Untangling the Sacred From the Secular

As hinted at by Rick's post, there is a strong case to be made for getting government out of the marriage business (and into the civil union business). Arguments grounded in the common good do not persuade me that the longstanding conflation of religious and civil marriage is worth maintaining. Those who see the conflation as having beneficial effects on the public's approach to family commitments must recognize that the effects run both ways, and in recent decades it seems clear that the public's approach to family commitments is having more impact on religious conceptions of marriage than vice versa. I see very little evidence that religious communities are likely to impact marriage as a public institution anytime soon. Today's New York Times, for example, recounts the stalled efforts to introduce "covenant" marriage as an alternative to today's at-will contract approach to the institution. Covenant marriages require pre-marital counseling and drastically limit the available grounds for divorce (to infidelity, abuse, etc.). The article reports that, in the three states to adopt covenant marriage (Arkansas, Louisiana, and Arizona), only one to two percent of couples have opted for it. That statistic alone speaks volumes of the extent to which our vision of marriage has been compromised by its operation as a government entitlement, rather than as a sacred undertaking.

Rob