Gay Marriage and the War on Religion

The news is abuzz this morning about President Obama’s announcement that he supports the idea of Gay Marriage.  I’d prefer to stay out of the brouhaha that will roil for several months over this, but at least some scattered attempts at adding clarity to the emotional muddle are needed, and there are times when taking stands really are important.  It’s really important to recognize that the public issue is so complex because it’s really four (or more) issues tangled together – a theological issue, a church/state separation issue, a socioeconomic issue and an emotional issue, each of which is itself complex.

As it turns out, in my analysis, my own view on the theological issue (and yours) is not particularly relevant to the public issue.  That is because, in my view, theology is a set of languages for speaking about the Sacred, each imbedded in a different culture with different words for expressing what may actually be very similar things.  We each in our own groups speak a kind of theological argot which frequently causes us to talk past each other. An example is the silliness surrounding the use of “Allah” versus “God”; both are the same concept expressed in different cultures.  Those misunderstandings are unlikely to change over any short time frame, and Baptists, Episcopalians and Buddhists will continue to charge each other with heresy for saying essentially the same things in different ways.  That is really the basic rationale for religious tolerance: an agreement to accept and live with the fact that we each have our own, individually formed way of understanding the world which others will never really understand.  In any event, it can, and should, make individual religious differences irrelevant for deciding public issues.

And that is a good thing.  For since the Peace of Westphalia, church/state separation has been imbedded in our western European culture.  That’s by way of saying it’s not just an American idea; that’s what the bloody Thirty Years War was fought over that ended at Westphalia, and the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” was actually first used by a Scottish theologian 50 years before the American Constitution. Europeans may actually be a little better at it these days than Americans. In France, for example, each wedding occurs once or twice – first as a required civil ceremony at the city hall, then, optionally, as a religious ceremony at a church; both are celebrated.  Either in France or America, when meeting someone, no one ever inquires which church approved the marriage or whether it was only civil. Marriage is a term that includes many sources of authority.

People have come from all over the world to America to protect their religious views by separating them from the turmoil that accompanies politics.  Protection of the Church from the State motivated our founding fathers more than protection of the State. The irony is that the separation our ancestors strove so hard for is being threatened by the very religious groups they formed.  My own church, the United Methodist, views a marriage as a sacred event, but not a sacrament.  Other churches consider it a sacrament.  Some churches perform Gay marriages; others prohibit them.  Agreement or disagreement with a church’s position can be expressed simply by moving from one church to another. Yet some devout church members seek to have the State set rules on what constitutes a permissible form of sacrament, a topic only the church can decide.  Will an eventual discussion be whether baptism by immersion, a physically dangerous act, should be legally prohibited?  Viewed in that light, the only legal issue about Gay marriage is whether marriage constitutes a contractual arrangement to which all citizens are entitled. The answer clearly is yes. It can be limited legally to an exclusive arrangement (hence the prohibition against polygamy), but not on the basis of gender differences under our Constitution.

The emotional issues any good Jungian will tell you are tied up with our internal struggles with our own nature, and our propensity to project onto some target group (the Other) the features of ourselves we cannot accept.  Because of that, the emotions are life-long for each of us and will never be settled by society for us. They will be resolved societally only over long periods. One hundred years ago, some states still prohibited marriage between whites and blacks; it is still an emotional issue to some, but no longer a legal or societal one. 

The socioeconomic argument against Gay marriage has been that marriage itself is a social arrangement to legitimate the nurture and rearing of children.  An anthropologist might argue that it as much originated to stabilize communities and safeguard the transfer of property. Both those arguments were outgrown long ago.  A headline in our local paper the other day hailed the first marriage of a seventy-year-old local woman; there goes the first argument.  And the newspapers are also replete with accounts of both the recreational marriages of celebrities (followed eagerly by some of the same people who deplore Gay marriages) and accounts of the increasing number of young people who raise children without commitment to marriage.  For that is what a marriage is supposed to represent, a commitment to long-term stable relationship, and the more such relationships form, the more stable the society.

In sum, our American society is facing what constitutes a significant transition for many.  The arguments against Gay marriage are all theological and emotional, and must be met and faced by individuals on an individual basis.  As a society, our commitment to church/state separation leaves no room for retreat; Gay marriage is a form of recognized commitment whose time has come.