Christian confusion around marriage, gay and otherwise, or why abolishing marriage as we know it might be a good idea

The churches and Christians generally should take a long hard look about the issue of marriage and the respective responsibilities of church and state. We have not yet disentangled our thinking from the distortions of Christendom. Let me try a thought experiment.

The state has an interest in issues to do with transfer and management of property, payments, taxes and an interest in the fact that children are appropriately cared for. This requires a formal recognition of such relationships by the state, or acknowledgement for the state's purposes that de facto such relationships have been entered into. That interest can be taken care of through a purely administrative process.

The state should have no interest or involvement in the ceremonies that "religious" or ethnic/religious communities and organisation may engage in to celebrate the commitment of people to long term relationships. Such matters should be an issue for the bodies themselves. 

The disentangling of the respective interests of the state and the civil community, including churches, would help sort out the confusion over what marriage is about. Simon Barrow and Jonathan Bartley have tackled this issue in an Ekklesia Research paper What Future for Marriage?.

As they point out ... the form of marriage we know as such today is a relatively late invention out of something that once had much more to do with solidifying dynastic power. The link with Christendom is important in understanding how this happened. This link continued with the ...  revival and spread of marriage in the general population ... based on a fusing, of course, of civil and legal provisions with Christian meanings and rituals, because the church and the state were seen as mutually reinforcing institutions with a common grounding.

Much of what Christians think they are defending as essential elements of Christianity in this context is nothing of the sort and is deeply at odds with Jesus' radical critique of the way institutions stand in the way of the new community that he called people to.

Most people both inside and outside the churches assume that Christian teaching is uncomplicated and unequivocal about marriage. But when we look at the texts and traditions involved, we discover that things are actually much more challenging, exciting (and, perhaps, worrying) than we tend to suppose.

There are certainly biblical traditions that uphold marriage strongly. But the Bible also portrays a wide range of extended family relationships. Jesus himself never married (unusually for a wandering rabbi, perhaps, and contrary to the fancies of the Da Vinci Code). Paul was rather sceptical and grudging about it, so the evidence suggests.

Meanwhile, the Gospels are often downright hostile a search for Jesus' sayings about 'the family' suggests that, while he cherished covenantal values, had married companions and abhorred the practice whereby men could summararily divorce and disinherit women at will, he saw blood ties or contracted family bonds as less significant than the creation of a new kind of community.

That community was rooted in those who were often despised and 'impure' within the established political order. But it reflected the levelling, forgiveness-generating, favour-free, all-embracing, demanding love of God's coming kingdom. And for that, Jesus said, one should be prepared to abandon all if necessary - even family as we have understood it thus far.

Barrow and Bartley's argument is worth reading carefully in full.  While it has specific reference to the UK arguments and legal situation, it offers a recasting of the current controversy that has ended up in a confusing debate in Australia that has focused on the proposal for "gay marriage". In summary they recommend for consideration:

... that the legal and ceremonial aspects of forming partnerships should be viewed as distinct, and that the differences between religious and civil/secular definitions of marriage openly acknowledged by all concerned.

In this way, individuals who want to enter into marriage as a religious commitment within Christian contexts would be free to do so - as would humanists with their own meanings, and people of other faiths in their distinct traditions.

But registering their partnership under law would be a separate process allowing different arrangements depending upon their intent, and including clear provisions for the protection of children.

By the same token, it would be up to religious bodies to decide what forms of civil partnership would be acceptable within their understanding of marriage, and they would be free to offer ceremonial services, blessing and pastoral support or not. But such blessing (with its inherent meanings) would not be imposed on the non-religious or those who did not feel able to, or want to, make the commitments required or encouraged within a religious framework.

This would allow both civic and religious authorities autonomy in decision-making, would avoid people having to make vows they do not believe in, and would encourage couples to think more seriously about the kind of commitment they wanted to enter into, and the consequences of this for others.

It would also separate arguments within religious communities about gay marriage and cohabitation from the state‚provision of legal contracts for relationships, and would make space for both faith-based and secular understandings - without privileging or constraining either.

... discussing the possibility of a new set of recognized civil partnerships would require lawmakers to focus on the intentions underlying legal arrangements. Such values as justice, compassion, protection, community, commitment and love could thereby receive greater acknowledgement within public policy debate.

 Some fresh thinking by the churches along these lines would be helpful, particularly if it addressed issues of justice, compassion and the reality of living in a pluralist society. 

Refugee policy - a defining issue for Christians and to live beyond anger

Browsing through some columns that I wrote for Zadok Perspectives back in 2002, I came across a column on refugees. It was written after the events surrounding the Tampa. Though some things have changed since then, some critical things haven't.

I have therefore reproduced it in its original form. What is truly sobering is that it would take very few editorial changes to bring it up to deal with current issues. The pastoral issues as to how we can live faithfully in such a time as this remain as does the anger that I need to deal with.

Prophetic Patience - Active Waiting -  Refugee policy as a defining issue

Despite the inescapable impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, for many Australians the treatment of refugees became the defining issue of public policy in the year just past. The divisions in Australian society revealed by the Coalition Government’s handling of the “Tampa” event, the “Pacific solution” and mandatory detention seem likely to be with us for some time.

The issues raised by the current government policy stance on refugees are complex and ramify out to include questions of church state relations, indigenous reconciliation and the atrophy of public debate on political issues. They will have to wait for another time. What I want to engage with in this column is the reality that I find myself called to live out my discipleship in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in the wider Australian community toward the stranger and the refugee.

I have been shocked at the depth of my own anger at the events that have unfolded over the past year and the cynical willingness of the government to demonise the stranger in the form of refugees for their own political ends. Overlaying this has been a deep frustration and helplessness that almost no one was speaking for me in the public realm. Their was no debate during the election. The two major parties were trying to out macho each other over border protection and were quick to silence dissident voices amongst their candidates.

While I know that many Christians do not share this interpretation of  what has happened, I am also aware of a significant number who share my state of mind. There is a significant issue of pastoral care and witness at stake here and I can only ask those for whom this is not an issue to stay and listen.

What resources do we have to live as disciples, to live humanly in a time of fear in our community and anger within ourselves? How can we avoid becoming conformed in our reaction to the violence which we are called as Christians to overcome? For many this has been a moment when the automatic and unquestioning identity between being a Christian and being an Australian has been jolted.  We have been made aware of the possibility that there might have to be a gap between the two identities if we are to be faithful to the Gospel.

What Isaiah has to say

Biblical reflection seems an appropriate first step. During the election campaign, in which the appeal to a variety of fears seemed to have become the staple fare of both major political parties, I found myself reading through the prophet Isaiah. The following passages from Isaiah 8 snagged my attention like a woolen jumper on an obtruding nail.

Do not call conspiracy

All that these people call conspiracy;

Do not fear what they fear,

do not be afraid of them.

It is Yahweh Sabaoth,

 you must hold in veneration,

him you must fear,

him you must dread.

….

I bind up this testimony,

I seal this revelation,

In the heart of my disciples.

I wait for Yahweh

Who hides his face from the House of Jacob;

in him I hope

…

Distressed and starving he will wander through the country

and, starving, he will become frenzied,

Blaspheming his king and his God

Turning his gaze upward,

then down to the earth,

He will find only distress and darkness,

the blackness of anguish,

and will see nothing but night.

Is not all blackness where anguish is.

There is a passion in the prophet’s message which makes most of the preaching in our churches sound anaemic. The recovery of such passion and an honesty about our emotions and the violence within us and around us is an important step within the Christian community if we are to overcome violence.

The passage quoted above from Isaiah though it is honest and unsparing in its account of the darkness of the prophet’s time offer us some clues about the virtues and spirituality that we need to embody if we are to be faithful to God’s calling.

Truthfulness

The prophet calls us to truthfulness. We need to find the words to truly describe what is happening, which is to say that we need to learn how to speak truthfully.  … do not call conspiracy all that they call conspiracy… For the prophet to speak truthfully is to draw out clearly the dimensions of the tragedy while opening himself to the reality of the pain of those who are entangled in lies. The virtue of truthfulness will be as much a public and political activity as it is a spiritual discipline. It requires us in this context to research the reality of refugee policy and the experiences of those who have been refugees and not accept without question the official definitions and language.

That will be hard enough. But Isaiah pushes us further. We need to learn how to fear appropriately, that is we need to learn how to fear rightly. In our case we need to learn not to fear the stranger and the refugee but to fear God. The God that we are called to fear is not the god of violence and destruction but the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We are to fear the God who comes to us in the form of the servant and the powerless.

Patience

We will also need to learn how to wait, how to be patient. Isaiah announces that he will wait for the right time for his message and for God’s action. The prophet is committed to a patience and a waiting in which he shares the pain and the darkness of his community.  The prophet speaks not from a position of moral superiority and distance but as someone who allows the darkness to reverberate within his own being.  The kind of patience Isaiah is called to has its analogue in the New Testament embedded in the Lord’s prayer.

Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas in their wonderful account of the Christian life Lord Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life (Abingdon, 1996) highlight the importance of patience.

We have just prayed ‘your kingdom come”, a petition full of hope. Now we are taught to say “your will be done” a petition for patience…. Indeed our hopes as Christians can make us dangerous if they are not schooled by patience. Without patience we are tempted to storm the walls of injustice, destroying our enemy and thus betraying God’s way of forgiveness. Instead we are called to be a patient people schooled as we are by the patience of our crucified God so that the world might know that love not violence rules this world. God’s way of dealing with us and our evil is called the cross, the unlimited suffering patience of God. We are called to take up our cross and follow God’s patience. (p.65)

The patience that is called for here in the Lord’s prayer has nothing to do with passivity. It is an active waiting which is expressed in service. For my wife and myself that active waiting has taken the form of joining a local community refugee support group. The group has no formal church connections but the vast majority of the members are active in a number of local Catholic and Anglican parishes.

While the group works with the immigration authorities in the resettlement of refugees under the humanitarian resettlement program it has also committed itself to providing active support for refugees with Temporary Protection visas: that is to say refugees who have arrived in Australia and whose claim on arrival to refugee status has been accepted by the government, but who receive little assistance from the government to access their entitlements.

Christmas Eve found me as part of a group of over a dozen people helping shift furniture into a flat for an Afghani refugee family on a temporary protection visa, and in the process committing myself in a small way to learning the patience called for in the Lord’s prayer and something of the truth of the refugee’s experience. The first English words learnt by their two year old daughter after 11 months in Port Headland detention camp were ‘Hullo officer.’ That says a lot. As we manoeuvred the furniture up the stairs it occurred to me what a highly appropriate way it was to commence my Christmas celebration.

Caring for suffering?

Moria Rayner nails the hypocrisy of concern for animal welfare over cattle exports accompanied by a lack of concern over the welfare of children, young people and those seeking asylum for situations of war, and political and religious persecution.

Does anybody see, other than myself, the dreadful hypocrisy of demanding and obtaining real, inconvenient and expensive interruption to the export of live cattle, and the complete lack of outrage and demand for action to ensure the humane treatment of asylum-seeking, unaccompanied children, and a ban on their being transported to work in the sex trade or enslaved pauperism in Malaysia?
Such disparity in public outrage, such blindness to the sinful (for once, a proper adjective) lack of compassion for those who have no power and no voice, and such incredible hypocrisy about the likely improvement in the attitudes and practices in both of these countries to whom we have given the discretion to exercise our own moral responsibilities, leaves this writer a little short of breath. Eureka Street

Who is saving who from what?

Who is Mr Bowen as Minister for Immigration thinking he is kidding with his media comments that the latest policy initiatives to offload asylum seekers are designed to prevent Australians having to go through the trauma of witnessing the horror of the drownings that occurred off Christmas Island?

Who suffered on that occasion? It was I believe the asylum seekers. This line of argument I find morally degrading and demonstrating a self absorption that is absolutely reprehensible in its moral blindness.

The evidence is clear that the vast majority of Australians are totally uninformed as to the actual numbers of asylum seekers involved in efforts to get here by boat. The fact that it is substantially smaller than the number who seek asylum after they arrive here by air. The unwillingness of the government to get up and defend a policy based on moral principle and actual facts displays a lack of guts and willingness to stand for anything.

The linkages the media doesn't make

Three stories on the ABC news this morning, all a cause for grief, that were related but the connection was not.

There was the report of the return to Pakistan, through Afghanistan of the body of an Afghan asylum seeker that had taken his life while in detention in Queensland. The Pakistan government had refused to have the body flown back to Pakistan. The body was flown back to Kabul and then was being transported by the family back to Quetta in Pakistan where they are now living.

This was followed by new of the death of two Australian serviceman in the past twenty four hours in Afghanistan and was preceded by a US apology for the death of between 9 and 14 children in an air raid earlier in the week.

According to the Prime Minister "we will stay the course". Of course, but what about the families who are grieving the loss of loved ones due to the ongoing war? And what about those who are suffering from a policy of detention for those seeking asylum ? A policy set by a government that is unwilling to get out and tell the truth about the extent of refugees and unwilling to make the moral argument for receiving those seeking asylum.

Wedded to a Right Royal Theological Confusion - theological reflections provoked by the royal wedding

I am frequently deeply in debt to the musings theological and otherwise of my friend Simon Barrow, co-director of Ekklesia. On this occasion I want to reproduce in full his theological comments on the situation of the Christian church as highlighted by the wedding of William and Kate. It's great. I wish I had said most of it myself.  Read, be provoked and become a regular reader of the Ekklesia site.

Wedded to a Right Royal Theological Confusion

Reading the church media over the past week, and probably for the succeeding one, would leave many people with the impression that the boundary between church and monarchy is virtually indecipherable. I find this elision of faith in God with a longing for worldly pomp and circumstance deeply disturbing.

Though Anglican by tradition and somewhat Catholic in my spirituality, I am increasingly a Mennonite-shaped Anabaptist in my core theological convictions - and ecclesiologically formed by the difficult but fruitful conversation between these three.

However, at a time when flags are waved, national anthems sung, royalty celebrated, the state ritualised, and all 'proper' persons presumed to be monarchists, it is my nonconformist and Anabaptist side that I feel coming to the fore more than ever. 

Next to a willingness by Christians to sanction or excuse war, there is for me no greater evidence of the theological vacuity, privatisation of belief and civic absorption of the church (all of which lie at the heart of the crisis in modern institutional Christianity) than clerical eagerness to fawn over earthly monarchs and be their courtiers.

I write this without an ounce of ill-will towards any individuals within Britain's royal family, and without in any way wishing to be churlish about anybody's wedding - whether they are famous or not.
But for me, the idea and reality of monarchism is deeply offensive. It rests on nothing more nor less than absolute eugenic privilege and the reservation of power, wealth and status for the very few - in whatever attenuated 'constitutional' form. This is deeply unChristian. Yet most Christians, socialised into deference and mistaking the upside-down kingdom of God for earthly kingdoms, appear not to notice it. Even when it is pointed out. We have a massive amount of unlearning and relearning to do in the transition to post-Christendom. 

That means, among other things, re-visiting our theological roots. In this sense, while remaining implacably at odds with the constraining (modernist) ideology of fundamentalism, I am not a 'theological liberal' either. It is the deep structure of the narratives, language, events, experiences, grammar ('doctrine') and communal inheritances of the tradition of Jesus and the dynamics of his movement in the world which I wish to be constitutive of my political orientation - not passing fads in culture or secular theory.

But for that structure to become usable - and resistant to the powers that be - we need a hermeneutic of new community (ekklesia), a recognition of the tension between monarchical / establishment and prophetic / dissenting religion (much more significant than the modern 'conservative' versus 'liberal' typology Christians have become captive to), and an ethic of demonstrative Gospel virtues - economic sharing, forgiveness, peacemaking, hospitality and more. 

Otherwise we Christians - whatever our denominational or other labels - will go on 'getting it wrong' by interpreting the kingdom of God in terms of the kingdoms of this world, rather than the other way round. Which is where the confusion about monarchy (something established against the warning and will of God in the historical biblical tradition) comes in. 

Who or what are we really wedded to in terms of social practice and spiritual formation? Those are important and challenging questions for Christians to ponder on 29 April 2011, and beyond.
Meanwhile, I wish William and Kate well. But I am not their loyal subject, and never can be, given my defining allegiance to Jesus the subversive.
----------
© Simon Barrow is co-director of Ekklesia.
Also on Ekklesia
* Simon Barrow, 'The mytho-poetics of royalty' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14663
* Symon Hill, 'The subversive feast of Christ the King' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/13613
* Chris Rowland, 'A kingdom, but not as we know it' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8020
* Tom Hurcombe, 'Disestablishing the kingdom' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8138
* Jill Segger, 'Crown or parliament? Time for reflection' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14635
* Phil Wood, 'Beyond 29 April: Equity after monarchy' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14660

Folk festivals, the church and the practice of tradition

I spent a good deal of the Easter holiday weekend at the National Folk Festival here in Canberra. The experience got me thinking about the importance of tradition for both folk music and the church. I thought that there was something in the handling and sustaining of tradition as manifested in the festival that might be worth unpacking that might be helpful for the church in thinking about its engagement with the tradition. so let's see where this line of thinking might go.

The National Folk Festival (NFF) offers a huge range of music under the label of "folk" and provides an opportunity to display at a moment in time where the traditions of music are being taken by their current practitioners. Individual strands of musical tradition display a huge range of difference in performance - some seeking to represent a particular tradition in what is viewed as its authentic form, while others work on adapting it to say things in a different cultural context or because they have access to a differing range of musical skills. At the NFF this year, 2011, this difference could be seen in the contrast for example between The Peter Rowan Band and The Baylor Brothers. Another example would be in Celtic music where you had the expression of traditional Irish instrumental music by The Kellys, focused on tunes from a particular region, County Clare, contrasting with Australian performance of the tradition more broadly by Sunas or by a slightly more upbeat interpretation by younger performers in The George Jackson Band.

The various sub-traditions within the broader, or "great" tradition of folk music have in common an emphasis on the quality of their perfomance, sustained by the practices and disciplines of learning from and showing respect for those who are regarded as exemplary performers of the tradition by way of their musical and performance skills, and their willingness to pass on those skills to those who wish to be discipled in the tradition.

The sub-traditions are sustained by people living in an ongoing engagement, both informally and formally in gathering to share what they have learned and to learn from one another. There is a remembering of the past, a re-expressing in the present and the hope that the tradition will be picked up and continued in the future.


All of this seems highly relevant for thinking about the place of the church in a time in which the institutional and cultural supports for the church as an integral part of society are fading and its future will be to return to the past as a counter-cultural community.  Those who want to be part of the community of followers of Jesus share with the folk music community that they both inherit traditions that are in tension with a broader culture that focuses on consumption, not participation, on the individual rather than the community and both will require intentional discipling in the skills and practices that are integral to their respective traditions if they are to survive and thrive.