Thinking about things like polygamy, and if still illegal gay marriages. Could a church, or religious organization of some like sort, legally and openly perform such weddings but with the understanding that it is not a state marriage and no state acknowledgement of the union should be expected, but a marriage by faith, or of God, or some such things?
Churches perform all sorts of ceremonies that aren’t recognized by the law. I don’t see how you could Constitutionally prohibit them. At most, there might be some sort of legal consequences for the couple if they afterwards presented themselves as married.
In America, marriage is a civil contract. Some folks wrap their own religious stuff around the event, but it still remains a civil contract. Religious bodies can do whatever they want with the religious wrapper. But for a marriage to be valid under civil law, it must follow the civil law.
Why not? ISTM that’s not any different than me standing in my living room and pronouncing my two dogs to be married or two 3rd graders having a pretend wedding during a play date or even a long term couple deciding that they’re going to start telling people they’re husband and wife since it’s just easier than saying ‘this is my boyfriend, but we’ve been together for 17 years and we’ve lived together for 15 years, we’re basically married’. Is it that different for them (the romantic couple) to just make the decision on their own than it is to have friends and family standing around a priest say some nice words?
Plenty of churches did same sex wedding ceremonies before they were legal.
I don’t know what constitutes “legally and openly,” but I went to several gay marriages performed by Unitarian churches long before gay marriage was legal in California.
Church marriages are the only way polygamous families are married.
Reform Jewish synagogues have been performing same-sex marriages since the 1990s, long before they were legal.
The Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage just means that all the default privileges of being married under the law are extended to gay married couples- things like inheritance and insurance coverage for example, got a LOT easier for gay couples as a result.
But that does not impose a requirement that religious organizations recognize or conduct marriages of that sort- most of them already don’t really consider common-law marriages to be “real” marriages anyway, so why should gay marriage be any different?
There’s nothing saying that the FLDS out in the Utah sticks can’t perform their own polygamous marriages that are valid by their theology… except that when it comes to all that pesky legal stuff, they have no weight whatsoever.
I could imagine one situation in which a church could get in legal trouble for “illegal marriages”: if they were performing child marriages. The authorities would almost consider this to be statutory rape; and what’s more, members of the clergy are “mandated reporters” of child abuse in many jurisdictions, so they could even be put on trial for not reporting a marriage they had sanctified.
Of course, I am in no way saying that such situation would be in any way comparable to the relationships between presumably consenting adults described in the OP. But such marriages have been known to happen in certain churches/cults.
Generally in the US a church can do any ceremony it wants under protection of the first amendment, unless the ceremony involves violating a law that is generally valid. A ceremony that involves dropping acid for enlightenment would not be protected since it’s illegal to possess and use LSD. Generally laws that exist purely or primarily to limit what can be done in a ceremony won’t hold up to a court challenge; shortly before gay marriage was legal, NC passed a law forbidding churches from performing gay marriages, but it was expected to be shot down on it’s own as a first amendment violation even if the supreme court hadn’t required states to allow gay marriage.
Currently a lot of states have laws against polygamy sparked by controversy over Mormons in the 1800s. These aren’t just laws about civil marriage, but forbid people from living together and claiming to be married, and there’s an ongoing lawsuit challenging Utah’s law by the polygamous family on the show Sister Wives. It’s being appealed to the supreme court now, and the lower court ruling was essentially that the law would be invalid, but the DA adopted a policy that they would only use the law for cases of fraud and coercion which means the family doesn’t have standing to challenge it. So currently polygamous marriages may be ‘on the books’ illegal in some states, but the laws are not generally enforced and probably wouldn’t survive a serious legal challenge.
The first example that came to my mind was tax filing … depending on jurisdiction, without the civil contract in place, the couple would have to file separate returns as single … rather than jointly. The marriage itself wouldn’t be illegal, but there may be some behaviors normally associated with marriage that would be illegal.
And even before that , it wasn’t unheard of for people have to have religious-only weddings so that one person would remain eligible for some sort of benefit whether that benefit was SS survivor’s benefits or Medicaid coverage for someone with a serious illness.
In my church they were called “ceremonies of commitment” to make it completely clear the church wasn’t claiming they were valid civil marriages. And the minister didn’t sign a marriage license.
There’s nothing illegal in conducting or participating in a marriage-like ceremony that doesn’t result in a relationship that the law recognises as a marriage. As others have pointed out, a number of churches and synagogues did so at a time when same-sex marriages were not recognised by the law.
But if a relationship is capable of being legally recognised as marriage, most Christian churches will want to ensure that their celebration of that relationship does in fact engage legal recognition This has nothing to do with civil law, and everything to do with mainstream Christian theology of marriage, which is that it is intended to attract social, societal, administrative, legal, etc, recognition. If that recognition is available to you and you seek to avoid it then the relationship you are seeking is not, from a Christian perspective, marriage, and you’ll generally find that churches will be reluctant to celebrate it as a marriage. There probably are some churches which will do so, but you’ll have to shop around.
It’s my understanding that some groups use religious marriage in this way so that wives can claim to be single mothers and thus have access to benefits that are (were?) not available to married parents.
Sure. I’ve performed triad and quad Handfastings before. In my religion, that’s a wedding without the legality of marriage. No one was under any illusion that this meant they could file taxes together, but in all other, non-legal, ways, we considered them married.
I myself was Handfasted to my current husband before my legal marriage was dissolved with my first husband. No triad there, just a plain old fashioned divorce that took forever to finish because of finances. Several years later, we got the paper from the state and had a wedding, and that’s when we started filing taxes together.
In terms of the law, since you’re making it clear that the state doesn’t acknowledge the marriage, it’s no different than 2 preschoolers deciding to “marry” each other under the tree in the playground.
Heck, I can walk up to random people on the street and pronounce them man & wife too.
Just because the church, or, more specifically, the officiant at the church in question, is also authorized to perform legal ceremonies, no additional weight is given to “illegal” ceremonies they perform.
To put it simply, they could legally say whatever they want, including pronouncing two people (or a man and a goat, if they’re so inclined) man & wife, as long as they make it explicitly clear that they aren’t speaking as a licensed officiant in those instances (which they aren’t).
Most of the marriages mentioned aren’t so much “illegal” as “alegal”. It’s not that they are banned, but that they aren’t recognized as part of the civil legal system: they are legal within the context of that religious organization’s own legal system. If the religious officer isn’t a mandatory registrar, this can also include marriages which are recognizable within the local civil system but which the spouses decide not to record within it.
Different in the UK, where a licensed minister can carry out a fully legal marriage. My wife, as a church official, writes out bans, wedding certificates and the various documents that have to be submitted to the authorities. The couple are legally married when they walk out of the church with the certificate tucked in the groom’s pocket.
Ever since same sex marriage was made legal, some churches have conducted ceremonies but not Anglican churches. This is pretty controversial stuff and the cause af a potential split.
I thing that marriage is a *civil contract *pretty much everywhere in the world; the way it is conducted and the means by which it is formalised will be different.