(no subject)

[lavendersparkle]

In my perusing of the wedding planning part of the internet I'm getting increasingly irritable with non-religious brides who want to have an Anglican wedding so that they can get married in a pretty church but then bitch about unfair it is that the church:
a) won't let them get married in a different church to their parish church just because it's prettier and/or was in a film.
b) strongly encourages them to come to church a whole three times to hear the Banns read.
c) makes them meet with the vicar more than once and dares to try to explain Christian ideas of marriage during those meetings.
d) won't allow them to do things which it deems inappropriate during the service.
e) makes them use the liturgy of the Church of England.

The Church of England is a religious body, not a wedding and pretty building preservation service. Would these people wander into a Mosque because it was pretty and then get all uppity about how the imam wouldn't let them wear a strapless dress for the ceremony?

Comments

[cesy.livejournal.com]

And they're all so sure that the vicar is just being mean and nasty when he points out that he can't legally marry them in a church that isn't their parish church, however many years they spent there growing up, and regardless of the fact that their parents still live there.

In many ways, it would be better if church ceremonies were not legal weddings, so it worked like other religions do already, where you have a registry office ceremony for the legal bit, and a religious ceremony for actually getting married in sight of God. Then the distinction between "reducing taxes" and "making religious vows" would be much clearer, and they could do whatever they liked with their pretty wedding ideas.

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

Well, a vicar probably would have the discretion to be able to marry people in his church who aren't parishioners but have a strong conection to the church. He'd have to do it by special licence, but that's not hard to do if you have a reasonable excuse. My youngest brother is planning to marry in my parents' church and I doubt there'd be any problems obtaining a special licence, particularly as my mother is on the PCC and the deanery synod. Anyway, the Chrch of England is planning to change the rules soon so that you can get married in your parents church or the church you grew up in without a special licence.

I agree that I think it would better if we had the Dutch system of everyone civilly registering their marriage and then doing whatever kind of celebration they want.

[lecabinet.livejournal.com]

I read something about the Church trying to get people marrying in Churches again by loosening the rules, you can [will be able to?] get married if your parents go to the churc or if your grandparents got married there, which seems fairly tenuous to me but whatever floats your boat I suppose!

[cathedral-life.livejournal.com]

Yay to that. I agree with your last sentence entirely. But I am an odd C of E anarchist because I'd only do the religious bit and would skip the civil altogether. Boo to Constantine.

[mummyfrances.livejournal.com]

this drives me nuts too! (especially as i sing in the choir at the local church for people who come only for the three times and clearly grimace at all the religious language involved in the ceremony. It is so bl**dy unfair that they can have their wedding there, whereas Emmy and I will not be able to, even though we are actually believing members of the church community.)

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

What kind of a church are you two going to now?

Alec has told me that the clergy at his church tend to hate doing weddings because the couples can be really demanding and are unlikely to ever darken the church's door ever again.

[cesy.livejournal.com]

Surely if you're members of the church community, you can join the electoral roll even if you don't live there, and then you can get married there? Anyone who regularly worships in a church for six months can join the electoral roll regardless of where they live.

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

Frances and Emmy are both women and therefore can only get legally married or civilised in a registry office or licenced venue. There would also be issues about what kind of a religious ceremony they'd be able to have in an Anglican church.

[cathedral-life.livejournal.com]

I keep wondering whether the church community might consider celebration in a churchyard to be acceptable... :) Or am thinking a more Wesleyan approach to Christian celebration of sacraments in a field might be useful.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

It is very weird the way the church and state are all tangled together in England. I think that the root of it is not "churches are pretty, registry officers are ugly" (after all, lots of people have civil ceramonies in castles and stately homes) but a much more complicated set of unvoiced prejudices that go "church weddings are _real_ weddings and registry office weddings are a cheap imitation for poor people and divorced people and foreign people". But people don't articulate this, they just feel strangely pressured into having a church wedding because registry office weddings are "bad", and then are annoyed and upset that the church wedding is not the wedding they want (especially because church weddings on the telly usually are completely made up) and this comes out in bitching about the vicor being an arse because they don't really understand what they've chosen to do or why.

(Or maybe I am too cynical)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I think there is a lot of truth in this analysis. I don't think it's unreasonable for people to think that a Christian wedding is in some sense more real than registry office weddings. In the sense that a marriage is a commitment between two people then they should be considered equal, but in the sense that it is also a commitment before God then they are not equal.

Given that we live in a Christian, or post-Christian country - some people will think that a church wedding is more proper than a non-Church one. The kind of people I'm thinking of are the kind who consider themselves to be Christian in some sense, but don't attend church, pray, or know very much about Christianity (and all the shades before and beyond that). i.e. not regular church-goers or 'practising Christians', but people with some kind of belief which is associated with Christianity.

Personally I am happy for such people to get married in CofE churches (and I feel like I have a bit of extra license to say this now that I am a member of a CofE church so am in some sense an Anglican) if there reasons are associated with what I said in the previous paragraph. Or in other words, if people want to get married at church because they kind of believe in God (or culturally think God is a good idea), I'd much rather them be allowed to do that than to go to a registry office.

Generally speaking vicars seem moderately happy about this too (unless they have a particularly beautiful church which means they're innundated with requests [my ex's church had this problem]), because often they will say you can get married there as long as you attend for a bit / meet up with the vicar a bit / attend a marriage course. Which is good from the vicar's perspective as he has an opportunity to share his more active view of Christianity with the less actively Christian people.

I can completely understand how annoying it would be to have completely irreligious people want to use the church because it is a fancy building though. The tanglement of the church and state is not so good in this respect.

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

It's not so much the fact that people who never go to church but sort of see themselves as Christian in a vague sort of way want to get married in church, people have all kinds of bizarre pieties and what pastoral theology text books refer to as folk religion, but the way that people feel such an entitlement to get married in a church which they have no involvement with which is part of a religion which they have no engagement with and then get so indignant when they can't have everything exactly how they want.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Yeah that is annoying.

I think there is some mileage in 'the CofE is the official church, so don't I have a right to get married in a CofE church' though. We (the CofE) can't (or shouldn't IMO) get away with the privileges we get from being the state church without the costs of having to marry people who don't regularly attend.

OTOH people don't have a right to get married at any church they want - AFAIK they only have a right to get married at a church in their parish (or possibly one they regularly attend, although one of your commenters said this is not the case - I suspect the vicar has a wide leeway to do things how they want in these cases). They certainly don't have a right to turn it in to a non-Christian service, or to have things the vicar deems inappropriate in the service though :-)

[atreic.livejournal.com]

get so indignant when they can't have everything exactly how they want.

Yes... I think it's a subset of the "wedding myth" that it is your day and everything should be just how you want it. There's so much pressure wrapped up in this impossible idea that it's not surprising that when it runs up against reality people explode.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's unreasonable for people to think that a Christian wedding is in some sense more real than registry office weddings. In the sense that a marriage is a commitment between two people then they should be considered equal, but in the sense that it is also a commitment before God then they are not equal

Yeah, but, I don't think that is what they're doing. It's not "church weddings are right because they have God TM, and registry office weddings don't", it's a much fuzzier set of ideas about why church weddings are right. And so they pick a church wedding because of those fuzzy reasons, and then get annoyed that it comes with so much God TM.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I think for some people the fuzzier reasons have God in there somewhere. Not for everyone, but for some people. For those people I think it's understandable and reasonable that they'd want to get married in church.

I am thinking of people I know here btw, not purely theoretical people.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you're right there are people like that too, but I doubt they're the people whinging on the internet and annoying lavendersparkle

[robhu.livejournal.com]

ISTM this kind of explains why there is such a big difference between the number of Christians on things like the census, and the number of people who regularly attend church. A lot of people believe in God but don't want religion to be an active part of their life, or believe in something out there. In both cases for various reasons Christianity is the thing that people connect to for their spiritual stuff.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Adds to list: gay people

[lavendersparkle.livejournal.com]

In fairness to people who don't want a civil ceremony, the wording of the civil ceremony is a bit crap. I remember at my eldest brother's wedding it felt very odd, because the civil ceremony is so clearly modelled upon parts of the Anglican marriage ceremony with the stuff about G@d taken out. I don't think we really have a model of how to marry people in a non-religious way so the civil ceremony ends up being a pastiche of a Christian wedding.

Related to this, I think people are deeply confused about what marriage is and why you'd want to enter into it. If you're religious the answers are given by your religion, but why do non-religious people want to marry? My brother was very clear that he wanted to get married because he needed to marry his parter for her to be able to get a visa to go to Japan with him, but I don't think most people who get civilly married are quite so practical about their motivation.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree, one reason people might think registry office weddings are a bit crap is that many of them are a bit crap. Even when you really really eake out what you can do it's hard to make them last longer than 15 minutes, and you're so limited (cue tabloid stories about "I couldn't play Robbie William's Angels because it said "angel" in it")

I think people are deeply confused about what marriage is and why you'd want to enter into it. If you're religious the answers are given by your religion, but why do non-religious people want to marry?

I don't think I agree with you here (or at least, if there are confused people, there are confused religious and non-religious people, and it seems to make just as much sense for them both to marry) I don't think the sentiments expressed in your comment the other week* (which I guess only makes up a bit of how you feel about marriage, but still) apply any more to religious than non-religious people.

*"My relationship with my very closest friends are like familial ties. It's stopped being a matter of whether I feel luke warm about them, but rather that I have a deep sense of altruism and obligation toward them. I decided to propose to Alec when I realised that I already felt that we had the web of mutual concern and obligation which makes up a marriage. It only remained to formalise this commitment."

[naath.livejournal.com]

But if you don't believe in G@d then why would you need the Seal Of Approval? I mean you could just say "we have this thing of mutual obligation and trust and so forth, so that's a marriage then" and just get on with your life, recognising that you are now committed to each other. I don't understand the drive to get this thing legally recognised.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's less a "Seal of Approval" and more a contract? Formalising things does make them easier for society. It is easy to give people offence if you don't know the intricate details of their relationships (eg asking Tracy how Fred is when they've just split up with Fred, inviting "Tracy and Fred" to your wedding when Fred is just a FWB and Tracy will be horrified at people assuming they're a *serious couple*, not inviting Fred to your wedding and having Tracy offended that you don't take their relationship seriously just because they're not married etc etc) If you know people are married, then it's easier to make a few ground assumptions about their relationship [Yes, I know you think people shouldn't make assumptions about anyone, ever, but given that I think the world couldn't actually work in this scenario it's better to formulise it so people make mainly-right assumptions, not mainly-wrong ones]

Also, it makes it easier to talk about stuff. You could just say "we have this thing of mutual obligation and trust etc etc" but there's a _lot_ of etc etc - it's easier to say "A standard marriage with a side order of X" than have to explain the whole thing from the bottom up.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I've been to a few civil weddings and yeah, it does seem very much "we took a CofE wedding and took out the GodTM", very odd.

I'm also not sure why people do it - but there are a range of benefits that the state hands out, not so much "less tax" these days but things like what happens if you end up in hospital, or if you die intestate, or parental responsibility for the father (or non-gestational mother; I guess that if neither parent is going to gestate the child you have to jump through hoops) with less hoop jumping and so on.

But people often claim things about how they can't feel committed without a wedding, which seems bizarely tied to the God thing (which is fine for people who believe in God, but not so much for people who claim loudly to not believe in God).

Or maybe they just want a stupidly expensive dress...

[guthrun.livejournal.com]

However bad the civil marriage ceremony is, it can't possible be as cringe-worthy as the civil partnership ceremony. A wedding ceremony with all the references to marriage and to God taken out and replaced with phrases like 'the civil partnership couple' and 'enter into a civil partnership contract'? Makes it sound rather like buying a house.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

(FWIW, yes, I think that's a pretty good description of why. I strongly suspect that the committed rationalistic people of various/none religions I know would like church weddings for similar reasons, just (a) recognise _why_ they want what they want and (b) be nice about it if you have to negotiate things with the resident church officials and (c) often be able to use a college chapel)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely, in that if one has been paying any attention whatsoever, you should realise that the church is a CoE church, and they may let you get married in it, but whining about the details will be just pointless/offensive, even if they're annoying.

OTOH, when you said "The Church of England is a religious body, not a wedding and pretty building preservation service", it occurred to me whether it should be :) That is, three-quarter tongue in cheek, everyone wants churches to be preserved, and I think they should also be treated with respect and not used for whatever anyone likes, but on the other hand, is the natural successor of the last several hundred years of CoE all people in England who have a Christian background, or only people who are actively CoE?

We sort of assume the second, except that the church does generally go out of its way to accept sort-of and mostly Christians. And I'm not sure if it holds water, but I'm wondering if you could argue churches ought to be available to everyone.

(That doesn't make any difference about the complaints, because even if you were to disagree with how CoE handles churches, it's not the local vicar's fault, so there's no point complaining about him. I just thought it was interesting.)