cwSpouse and I have been arguing (in a friendly way) over this. Since neither of us is Christian, nor have either of us ever been married in a Christian ceremony (in a church or outside of one), we don’t have an authoritative answer between us.
I am of the understanding (based on the experience of friends and relatives) that Christian churches and clergy require that a couple obtain a marriage license from the state prior to the religious wedding ceremony. That is, the expectation is that the church is in the business of contracting marriages that are legally binding and not solely of religious significance. Obvious exceptions would be (1) a religious group - such as the FLDS - that doesn’t care if its members’ marriages are legal; (2) a couple who has already had a civil marriage ceremony and wishes to follow up with a religious ceremony; or (3) a couple who cannot get a civil marriage license - say, a same-sex couple - but whose union can nevertheless be solemnized by their church.
cwSpouse disagrees. He claims that most mainstream Christian churches are only in the business of administering religious rites, and that ministers, priests, etc. will happily conduct a religious wedding for a couple who have not obtained a marriage license and have no intention of doing so, even though the option is available to them.
Surely there’s at least one person on the Dope who is qualified to answer the question. Which one of us is out of his everloving mind - cwSpouse or me?
Even though a marriage CAN be valid in the eyes of the Catholic Church but not in the eyes of the state (and vice versa), a couple getting married in a Catholic Church is expected to present a valid civil marriage license.
I suspect that in most cases (in the U.S.) it’s up to the individual congregation. I further suspect that most congregations don’t care to have a minister’s time taken up for what they might consider a non-essential or meaningless ceremony.
It’s not the church that requires the license, it’s the state. In order for the marriage to be legally recognized, the couple must have a valid marriage license, regardless of who performs the ceremony.
I’m sure the OP understands this. The question is whether the church will perform the ceremony (which will have no legal standing) for couples who do not wish to be legally married but would like to have a church wedding.
In Germany, the main Protestant Church (Evangelisch-lutherisch) requires a certificate for the civil wedding because they don’t do a special rite that makes a sacrament like the RCC does; instead they have “just” a (special) service to celebrate and bless the couple.
The wedding service for a hetero couple is different from the “blessing” given to homosexual couples, though things vary widely among the different state churches there - there is no central authority for German Lutheran-Protestant Church, instead, each state church branch decides how to handle this. This means that some state Church branches are more tolerant and bless homosexuals, others are more conservative and don’t. This also leads to things like one state church strongly urging a divorced bishop to resign, because of being a bad example, and another state church having no problem with divorced bishops at all, because they are humans and things can go wrong).
I could dig up a copy of the PC(USA) Book of Order and see what it says, or the OP could do an online search. I suspect no matter what church documents say, most mainline ministers would expect to see the civil license. Churches take marriage seriously. If you don’t get a civil license, how strong is your commitment?
As for same sex marriages, that is a very divisive issue in most churches, except for the ones it is out of the question. Even as the leadership approves it in some cases, many members remain opposed. I am sure many of the same sex marriages preformed are done so without a civil license.
This gets into the category of “what is, is.” When a same-sex couple at my church wanted a ceremony, both they and the minister were quick to point out that they weren’t asking for a “wedding,” but a “ceremony of commitment” and the word “marriage” was never used by anyone.
Other ministers will “bless the union,” again never using the M word.
One thing I am absolutely sure of. In the U.S. Roman Catholic marriage ceremony, the priest asks the two parties if they take each other to be their “lawful husband/wife.” If it’s not “lawful” the priest ain’t gonna do it.
I have heard of ministers marrying an elderly couple apart from a license, due to questions of Social Security, etc. leaving their civil status the same
As so many things, it varies by location; in this case, it will also vary by why is civilian paperwork not part of the game.
Is it a couple who is already married to each other in the eyes of the law? No marriage license, and the ceremony is likely to be presented as a renewal of marriage vows rather than as a taking up of marriage vows. The marriage already exists, it merely hasn’t been presented to that particular community before.
Is one of the members already married to someone else in the eyes of the law? No ceremony will be available from a mainstream religion.
Is it a couple who is free to marry, both according to civil law and according to that church’s laws, but who do not want a civil marriage for specific reasons? (Such as not losing social security benefits, making it extra-super-clear to their children that there is no joining of households and therefore no changes to expected inheritance, etc.) If civil law allows it, then the ceremony will be available. The “keeping both pensions” part was the most common cause for religious-only weddings in Spain following the law which made religious weddings NOT be civil weddings automatically - nowadays religious weddings can be civil or not (again, in Spain), so long as the religious organization has done all necessary paperwork to be able to “count double” (if, say, the Southern Baptists opened a Spanish branch, it would have to get this paperwork before their weddings counted as civil ones and not merely as “pomp and circumstances”).
In general, if civil law accepts a religious ceremony as an acceptable source for the paperwork, the expectation will be that both go together - whether exceptions can be granted or not depends on those civil laws.
Generally, from a Christian perspective, marriage is not just a private affair between two individuals that concerns no-one else; it involves recognition of, and support for, the relationship by the community at large. Thus a couple who want to marry should want the legal status of marriage and, if they don’t, the question arises as to whether what they do want is marriage in the Christian sense at all. Hence the starting assumption is that civil and canonical status should line up.
In some, but not all, jurisdictions this may be reinforced by civil law, which forbids the celebration of a marriage which would be invalid for civil purposes. In others the law may simply recognise religious celebrations, so the option of having a religions celebration which is not civilly valid may simply not exist (or may exist only where, e.g., the marriage would be civilly bigamous, in which case most churches would refuse to celebrate it anyway).
Where the law permits, there may be cases where mainstream churches will celebrate a marriage that is not going to have civil legal validity. But they will be very much the exception, and there will have to be particular facts to justify them.
When my husband and I married in a Catholic church in Illinois, we were expected to have a marriage license issued by the state. I don’t know what the priest would have said if we had requested only a religious ceremony, and since it was about 40 years ago it never occurred to me to ask.
Hummmmm? You want to live together without getting married, that is mostly fine with the law. But add a religious ceremony and it becomes illegal without a civil license?
My wife and I were married four years (Catholic, IL) and it was made clear that we had to have a license. Since we had planned on it anyway we never had reason to debate it, but I suspect that the church expects you to be married afterward and that includes all aspects of it. Otherwise it’d kind of cheapen the idea of marriage in the church.
Depends. In some places they don’t want you going through a marriage ceremony if it’s not going to result in a civil marriage. Presumably this is because they want the couple/the community to understand clearly who is married and who is not - they are seeking to avoid fraud or error. There’s possibly also a historical background of church/state conflict over who ultimately gets to control marriage.
So you can have commitment ceremonies and blessing ceremonies and whatnot, but if you have a marriage ceremony then it needs to correspond (and, usually, create) an actual marriage actually recognised by civil law.
This wouldn’t work in the US, of course, since the Constitution probably prevents the civil power from telling a church what ceremonies it can and cannot conduct. But in other countries the civil power is not so constrained.
