SUPPORTING MARRIAGE - The Tablet - 15th December 2002

A few months ago I sat down in a train next to someone who had, I knew, recently become engaged; and I congratulated her on her engagement. She told me how by no means all her friends had reacted confidently, or been glad for her; what of her career? And  what of her independence? Some had seemed quite unsettled by her news.

From many sides people doubt that it is now wise, or kind, or even possible to support and to advocate Marriage.

To do so in a classroom seems to discriminate against young people whose parents are not married, or who live with only one parent, or who worry that they may be homosexual.  Politicians fear that if they  speak positively about marriage, they  will invite media inquisition into their past, into their  own marriage or into the marriages of their colleagues. And when the Church speaks of marriage as among God’s most precious gifts, the greatest of blessings for a man and a woman, for their children and for all with whom they come into contact, even some Christians worry that we are showing ourselves hopelessly and alienatingly  out of touch with the culture of today.

For many people, unhappy experience of their own or of others’ marriages understandably makes it seem both impossible and irresponsible for anyone to commit themselves to another person for life. Such a commitment seems to promise more in the way of constraints and loss of independence than of encouragement, delight and  security. None of us can avoid the powerful propaganda of every evening’s television that depicts cohabitation, promiscuity, infidelity and adultery as not just normal (because for  many they are) but as mature, desirable, even inevitable – and certainly modern!  On all sides there is a priority for choice and satisfaction, not acceptance and restraint; an impatience with anything that smacks of the past or of any kind of authority; and a rejection of any normative framework for behaviour.

Yet it is basic to Christian faith that marriage is  “a pattern that God has given in creation…..   so that the weakening of marriage has serious implications for the mutual belonging and care that is exercised within the community at large”. The life-long commitment of a woman and a man in marriage, that “school of patience and forgiveness”, mirrors not only for those married but for those around them the loving interaction and the persevering, suffering commitment that we believe to be characteristics of God. (Quotations in this paragraph are from Marriage: a teaching document from the House of Bishops of the Church of England)

There is a large body of research evidence that confirms these insights (which are not those of the Christian Faith alone): evidence of the benefits of marriage to the physical, psychological and emotional health and welfare of adults; evidence of the damaging effects of marital breakdown and divorce on adults as well as  on children; evidence that in general prior cohabitation does not make for lasting marriage; and as well as the costs to the people involved, there is the soaring cost to public expenditure of marital breakdown. Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, has expressed the seriousness of our position by drawing an analogy with the effects of toxic emissions, or the destruction of rain forests: “by destabilising marriage, and accepting casual sex, serial relationships, divorce and single parenthood as norms, we are rapidly eroding the social structures on which humanity depends”.

If this is true, as I believe it is; if supporting and  educating about  marriage is at least as important (I should say that it is still more important) for the health of the nation as dissuading people from smoking or encouraging exercise and healthy eating; then it is simply negligent of politicians to refuse to support marriage in the face of so much evidence from research, as well as from the major Faiths, of its unique value.  

Married people, whatever their beliefs, need to be prepared  to “talk up” marriage; yet how often I hear “careless talk”, that runs with the crowd and plays  into the fashionable denigration of marriage,  from people whom I know to be happily and fruitfully married and who seem unaware that they are undermining for others what is the central pillar of their own lives. It is vital that in the Churches we discover the resources that exist in every parish for education and for encouragement about marriage, and deploy them at every stage: in our schools, with young adults, for those who have made what today is often the brave decision to get married, and then with those of us who have been married for many years. And the last is as important as any other group; because  we shall advocate marriage most effectively, if those of us who are married look to others like people for whom our marriage is the greatest wonder and blessing of our lives.

None of this of course is to argue against compassionate care, by the churches as well as by society and government more widely, to people in all those kinds of distress that are caused by marital or family breakdown, or by their own or others’ sexual behaviour, or by the attitudes to all these that prevail today. But what we must not do, is to go on giving way to the very strong  pressures to be active and vocal only about this compassionate care, soft-pedalling to the point of extinction our advocacy of marriage. However hard it is in today’s culture, I remain convinced that the most effective and the most compassionate way of “Supporting Families” in the long run is to support marriage.

It follows that we need to remain clear as a society, for the sake of generations to come, what marriage is and what it is not. If  marriage, the mutual exclusive commitment to each other for life of a man and a woman, is indeed “fundamental to human flourishing”, as Christians and very many others believe it to be, then we owe it both to those growing up today and to future generations not to equate even the most loving and committed same-sex relationships with marriage.  

Lastly, I am convinced that today “Supporting Marriage” requires us to renew our wrestling  as Christians with the difficult, divisive  questions  that surround marriage in church after divorce.    

I appreciate that some Christians, some Churches, think that in current conditions “marriage in church after divorce” can only undermine the Church’s witness to marriage; and I am sensitive to the danger that any attempt to make more coherent the Church’s teaching and practice  around the marriage of divorced people could have the effect of softening still further people’s will to persevere in marriage and to resist “the corrosive cultural influences that make divorce seem inevitable”.

So the Church of England’s House of Bishops’ teaching document Marriage holds to the conviction that “a further marriage after divorce is always an exceptional act”; and its discussion document Marriage in Church after Divorce argues that the Church should put in place the criteria and the procedures with which, while it may say “yes” to some couples asking it to solemnise a marriage after divorce, it can properly say “no” to others for the sake of our witness to the character of marriage itself. Are they determined, for instance, that their marriage will be a life-long, faithful partnership?  Do they seem to have explored together the “past” of each? Has everything realistically possible been done to fulfil the responsibilities that remain from the first marriage? Is it clear that the new relationship was not the cause of the breakdown of  the previous marriage?

Very difficult though all this is (and I judge that the New Testament shows the Church struggling with these questions even before the completion of the canonical Gospels), I do not believe that we should retreat from this particular front-line. When so many people, and therefore so many people who are seeking to marry, are divorced the Church cannot escape the range of questions that this whole situation poses to its evangelism as well as to its pastoral care and to  its teaching of the Faith.

For God, I believe, has given us the task of witnessing both to his gift, fundamental to humanity's welfare, of life-long faithful marriage, and at the same time to his character to enable fresh life through forgiveness – in this case, forgiveness of those whose marriages come to grief  and who want to make a new marriage.  I see no escape today, for any  Church, from this tension; and I trust that God will guide us through what I know only too well to be its hazards.

MARRIAGE, a teaching document, 1999  and  MARRIAGE IN CHURCH AFTER DIVORCE, a discussion document, 2000 are published by Church House Publishing, and cost £1 and £5 respectively.

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