Sacramental Marriage, Civil Marriage & "Family Values"

Marriage and family values. They used to be positive and uncontroversial terms. No longer.



The first thing we need to do is establish that what the Church means by marriage is very different from what the state means when it uses that term. Likewise, we need to make it very clear that "family values" is not a euphemism for "anti-gay".



A great deal of the problem we face in the debates of the decades long "cultural war" that has raged in this country is the twisting of words and terms into euphemisms for things that are very different from what they appear to describe. "Pro-choice" has come to mean "Pro-abortion", "liberal/progressive" has come to mean intolerant and anti-traditional, "adult" can often mean pornographic, and "enhanced interrogation" means torture.



Likewise the matter of "marriage"--a term that has been reduced to mean a sexual relationship in which the partners have legal claims to one another's property and persons--inheritance, medical decisions (under certain circumstances), etc. Now, on one level, this is what marriage has always meant--to the State. But it is most definitely NOT what it means to the Church. The problem is that when believers and secularists get into arguments over the issue, they are talking past one another.



For the state, since ancient times, the venerable institution of marriage existed to establish clear lines of inheritance and authority within a family unit. And for centuries this understanding worked relatively well for Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians whose understanding of marriage was quite different than the State's. The State's limited and concrete concerns and the Church's supernatural and mystical concerns were able to coexist harmoniously within the context of a single term.



The truth is that this coexistence ended a long time ago--long before the advent of "gay marriage".



Since the nineteen sixties, with greatly eased divorce laws in most Western countries, it has become increasingly common for individuals to marry and divorce--sometimes multiple times, or, simply to live in a sexual relationship without even the pretence of "legality". We are speaking about heterosexual relationships here. In many cases the children of two or three (or even more) marriages/relationships might live in the same household with an ever changing kaleidoscope of "mothers" and "fathers". Serial monogamous relationships, with or without legal blessing, have become 'normal' in most American communities--even in purportedly religious parts of the country like the "Bible Belt" of the deep south.

Any complementarity between the State's idea of marriage and the Church's has long since eroded away. The debate over "gay marriage" and the soon to come debate over "plural marriage" (don't believe me--just wait!) is merely the natural result of a deeper crisis that extends back at least a half century.

The best thing the Church could do at this point is to separate itself entirely from the State when it comes to discussing the various forms of civil unions that the states recognize and concentrate on coming up with a clearer explanation of sacramental marriage, which will at the same time clarify our position on the meaning of gender and family structures. To state that we have our work cut out for us is to put it mildly!

The first thing we need to do is to literally divorce ourselves from the State! By this I mean that Orthodox clergy ought to petition their bishops to be advocate a complete separation of the sacramental/mystical marriage that is performed in the Church from the civil union that is performed by the State. Our clergy should not operated as agents of the state! As is common in Europe, let those who wish to "marry" according to the state's notion of the term do so at a local courthouse or town hall. If they wish to enjoy the blessing of the Church, then let them make arrangements with their priests to have a sacramental union. If we were to do this we would move in the right direction of letting the public know that what we mean by marriage and what the State means by marriage are not one and the same. But, if most people continue to get married in Churches by pastors who are also acting as State agents by signing marriage certificates and attesting that State regulations have been lawfully applied, how can we blame anyone for being confused about the difference between the two fundamentally different (an now even opposed) understandings of what is happening? Of course, some religious denominations are in full sync with the State and will be happy to continue to act as its agents. They are not Orthodox.

The next thing we need to do is to educate our own people on the "mystery" of marriage--which is described as an image of the relationship between God and the Church in both the Old and the New Testaments. The "husband" image of the God of Israel in the Old Testament to His (often unfaithful) wife is made even more explicit in the New Testament where the enfleshed God in Christ is seen as the Bridegroom of the Church (Ephesians 5). Understand that human marriage and human sexuality are images of a deeper divine mystery. One of the great crises of our times for the Church is to explain that gender has MEANING and that this meaning is rooted in Divine self revelation. Part of the problem is that the Church has never had to clearly explicate this understanding because it was not under attack. Now it is and, as we had to deal with issues of the divine/human natures in Christ and the Threefold Oneness of God in the past, so now we will have to more clearly explain the mystery of gender today.

Fundamentally, the mystery of marriage in Orthodox Christianity is rooted in the mystery of a paradox--that of otherness and sameness in union. Clearly men and women are equally human (the same), but they are also mysteriously "other". This is not only an obviously physical fact, but a spiritual fact. We are "psycho-somatic" beings--we partake of both matter and spirit--on every level. The current age's attempt to reduce everything to material determinism in one direction and individual choice in the other, aside from being insane, has obscured the mystery of unity and differentiation between creation and the uncreated (God) and among creatures--particularly among human beings. St. Paul speaks of the union of a man and a woman in marriage as a "great mystery" (or, a "great sacrament").

Likewise, the order (taxis) of "headship" in a family--husband/wife; father/mother/children is rooted in the order of the Trinity, where the Father is "first" and "source" while being equal to the Son and the Holy Spirit. This, too, is a "great mystery/sacrament" which is virtually unacknowledged and untaught by most Orthodox pastors when they prepare men and women for marriage. Why? Perhaps because we don't understand it ourselves because we have absorbed the pseudo-scientific theories we were indoctrinated with in the schools and because, like everyone else, we are creatures of the times. The seminaries in this country certainly haven't been up to the task of confronting this issue--perhaps the fundamental pastoral issue of the age.

So, what about "gay marriage", the politics of "gender identity", and "family values"?

Well, the first is simply non-existent within the mystical framework of Christian marriage (like polygamy and other "choices"). We need to stop fighting about it and get out of the business of being State agents. If the State wants to recognize multifold forms of what it calls marriage then we might bemoan the fact that it causes some confusion to untrained ears and get on with the business of distinguishing between Orthodox Christian marriage and state sanctioned civil unions (homosexual, heterosexual, and multiple).

The second (gender identity) is a subject worth and Ecumenical Council! But we need to start challenging the prevailing "science" with some real theology here. Writers like Father Thomas Hopko, former dean of St. Vladimir's seminary have begun to tackle this issue and we can expect more to arise as time goes on.

The third (family values) is intimately tied in with the first two, but the ultimate model for any and all relationships among human beings is that of the Holy Trinity. In no place is this more true than in marriage and the family.

So, in the end, we need to reformulate the debate within the context of our own community of believers and accept the fact that the non-believing (or barely believing) world outside the Church has an entirely different agenda. If we debate the issues on the terms of those outside the community we will always come out looking like fools.

Does this mean that we are to drop out of the public debate? Absolutely not. We simply need to reframe it and be explicit about what we are doing. At this point we are talking about mission and conversion--which is to say, doing the business of the Church. Again, it is a matter of taking charge of the debate using our own terms and norms and conveying this to our own people and to the world at large.