Fewer Couples Choose Clergy to Conduct Their Weddings

While Maggie Gallagher, Pope Benedict XVI, and others in the professional Christian class maintain their anti-gay jihad under the guise of "protecting marriage" another interesting trend is developing: More and more couples are choosing to nix having clergy officiate at their weddings. This means, of course that they are choosing non-religious marriage. The Washington Post looks at this growing trend towards purely civil marriages. Perhaps rather than persecuting same sex couples who want to be married - some even in church ceremonies - Ms. Maggie and her fellow gay haters ought to be more worried about the growing exodus of those who reject church weddings. Combined with the surging numbers of self-identified atheists and agnostics, same sex couples marrying would to be very low on the threat factor ratio for professional Christians. Here are some highlights from the Post story:

As Julie Butcher Pezzino and Andrew Butcher sat in an oceanside garden in tiny Southwest Harbor, Maine, the Sunday before Labor Day, watching two friends get married, the scene was beautiful, moving and very familiar. Practically everyone from their tight little American University crew was there. And as in their own ceremony, the officiant wasn’t some distant member of the clergy; it was another member of the crew. The college friends have made the rounds, presiding at each others’ weddings, four times so far, with another wedding scheduled for December. . . . “We don’t want to be confined to what some religion says you have to do.”

Although the majority of brides and grooms still use members of the clergy and other professionals, including judges (61 percent last year, according to the study), the shift toward nontraditional officiants seems to be further evidence of another, broader trend: the movement of Americans away from organized religion.

Recent studies show that most Americans aren’t a regular part of an institutional faith community, and many people say they don’t know a member of the clergy well enough to want to be hitched by them. “I can’t remember the last time I was at a wedding that wasn’t officiated by a friend,” said Jim Kurdek, the groom from the Southwest Harbor wedding.

While people who choose secular officiants might not want a cleric in their faces when they exchange vows, many often still want a traditional experience: exchanges of rings, a request for community support and even explicitly religious rituals slightly reformatted.

A spokesman for the nonprofit Universal Life Church Monastery, the largest of multiple groups that produce insta-certification for officiants, said the organization uses the lingo of organized religion, even though its mission statement stresses total freedom of religious belief or lack of it. The group says it “ordains” 700 “ministers” each day.

“The kind of authority that’s emanated in these weddings is confidence, love and knowledge of the couple.”

Obviously, in far too many religious denominations, love is largely absent from the radar screen. Instead, it's all about fear and hate. Bob Felton at Civil Commotion speculates in part as follows on the trend away from clergy officiated weddings:

This is bound to cause some discomfiting bureaucratic moments but, really, I like the spirit of it. A successful marriage is a state of mind as much as anything else and, since pious idiots like Albert Mohler warn constantly that it’s a troublesome and sinful state of mind that must terminate in Hell if you take it too seriously (meaning, if you don’t take Holy Men like himself seriously enough) … well, you can see where I’m going with this.

The sine qua non of marriage is mutual loyalty and shared ambitions, and such as Land and Mohler condemn both on the grounds that they are a form of idolatry, and therefore sinful. Really, it makes me wonder whether clergy have any business conducting weddings.