Who Owns “Marriage”?

I keep seeing claims by those who would “defend marriage” (à la Proposition 8) that the churches have some special claim to “own” the term “marriage” and thus to define that term for all of society. This claim has no basis in language or history. Virtually every society has had some form of marriage, and while religious institutions or themes have commonly been involved in whatever rituals might accompany the solemnization of such a relationship, there is nothing about the history of marriage—either the term or the institution—that gives churches in a pluralistic society any special claim to control its meaning.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “marriage” comes from the 12th Century French mariage, which in turn derives from Latin maritaticum, from maritus, meaning “husband.” Similarly “marry” is from French marier, traceable to Latin maritus, a participial adjective meaning married. At least one source, Wiktionary, notes possible origins in the Indo-European mas (“man,” stem mar-), whence the god of masculinity, Mars. So it may be inferred that the core original sense of the term could most nearly be rendered in English as something like behusbanded. It was the woman whose essential status changed upon marriage; she ceased to be the charge, if not the property, of her father, and was transferred to her husband. He acquired a wife, as he might acquire a cow; she was acquired, as a cow might be acquired.

Although this conception of marriage conflicts with modern ideas of sexual equality, it is very far from dead. Many families and churches would still say that a father “gives his daughter’s hand in marriage,” and even more would say that the father, or a surrogate, “gives the bride away.” Notably, no similar construction is ever used in reference to the groom. And even as our society slowly moves away from phrases whose meaning is so obvious, we continue to use terms that are historically freighted with conceptions of male dominance—not only “marriage” but “husband” whose meaning as head of household is traceable to Old Norse.

Such usages suggest that one source for some of our culture’s hostility to homosexuality and gay marriage may be the very fact that we are steeped in a conception of marriage as the joining of unlikes. In this view the core sense of “marriage” being “defended” by Proposition 8 is that of a relationship between unequals—a dominant, possessing “husband” and a subordinate, possessed woman (“wife”). From this perspective the real danger of gay marriage is that the outward sameness of the two partners suggests an inherent equality that contradicts deep-seated notions of marriage and, more broadly, all relations between the sexes, and indeed between individuals in various settings outside marriage. Why, after all, is it so deeply galling that a child might have “two mommies” or “two daddies?” Isn’t the important question whether the child has two good parents?

But this line of rumination diverges from my theme, which is that the word “marriage” owes nothing to Judeo-Christian faith or tradition. It is, rather, the child of Pagan Rome. Much the same is true of common synonyms. “Matrimony” is also from Latin, alluding at its core to the state of being or becoming a mother (mater). “Wedlock” is from the ancient Germanic (Old English) for the act of pledging or becoming bound by a pledge. There is of course nothing distinctly religious, let alone Judeo-Christian, about any of these words or the concepts they denote.

So what did the Romans think of when they contemplated marriage? For one thing, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, they pictured a relationship that was commonly created by secular, not ecclesiastical, means:

Ancient Roman Law recognized three forms of marriage. Confarreatio was marked by a highly solemnized ceremony involving numerous witnesses and animal sacrifice. It was usually reserved for patrician families. Coemptio, used by many plebeians, was effectively marriage by purchase, while usus, the most informal variety, was marriage simply by mutual consent and evidence of extended cohabitation.

Roman marriage resembled the Christian tradition in one respect I have already discussed: It “generally placed the woman under the control of her husband and on the same footing as children.” (Id.) But the view of marriage as a fundamentally civil phenomenon persisted until long after the Catholic church claimed to have succeeded to the political power of the Roman Empire. The Church’s gradual appropriation and conversion of Roman marriage to its own purposes is described, though unfortunately without specific citations to sources, in a 2005 article by Patricia Nell Warren:

According to historian David G. Hunter, the early bishops acquired a quasi-civil standing in their communities, and some Christians had to get their bishop’s approval to marry. But weddings still took place at home with the joining of hands and the feast. The dowry contract was read aloud and signed by witnesses.

Indeed, there really wasn’t a Christian concept of marriage as a “legal” entity till the Middle Ages. By then, the Roman Church was putting less emphasis on Jesus’ scriptural teachings and more on its own authority, and would proclaim Catholic dogma by papal edict. This trend was given a boost when Charlemagne united most of western Europe and assumed the title of Holy Roman Emperor with papal blessing in the year 800. By the 12th century, the Church had yanked the marriage ceremony out of people’s homes and required that it be done in a church. By the 13th century, the Pope had decreed marriage to be one of seven sacraments, so now it could only be dispensed by a priest. But theologians still recognized the old Roman principle that, to be valid, a marriage had to involve a contract and consent.

(The quoted article also refers to research indicating that in Roman times and well into the Middle Ages, same-sex unions were not unheard of, and some were even solemnized in the church. That subject goes far beyond my thesis, however, so I will leave it to another time.)

Under the Roman church, marriage ceased to be a “terminable civil contract under Roman law” and became “a mystic union of souls and bodies never to be divided.” (Britannica.) This view enlarged the church’s power and was literally good for business. (No prospect is quite so alluring to any institution as monopoly power.) The fact remains that the church had not invented the concept of marriage but appropriated it from the secular realm and adapted it to fit its own all-too-worldly ends.

Of course the Catholic conception of marriage as “a lifelong and sacred union that could be dissolved only by the death of one of the spouses” (Britannica) was a bit too categorical for the Protestants. The Anglicans in particular rebelled famously on this ground, and today quite a few self-proclaimed Christians openly practice what the Catholic Church views as bigamy. Yet somehow, Catholics and Protestants manage to tolerate one another, and even to respect one another’s marriages—however offensive to God they may suppose them to be.

Since taking jurisdiction over marital matters, Christian denominations have, as usual, fallen out over every point of theological debate that might be suggested, naturally or otherwise, by an often ambiguous and impressionistic text. Some insist that marriage is a sacrament; others do not. Many have elaborate and esoteric rules purporting to determine the validity of marriages not solemnized under their own auspices. Implicit in many of these rules is at least the possibility that a marriage valid under local secular law may not be recognized at all, or only for very limited purposes, by this or that church. Yet none of them, to my knowledge, has sought to enlist the power of the state to enforce its own notions of validity. Again, they observe at least the outward signs of mutual respect, however damnable they may find one another’s conduct.

It should be obvious from all this that no one church, or indeed alliance of churches, has any legitimate claim to the term “marriage” or to primacy in deciding what relationships should be governed by that term. Except perhaps in outright theocracies—and probably even there—distinctions have always been made between the secular and the religious aspects of marriage. Innumerable further examples could be marshaled. Indeed it is safe to say that over the whole world there are no two jurisdictions that do not differ in their regulation of marriage, from the conditions required for official recognition to the resulting rights and obligations. California and five other states observe a regime of “community property” traceable to the civil law traditions of France and Spain, while the rest of the country follows (very loosely, with innumerable variations) in the tradition of the English (Germanic/Norman) common law. Some states will find a marital relationship based merely upon a couple’s living together “as man and wife,” while others (including California) do not recognize such “common-law” marriages.

I know of no church that would claim the authority to dictate to the state on any of these subjects. In these areas, most if not all churchgoers understand perfectly well that Caesar may regulate marriage for his purposes while the church may view it differently for its own. There is absolutely no principled reason that gay marriage should be any different. Churches are free not to recognize gay marriages. They are free to despise them, if that is what they think Jesus commands them to do. What they are not free to do, and have not the slightest claim of right to do, is decide what relationships the state may choose to recognize as, and call, marriage. By doing so, they only erode their own standing as members of a pluralistic, and of necessity mutually tolerant, society.