a
matter of some controversy. An attempt
to revoke this law in 1842 was defeated by strong opposition, and it was not
until 1907 that the Government finally permitted such marriages in the 'Deceased
Wife's Sister's Marriage Act'. The issue was still so controversial that individual
clergy were permitted to refuse to conduct such marriages - an interesting
parallel in today's debates about same-sex partnerships.
So when the
Archbishop asserts that it is not for the state to define the scope of
marriage, it is a selective view of history at best.
Divorce and
remarriage is another example. Civil
marriage after divorce has been widely available in England since the 1857
Matrimonial Causes Act and further widened in 1937 and 1969. Yet it was not until 2002 that the Church of
England embraced a clear policy which formally allowed marriage in church after
divorce. Once again the understanding
and practice of marriage in law has changed with the church lagging behind the decisions
of the state.
But perhaps the
most shocking examples of changes in beliefs about marriage come from elsewhere in
the world. In the United States laws
against interracial marriage, underpinned by traditional Christian teaching,
were still in force until 1967 when a landmark case at the Supreme Court
finally declared them unconstitutional.
The case was brought to challenge the conviction of Mr and Mrs Loving,
who were dragged from their bed in the middle of the night after crossing the
state border to get married in more liberal Washington DC.
The judge who
sentenced them to a year in jail famously declared that God created the races
and placed them on separate continents which "shows that he did not intend
for the races to mix".
Such ideas
about race and marriage are hard for us to understand today but they were
deeply held and underpinned by theological argument. This theology of race and marriage has its
roots in the preaching of church leaders who opposed the abolition of
slavery. Theologians like Robert Lewis
Dabney truly believed that the abolition of slavery was the first step to
'amalgamation' which he described as a 'abhorrent' word. As far as he was
concerned the mixing of races was something which the Bible forbade and such marriages
should be prevented at all costs.
Nor are such beliefs dead and buried
in US churches today. As recently as
December last year, Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church, in Kentucky, voted to
prevent interracial couples from becoming members or taking part in any
services. The Pastor of the church said,
“I am not prejudiced against any race of people, have never in my lifetime
spoken evil about a race... I do not believe in interracial marriages."
So whose role is it to define marriage?
Is it really the Church in all its conflicted diversity? Is marriage really 'set in tradition and
history' as the Archbishop of York believes, even when history shows a
continually changing landscape in both spiritual and temporal spheres? Is marriage really an area where the state has
no jurisdiction, despite evidence to the contrary?
What we need in the Church of England is theological debate and prayerful
reflection on the nature of marriage, rather than knee-jerk reactions to
government initiatives. At the present
time, the debate is almost entirely sociological and political, which is why
the church is getting left behind. Our
theology of marriage has changed over the centuries and this is the next change
we need to consider.
Perhaps that debate should start with the words of Mildred Loving whose
legal challenge finally legalized interracial marriage in the USA. "I think marrying who you want is
a right no man should have anything to do with. It's a God-given right,"
