Attitudes toward marriage need a good, hard look

Maybe clergy should just get out of the marriage business.

Sounds shocking to you? Well, listen to this:

"Many members of the clergy say they would much rather do a funeral than a marriage."

The reason, said Episcopal priest Deborah Hentz Hunley, is that weddings "tend not to be about the faith issues that are so critical for Christian marriage.

"People want to come in and have a big party," she said, often with hardly a thought about the religious implications of the ceremony. Clergy, on the other hand, "try to focus on spirituality, what we know will get them [the couple] through the marriage."

But many people aren't listening, apparently, based on divorce rates that are as high among churchgoers as in the general population.

So, Hunley - and many others - hope that the current debate over gay marriages can be expanded to "looking at Christian marriage and what we think it means."

For her, that includes the possibility of separating the governmental recognition of a marriage - deciding who is eligible for the legal benefits and obligations that entails - from the religious blessing of the union.

The current system of having clergy act as agents of the state is so taken for granted that we rarely think about the illogic of it in a country that has no established religion.

Separating the two functions seems to offer benefits with few, if any, disadvantages.

A couple have to appear before a governmental representative as it is now to receive a marriage license, so there's no good reason why that process couldn't include having them sign on the dotted line to be married.

Everyone would then have a civil union - whose rules the state could decide outside of religious considerations.

Then, couples who wanted a religious ceremony to solemnize that union could find a willing priest/minister/rabbi/imam/shaman or whoever to bless them.

Start with the Bible

Even if our society is not ready or willing to separate the legal from the religious in this case, Hunley insists that Christians, in particular, should take a long, deep look at their expectations for marriage.

For instance, "Is it realistic in the modern world to think that most people will have lifelong unions?" Hunley points out that "we've backpedaled on that ... as most churches now allow divorce," even though Jesus spoke out strongly against it.

"We need to do a lot more reflection on what the Bible really says about marriage if we're going to use Scripture as a guide," she said.

The Episcopal Prayer Book, for instance, describes marriage as having been established by God in creation. "Is that really what God was creating?" Hunley asks, in the relationship between Adam and Eve. The Episcopal wedding service also refers to Jesus' presence at the wedding feast at Cana, where he is recorded as performing his first miracle, changing water into wine. But "I'm not sure the miracle had anything to do with marriage," Hunley says.

Not to mention that the Bible in some places condones plural marriages, for instance, and frequently describes wives as the property of their husbands, who could divorce them at will.

Although any specific biblical incident might "not seem all that positive a model for how we want marriage to be in the modern world," Hunley said, "we need to study the Bible ... for general themes," not to nitpick verses out of it.

If marriage remains, as Hunley clearly seems to believe it does, an important institution - a sacrament, in the case of her church - then it deserves better treatment, she says.