Jul 24, 2026
By Frank Turk
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Back in the beginning of March, there was much ado made in the press that the tipping point has been reached in American society regarding views on marriage. For example, according to the Washington Post, 59% of Americans now favor same-sex marriage They wrote:
Despite the changing views, deep chasms remain along religious, generational and political lines. Six in 10 evangelical Protestants oppose same-sex marriage, while about six in 10 Catholics, non-evangelical Protestants and eight in 10 with no religious affiliation support it. Three-quarters of Americans younger than 30 support same-sex marriage, while less than half of seniors say the same.
Before this data became a prevailing headline, CNN had already put the matter to rest, its story bearing the lede, “Same-sex marriage is a non-issue in American politics.”
The innovators – the side demanding (and getting) a redefinition of marriage – have declared victory (which is actually part of their strategy to gaining victory). The unsurprising development is that the side in favor of traditional marriage is working from the textbook which allowed secularism and agnosticism to take over the English-speaking world. We can tell because the reaction to these same-sex marriage victories and the accompanying commentary is received by the most public opponents of ssm with threats that the fight is not over, and there’s more to be done in court and in the legislature to preserve the institution of marriage.
This response is a concession that the right battleground for this fight is somehow in the realm of the wagging tail of society and not the head or the heart of the beast. It overlooks that marriage is not actually any kind of contract even among secular people; it overlooks that the Western view of Marriage is actually, largely, the Christian view of marriage; and it overlooks that somehow, in spite of being a weak and persecuted minority with no political power, no economic pull, and little care for taking over the arts and the media, historically, the Christian view overcame the previously-dominant view by other means. If these statements are true, then the law is hardly the most important issue in the fight for marriage, and the weapons to win that fight have never been the property of any secular state.
Let’s start first with the view that the Law can govern marriage because at its base Marriage is really a secular contract. No less a profound thinker than Johnny Depp has said this about marriage: “Marriage is really from soul to soul, heart to heart. You don’t need somebody to say, okay you’re married.” In his view, marriage is so profound and personal, nobody outside of you and the object of your desire can say anything about it – at least, until you don’t want to be anymore. Mr. Depp unceremoniously dumped the woman he was unceremoniously attached to in June 2012, demonstrating the bounds of this lofty soul-talk – so in some sense he’s the poster boy for proving there ought to be some kind of contract so that tawdry items like who has to look after the children and who is responsible for common debts can be settled by somebody when the soul and the heart aren’t up to it anymore.
So let’s adopt some kind of definition for marriage for a moment which doesn’t allow the flighty soul and fickle heart to enter into it. In the book Living Sociologically by Renzetti and Curran, the secular definition of marriage is given:
Marriage: a socially approved union of two or more people in which each is expected to fulfill specific economic, sexual, and caregiving obligations and responsibilities.
What sort of marriage proposal do you think this sort of arrangement would generate? Imagine you are at dinner with some other person, and you’ve been thinking about this for a long time. As the waiter leaves with your order of eats for the evening, you clench up a little, and then screw your courage to the sticking place. You take a deep breath and you begin, “What I really want is to avoid incest, and embrace endogamy. I want some rights and duties regarding sexual intercourse and property, and to establish a nominal division of labor. I want a visible household economy. And you seem like exactly the right person to do that with, at least for now. Will you marry me?”
When we think of marriage that way, we can see we are thinking of something more than what the advocates for renovating the institution are putting forward – because the changes they demand make marriage into this lesser, utilitarian arrangement, something less than romantic in spite of the smiles and kisses they wrap it up in to sell it back to us.
I say “sell it back,” because let’s face it: they aren’t the ones who invented this dour duty to state. We are. That is: we, Protestants are the ones who first came up with the idea that somehow marriage is not really sacred but secular.
Both Luther and Calvin, while having a very high view of the union of marriage, reacted against the Roman Catholic view of marriage as a sacrament by making it an important and God-ordained institution which, like all other vocations, ought to be administered by the civil magistrate. Calvin had second thoughts about this before the end of his life, but it is unquestionable that the Protestant states of Europe were the ones that, in an effort to take this power out the hands of ecclesiastical courts, put it in the hands of the civil courts.
This migration had little immediate impact on the definition of marriage in Europe and America because all the judicial precedence for the civil courts (at that time) was from the ecclesiastical courts. But over time, as Western culture moved through the Enlightenment, seeing marriage as a “vocation” changed the legal view from something holy and inseparable to something more like a contract. It was only in the 19th century that divorce became commonly legal in the English-speaking world. Yet as divorce became more and more conscionable, the law followed until the adoption of “no-fault” divorce in the United States. The rate of divorce since then has become a predictable epidemic.
The obvious irony is that somehow religious people are fighting with their secular cousins when their cousins have, finally, agreed with them that marriage is a vocation. The less-obvious irony is that the reason this seems like such a hard place to come to terms is that prior to the Protestant gambit of downgrading marriage from sacrament to vocation, the Christian view of marriage in the West (and in the Orthodox East) was universally accepted. The Christians had somehow wrested this institution from those who came before them and caused everyone to think of thing the way they did.
This, I think, is the part where history has to give us instructions for the way forward because we’re at a place in time now where we have a culture grasping at straws for meaning. While the Christian church has done this two or three times in the last 2000 years, the best example (I think) is the first time it did this, which is in the first and second century after Christ. After 100 AD, the Roman Empire was coming apart politically, socially, and economically. It was past its peak as a Republic and shambling into the downside of Empire. With regard to the family unit, in the earliest periods of Roman history, Marriage meant that a married woman would be made part of the household of her husband, but that custom had died out by the 1st century, in favor of Free Marriage which did not grant a husband any rights over his wife or have any changing effect on a woman’s status. With this, the reasons for any divorce became irrelevant. Either spouse could leave a marriage at any point.
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This was the state of things into the second century — as the Christian church entered the ancient world. At that time, the Christians had no political power, no economic power, and were seen as weird and irrational atheists because they only worshipped one god. They had nothing — no publishing houses, no televisions networks, no newspapers, no blogs. They had absolutely no advantages in the society in general.
In our view, that means the game is over. I think our view of it is deeply influenced by our own prosperity and our own good standing in the culture, but if we had no legislative recourse and no way to make movies about what we say we believe, we would see the problem of helping our culture rethink, refine and restore the institution of marriage as completely without hope.
The writer Methetes wrote to his friend Diognetes about this during the second century, and he marveled at the Christians of his day. In some sense, he thought, they were like every man; but in a really obvious way, they had a striking and wonderful way of life. He put it this way in the second century (my translation of the original):
[Christians] live in each country, but they live there as sojourners, travellers passing through. As citizens, they do what all citizens do, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They live their time on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.
They obey the written laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are insignificant and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life.
The ancient Christians knew that the Law was neither their friend nor their enemy, but a lower standard than the one they were called to live up to. And the standard they were called to was itself something which could not be mistaken as just another philosophy:
God Almighty Himself, the Creator of all things though invisible, has sent from heaven, and placed among men, a man who is the truth. He is the holy and incomprehensible Word, and He has firmly established Him in their hearts. …
But when our wickedness was fully grown, it had been clearly shown that its reward ought to be punishment and death, and was impending over us. God had before appointed for that time to come. But God did not regard us with hatred, nor thrust us away, nor remember our iniquity against us because he manifested His own kindness and power, the one love of God, for men. Instead He showed great long-suffering, and then He took upon Him the burden of our iniquities.
He gave His own Son as a ransom for us. He gave the holy One for transgressors. He gave the blameless One for the wicked.
And that, somehow, is the story which changed the world from a sea of coexisting pagan religious methods to a world that would become the one we inherited. Most importantly for the sake of this discussion, it’s the story which transformed the West’s view of marriage as a secular duty to something greater than a law.
If we are going to re-teach the world about marriage, it cannot be at the end of a stick – because let’s face it: we are not the people of the stick, or of the law. We have to be honest with each other (and our non-Christian neighbors) that we are in fact condemned by the law – whether it’s the law which was on the books in 1990 or the one which is now coming on the books in 2014, because they are both pale shadows of the true law which convicts all of us of being only sinners and only worthy of judgment.
What if we instead adopted the most ancient Christian view of marriage, living that out and teaching it to others? I think – and historically the church has thought — that marriage is not the social construction of a network of rights – especially the “right” to some emotive or financial state of being appeased. In fact, the church reads the Bible to mean that marriage is a surrendering of rights first to God and then to another person for manifold theological purposes – that is, a wide variety of purposes which, when acted out, give glory to God.
Marriage is about God, the God who created us out of the dust for a purpose and subordinated to Himself. Marriage is about the Creator of all things and the purpose He made in mankind. The purpose of God in creating mankind is first to show the power of God over all things. The story goes like this:
YHVH-God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
and then God says:
It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.
And therefore Jesus says this about these events:
Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
Celibate, single Jesus said that – endorsing the story in Genesis not only by saying he believed that’s what happened but in fact by saying those words from Genesis 2 were actually spoken by God. So what we have is not just some human story but God’s very own story-telling, God’s very own words telling us that marriage was made for man and woman, that in marriage they would become one flesh, and that it should never be separated because God made it so.
Marriage is therefore a glorification of God in our obedience, to do a thing the way He said it should be done, and not to treat it – as we do today in our churches – as something which is often abandoned because the other person has become to us not our own flesh, but merely a roommate or worse: merely a contractor who we can fire when we aren’t satisfied with their work.
This is a view of marriage which, in spite of the very uncertain economic and political environment of the next 15 centuries of Western Civilization, became the common view of marriage. It is not merely a social construct or advantage, but an utterly spiritual endeavor which is rightly and primarily ruled by the church because of its deep meaning. While we may disagree with it, we can grant that the Catholic Church’s high view of marriage as a “sacrament” which has a greater demand on the two people involved than only a contract arbitrated by law can have is an easy mistake to make when we listen to how Jesus describes marriage as built into the very fabric of creation.
What does the example of the first Christians and the teaching of the Bible teach us about what to do with our culture regarding marriage?
It teaches us that the meaning of marriage is not made by the law, so using the law to try to change it is useless. We should exceed the requirements of the law through the consequences of the Gospel in our lives. That’s a far more daunting task than trying to convince the Supreme Court that marriage is not merely a contract because it means we have to get all of our sexual ethics in line with the Gospel intention of sex being sanctified and perfected through marriage. It also teaches us that God has wrapped up the Gospel in the most rudimentary parts of human life, and this gives us the ground to preach the Gospel in those rudimentary things. If our marriages looked biblical, and we could explain why, the world would be embarrassed by its counterfeits. And it teaches us that we have a greater responsibility to our neighbors than merely policing their behavior. The law of the government can be good at justice, but it can’t be good at mercy and love because it is not meant for those things. We can see this when we realize that the best efforts to codify what we mean in marriage in the law always turn out talking about the mere plumbing of the matter because the law cannot cause anyone to love anyone else; the law cannot cause anyone to sacrifice and die for the sake of anyone else; the law cannot cause anyone to become one flesh with anyone else. The law can only stop a bad person from hurting someone else, and that’s not hardly a formula for a successful marriage.
Society knows it needs this kind of marriage because this is how humankind not only carries on, but flourishes. Marriage externally shows itself to be a good thing even when considered in the most superficial and materialistic ways; think about how it looks when it is manifest as God intends it to be lived out.
There is something the church knows which is not disclosed in mere creation. It is only disclosed by God’s Special Revelation, and specifically and particularly in marriage. If we overlook that, or find that to be somehow second-rate in favor of other means, we will have made a Gospel fail – we will have given up something God made for the purpose of demonstrating His plan for all things.
Frank Turk is a husband, father, and church member. He fixes trouble in the global renewable energy industry in his day job, and causes trouble by night on the Internet for the sake of Christ.
Illustration courtesy of Seth T. Hahne. Check out Seth’s graphic novel and comic review site, Good Ok Bad.
