The final post in the set of three.
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So the family is attached to marriage. This means that there is a lot at stake in any decision concerning marriage that the government makes.
No doubt, the family was divinely created for the sake of, not just bearing, but rearing children. But this has big questions attached to it too. What about the competence of the people entering the marital union for parenting? My mother has said on many an occasion that she thinks that parents should be required to get licences before being allowed to reproduce. But since children should be attached to marriage, it would be more logical to say that people should be licensed for marriage than for childbearing.
In a Christian world that's fine; we have the local church to deal with that. If I'm a pastor and an immature guy comes to me with his sweetheart saying that he wants to marry this girl, I'm going to tell him to grow-up first and then he can get married. Furthermore, the church is good for dealing with marital problems that come up along the way. It has church discipline for adulterous spouses, for example. (The church, though, does not have divorce. I will post on this some day because I find the argument so compelling and so interesting but it just won't be any time soon. For now, I simply refer you to Piper.)
What the local church doesn't have is every single person on the planet. The non-Christians of the planet are probably going to be having sex and babies, they should have a way to be married without being members of a church. That's where it may be suggested that the government come in. It could carry the responsibility of marrying non-Christians. But, unless it was willing to regulate laws prohibiting sex outside marriage, or adultery, and it was willing to deny certain people marriage licences, this would be useless. Couples who were denied marriage licences would just have sex without the licence. Or, if marriage was easily available to all, but sex outside of marriage was illegal, people would get marriage, have sex and then quickly get divorced.
As an aside, it's always confused me how an atheist, agnostic, deist or secularist would defend people's desire to get married. I know that non-Christians want to get married because God put a desire on their hearts to desire monogamy, but that doesn't sound rational to me if God isn't in the picture. Why does a person need a licence to promise to his wife that he won't leave her? Especially in our day and age, that licence is particularly useless in light of how easy it is to get a divorce. For example, I wonder what Christopher Hitchens would say if asked, "Why did you get married?" (Realistically, being the libertarian that he is, he'd probably say that he did it for the tax break.)
While the government would ensure that marriage was available to all, I don't see it fulfilling God's plan for marriage. However, as I think about it, I'm not convinced that on this side of the fall we'll be able to perfectly administrate marriage. With that in mind, I think that I'm willing to concede that I think that marriage should be administered by the government, where it also allows churches and other religious institutions to act on its behalf to marry couples.
What the local church doesn't have is every single person on the planet. The non-Christians of the planet are probably going to be having sex and babies, they should have a way to be married without being members of a church. That's where it may be suggested that the government come in. It could carry the responsibility of marrying non-Christians. But, unless it was willing to regulate laws prohibiting sex outside marriage, or adultery, and it was willing to deny certain people marriage licences, this would be useless. Couples who were denied marriage licences would just have sex without the licence. Or, if marriage was easily available to all, but sex outside of marriage was illegal, people would get marriage, have sex and then quickly get divorced.
As an aside, it's always confused me how an atheist, agnostic, deist or secularist would defend people's desire to get married. I know that non-Christians want to get married because God put a desire on their hearts to desire monogamy, but that doesn't sound rational to me if God isn't in the picture. Why does a person need a licence to promise to his wife that he won't leave her? Especially in our day and age, that licence is particularly useless in light of how easy it is to get a divorce. For example, I wonder what Christopher Hitchens would say if asked, "Why did you get married?" (Realistically, being the libertarian that he is, he'd probably say that he did it for the tax break.)
While the government would ensure that marriage was available to all, I don't see it fulfilling God's plan for marriage. However, as I think about it, I'm not convinced that on this side of the fall we'll be able to perfectly administrate marriage. With that in mind, I think that I'm willing to concede that I think that marriage should be administered by the government, where it also allows churches and other religious institutions to act on its behalf to marry couples.
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I may soon write about homosexual unions. This is just my thoughts about government and how marriage should be administered.
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