Pastors: Separate church and civil marriages

Dozens of pastors, priests, and other clergy have signed their names to an online pledge renouncing involvement in government-recognized marriages. “The Marriage Pledge,” posted at the website of the Christian journal First Things on Tuesday, calls on church ministers to “separate civil marriage from Christian marriage” and to refuse signing their names to government-issued marriage certificates.

“In many jurisdictions, including many of the United States, civil authorities have adopted a definition of marriage that explicitly rejects the age-old requirement of male-female pairing,” says the pledge, written by two priests, one Anglican and the other Episcopal. “The new definition of marriage no longer coincides with the Christian understanding of marriage between a man and woman. … To continue with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the Church in a false definition of marriage.”

Signers of the pledge include Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian clergy, among others. They say they will commit to “disengaging civil and Christian marriage” in the performance of pastoral duties: “We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign government-provided marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings.”

Christopher Seitz, one of the drafters, said the purpose of the pledge is to make a public statement to a culture and government that have redefined marriage to include anyone with an emotional commitment, including homosexuals. Christians have long defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a women, noted Seitz, an Anglican priest and executive director of The Cranmer Institute, an Anglican organization in Dallas.

Seitz said that although Christians have debated whether marriage is a religious sacrament or an exclusively civil ordinance, the reality is that in the United States, civil officials have delegated an optional role in the marriage process to clergy. It’s a sort of cooperation between the church and state.

“The question really is—is it wise for that concurrence to remain if the state’s going to redefine marriage?” Seitz asked.

Ephraim Radner, an Episcopal minister and theology professor at Wycliffe College in Toronto, was the other drafter of the pledge. Radner said by email he participated in a symposium not long ago during which he argued pastors should continue to sign marriage certificates in order to remain an influence in the civil sphere. But he has changed his mind: As courts strike down traditional marriage laws, “pastors are asked to continue to help the state perform actions that certify a person as being ‘married,’ even though what the state considers marriage is not what Christian pastors do.”

The pledge has elicited mixed reactions. Douglas Wilson, a reformed pastor and theologian, criticized it on his blog and recommended pastors not sign it. He noted the Supreme Court could still allow states to decide the question of gay marriage, permitting or prohibiting it within their own borders.

Property and custody rights are determined by civil marriages, Wilson pointed out. He questioned whether a “church marriage” under the pledge would be able to define fornication and adultery the same way civil marriages do: “What will these signatories do when couples in their churches move in together without a union recognized by the state? What about a couple that has a civil marriage but no church marriage?”

But Peter Leithart, a Presbyterian theologian and a fellow faculty member with Wilson at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, has endorsed the pledge.

Radner and Seitz both say if they were presiding over a wedding, they would ask the couple to also obtain a marriage license on their own.

“It’s not a ‘solution’ to anything,” said Radner of the pledge. “It simply allows pastors publicly to clarify their understanding of marriage; and to do so in a way that is not confrontational or hostile towards the new laws that are taking hold in our society.”

“We’re not arguing people should come to the church and get married, like Braveheart, off in the woods,” Seitz said.