My friend David is a retired UCC minister who writes books about Colonial Massachusetts, so I always come away from our times together knowing something I had not known before. Last week we talked about Marriage, starting with his comment that in France all marriages are civil and performed at the local city or town hall.* I added that when my daughter decided to be married by a minister friend, her fiancé’s mother, an official in the French department of agriculture, worried that her son’s marriage would not be valid if performed by a clergyman. (A copy of the Massachusetts General Laws quieted her concern.)
This led to David expounding that in colonial Massachusetts, the clergy – all men, of course – were forbidden to perform marriage ceremonies. “Why?” I asked, knowing David’s answer would be interesting as well as accurate. The answer was simple: “Separation of Church and State.” The colonists of most of the thirteen colonies were against the European model of the church and state being intertwined, and they wanted absolute separation of religious and secular activities in their communities. In the future United States, marriage was a secular function, and the religious rite had no bearing on whether a marriage was legal or not. Eventually, of course, this principle was softened to the point that now our Massachusetts Laws, like those of most of the United States, authorize clergy to perform legal marriages. (This led to my tales of legal problems when couples decided to end their marriages, but that’s another story.)
Coming from a Yankee background, I cannot help but believe in separation of church and state. (This means, of course, that religious institutions like ours must adhere strictly to the moral values they claim to espouse and act accordingly to sanction any leader or member who violates those strictures, even to the point of turning cases over to secular authorities.)
*N.B.: The French Revolution ushered in that country’s strict adherence to separation of church and state.
Lyn Pickhover, Adamant