TIME TO COMMIT: William J. Doherty on Unitarians and marriage

Same-sex marriage has stirred a new idealism in our midst. We are poised for a new look at marriage in our denomination, a fresh conversation about an important social institution that we have allowed to become the domain of religious conservatives.

I am at once proud of and bemused by our current denominational work on behalf of same-sex marriage. Given our collective silence on the value of marriage until recently, I wonder sometimes if we believe in marriage or just in the right to get married. Does it matter to us what happens to newlyweds of any gender after someone signs their license? With marriage now so prominently on our agenda, I hope we can ask ourselves why marriage matters in the first place and whether we want to help UU married couples achieve the audacious goal of a loving, lifelong union in the bosom of a community of faith and practice.

I come to this conversation as a big fan of marriage, both same-sex and straight, and with a background as a Catholic seminarian, a Unitarian Universalist for twenty-seven years, a university professor, and a practicing marriage and family therapist. With this history, I feel I have gone through a kind of whiplash on marriage during my adult life. As a Catholic, I knew marriage was a permanent covenant and a sacrament. As a new UU and liberal professional, I decided that marriage was not so special--just a personal lifestyle that should not be subjected to so much social pressure about entering and exiting.

Now after thirty-three years of marriage to the same woman and a career working with couples in distress, I see lifelong marriage as a countercultural act in a throwaway society. Without ignoring the shadow side of marriage and the pain of divorces that cannot be avoided, we religious liberals can support marriage and shape its future according to liberal ideals.

But reclaiming marriage won't be easy. As a denomination, we have no visible theological discourse on marriage beyond the civil right to marry and divorce. We have no set of pastoral or community practices to support couples across their life cycle together, no message that says we value marriage and will help couples who choose marriage to succeed in their life together. Our congregations celebrate weddings and sponsor divorce support groups, but in between there is a big pastoral and theological hole.

It's not by happenstance or oversight that we have neglected marriage until now. Contemporary liberal Christian denominations such as Presbyterians and the United Church of Christ also have been quiet about marriage for decades. Like us, these liberal denominations emphasize the right to get out of a bad marriage and the importance of supporting and not judging people who make that decision. Sometime in the 1970s, divorce became a transition and not a tragedy, and for many religious liberals, marriage came to be seen at best as a personal lifestyle among other lifestyle options and at worst as an institution compromised by patriarchy and heterosexism.

This liberal religious ambivalence about marriage has been influenced by more than two centuries of political and social thinking on the left, whose leading thinkers have been negative about traditional marriage and family life. Some radicals in the French Revolution wanted to abolish marriage and family life as shackles on individual freedom and obstacles to a true voluntary, collectivist community. Marx and Engels saw the bourgeois, marriage-based family as the enemy of social revolution. In the first half of the twentieth century, many socialists and artists disdained marriage as a conservative, middle-class institution.

But it was feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s that brought this critique of marriage to the mainstream of liberal thinking in the culture and the churches. Feminists recognized that women's full equality required making connections between the personal realm of marriage and the public realm of social inequality. They forced a reluctant culture to confront the horrors of wife battering and the in-justices of unequal division of household labor. Feminist leaders championed women's right to get out of stifling marriages and joined with legal reformers to create no-fault divorce in the 1970s. The idea that women needed marriage to have fulfilling lives was disputed in the mainstream liberal culture, as epitomized by the famous quip: "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." (Often attributed to Gloria Steinem, the phrase actually belongs to an Australian educator, Irina Dunn.)

Parallel to these political and social developments in the late 1960s and 1970s was the triumph of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls expressive individualism, the cultural norm that the pursuit of personal fulfillment is the cornerstone of life and the chief criterion for evaluating personal relationships such as marriage. Expressive individualism disdains the ethic of duty in favor of flexible choice based on current personal satisfaction. As therapist Fritz Perls wrote in 1969 in his Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, "I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine." I know people who recited this at their wedding in the 1970s. ...

Although I used to hold these standard liberal views of marriage and divorce, my professional and personal experience has taught me some different truths: that there are many stakeholders in a marriage beyond the spouses, that many people are better off working through their problems than walking away from them, that some people act irresponsibly in breaking up their good-enough marriages to pursue dreams of more happiness and better lovers, and that children, extended families, friendship groups, and church congregations are often wounded by unnecessary divorces. I now see divorce as a sometimes-necessary evil to prevent greater evil in a toxic marriage or to end an already-dead marriage, but not as a sacrament of personal liberation. ...

In this consumer culture of marriage, let me ask: Is it sufficient for a religious community to emphasize only equality of entry into marriage and judgment-free exit from marriage? Those are our current Unitarian Universalist contributions to the public dialogue about marriage in our time. The civil rights dimension of marriage is an important plank in a liberal religious platform, but it's only one plank--and in my mind, not the best argument for same-sex marriage. Standing alone, the individual rights perspective will be co-opted by a consumer culture that turns all rights into personal entitlements bereft of responsibilities, spiritual depth, and communal obligations. We need something more.

more
posted by Eve at 5:19 PM | link

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home