Church, State, Marriage
Why separation is crucial
To the people of God, Christians, who might be confused or angry or sad (for or against) about marriage ideology in our nation, I want to lend some wisdom to you as both a Christian and someone who has long been involved in politics.
As the Body of Christ, it is not our job or our place to legislate people’s hearts. We cannot make the Bible into law, for the United States is, thankfully, not a theocracy. The separation of Church and State not only prevents the state from being overrun by religious zealots of all kinds, but legally prohibits the state from governing our worship. The state does not bust into our Sunday services and add or delete passages of the Bible, does not tell us what to pray or the order in which to pray it, and it does not lock our doors (save for the sticky COVID situation which is another post entirely).
This means that the state (local and federal) can decide who gets to be married under the US Constitution. This includes policies like who gets life insurance and social security benefits, how child custody is handled, and how medical decisions are made based on who the government legally identifies as “spouse.” This means that there might be couple at your church who, despite your church’s stance on the matter, is gay and legally married. And this means they are married, period.
What the separation of Church and State also means, however, is your church is not legally required to perform marriages outside of the definition your church has for marriage. To complicate things, this is opinion is not equal across Christianity. Christianity is made up many, many denominations. Quick research indicates a couple hundred denominations in the U.S., but a staggering number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Nearly all of these sprang up as a result of the Protestant Reformation and have been dividing and multiplying since 1517. However, by and large and at present, marriage is defined by most biblical interpretations and church history as being between one man and one woman, gender ideology notwithstanding.
It is a vital point under the US Constitution that churches are not required to perform any requirements of the state beyond concerns of human life and murder. It would be appropriate for the state to intervene, for instance, if human sacrifices were on the menu at any religious house of worship. Murder is generally accepted across humaity as a bad thing. This means, though, there is an opening for houses of worship of all faiths to enter the arena in discussing the state practices around human life, from conception (abortion) to death (euthanasia) because, as it turns out, what counts as murder is not cut and dry. Lest you think I’m wading into that today, rest assured I am not. Rather, this is a placeholder for a later philosophical and ethical discussion.
We as Christians are not to use the law to win people to Christ, but to join with the Holy Spirit to spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth. This has to do with hearts and lives toward Christ, not behavior management. If you, Christian, are confused about your political opinions around marriage ideology, I encourage you to separate the Constitution from the Bible before thinking deeper. Further, and most importantly, if you’re confused about how to treat your gay fellow churchgoer, open your Bible and read all the words in red. The words of Jesus Christ, who pardoned a thief on the cross as he died, sat next to a woman at a well with a sordid past, and washed the feet of his betrayer.
No, your church in the US is not, and should not be, required to marry anyone they deem is not permitted to marry under a covenant with God. Therefore, I would think twice about how much this covenant should be promoted at the level of state and federal government. We Christians have a long and bloody documented history of what happens when the church is in bed with the state, and it has never once worked out in favor of the church, but always—always—harms the church and its witness.
“Give to Caesar what is Caesar,” Jesus said, “and to God what is God’s” (Mark 12:17), separating God and politics but never separating the Christian from love.