The church has surrendered on marriage

Apr 27, 2023 by

by Harry Benson, Marriage Foundation:

Today marks the launch of the Church of England’s report on Families and Households. You can download and read the report for yourself here.

We contributed extensively to the commission and one of our contributions actually makes a highlighted appearance on page 44, without a namecheck.

The relevant section is pages 31-58. Alas the title ‘Celebrating diversity in family life’ says it all. One of the key recommendations is that ‘It is critical to recognise and value all kinds of loving couple relationships’. This is something of a departure from the traditional Christian message that we should love all people regardless. And we should. But that does not mean affirming behaviours that might be harmful or not in our best interests. Love the sinner, not the sin, sort of thing.

In fairness to the authors, marriage gets a good run, in sharp contrast to almost all government policy papers on the family. But it’s how its portrayed that I take exception.

Marriage is damned with faint praise. Yes, most people aspire to it. Yes, most families are married. But marriage was glorified by the Victorians, according to the report, and has now been replaced by other popular structures that are now commonplace and normalised. There are as many bad marriages as good cohabitations. And family change has always been with us. There was even a cohabiting couple in the bible. So we should acknowledge that the way families structure their lives is equally valid and equally good.

This is just wrong. Marriage has always been linked to childbirth. In my PhD research, I found plenty of sources showing that cohabiting was virtually unknown in England at least between 1580 and 1960. Yes people slept together and got pregnant. But they then either aborted the child or got married. Unmarried cohabiting is a new family structure. There is an acknowledgement that birth control changed the game by liberating women from the risk of childbirth. But the language describes liberation from the patriarchal restrictions of marriage rather than a product that removed the link between sex, marriage, cohabiting and children. How we should handle this game-changing revolution better when it has directly led to what are almost certainly the highest levels of family breakdown in history becomes a much more interesting question. It’s a question they don’t even acknowledge.

Read here

Read also:  CofE accused of ‘damning marriage’ in publishing new report promoting families ‘in all their diversity’ by Heather Preston, Premier

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