How did marriage lose most of its meaning? How has it gone from being regarded as an institution that formed the conjugal bond, established nuclear families, knit vital social ties across extended familial units, and forged the necessary social cohesion for the sheltering and rearing of children, to a more-or-less optional affirmation of love?
True, the same-sex marriage debate has rekindled some interest in the institution and its purposes. But that imbroglio seems more like the last flaring of a star before it goes cold rather than a true rekindling.
The weakening of the institution has been ongoing for so many years that it is difficult to discern the proverbial tipping point. But I have a good candidate: The 1976 California Supreme Court case, Marvin v. Marvin.
Wow, I had never heard of this wierd CA case, but it is indeed symptomatic of the sea change in cultural attitudes toward marriage in North America. One could certainly suggest alternative events or dates, but I would tend to agree that the problems go back at least 30-40 years, and maybe further.
For example, some of us believe that the cultural tipping point was when No Fault Divorce became normal in the US. Lots of us think that the advent of No Fault Divorce is a prime illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Designed primarily to eliminate the ugliness and sheer nastiness of proving which side/spouse was at fault in a failed marriage, the unintebded result of this momentous change was to make divorce way too easy to get. This was especially true when one partner could be granted a divorce by the state over the strong objections of the other partner who still hoped (often unrealistically, but sincerely) to save the marriage somehow. And the rest is history…
As for the collapse of the theology of marriage in the Church, there are a growing number of us who believe that the tipping point in TEC’s recent history was the approval in 1970 of a far more “progressive” stance toward divorce and remarriage. And it was particularly unseemly (and symptomatic) that when TEC revised its canon law in 1970 to allow easy remarriage after divorce with very few, if any, real restrictions, in many places the first people to take advantage of the new permissiveness were clergy stuck in unhappy marriages! In retrospect, I suspect that this capitulation to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s set the trajectory that TEC has been on ever since.
But of course, I’m well aware that some people would point much further back in time, and say that worldwide Anglicanism began to go wrong about sex and marriage way back in 1930 when the Lambeth Conference of bishops gave approval in principle to the use of contraceptives by married couples!
David Handy+