The authors promise to “ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings.” And they “will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles articulated and lived out from the beginning of the church’s life.” In practice, they ask couples to be married in Christian rites with ministers or priests, then to have second services, with judges or justices of the peace, who will sign their state licenses.

If you read wedding announcements, you may have noticed that members of the clergy do not matter as much as they used to. More and more people are married by judges, or justices of the peace, or friends who get officiating privileges from the state. Others use what we might call “clergy lite,” ordained by online services like the Universal Life Church, which has but two tenets — “To promote freedom of religion” and “To do that which is right” — and requires only your name and email address and a promise that you are “over the age of 13.”

Full disclosure: I am a Universal Life minister, and have performed one wedding. But millions of Americans are still married by traditional ministers, priests, rabbis and other clergy members. They are generally granted a special role in weddings, as officers of the state. They can sign your marriage license, and when they do, it all becomes official. It is an obvious commingling of church and state, one to which most Americans have been amenable. Letting a minister sign the license recognizes that most people want their marriage ceremony to be both sacramental and civil.

But as same-sex marriage becomes the law in more states — at last count, 35 states, plus the District of Columbia — some clergy members who are opposed to same-sex marriage are discovering that being officers of the state puts them in an awkward position. They are signing marriage licenses that get filed with a state government whose laws, they believe, are undermining traditional notions of marriage. And so a few of them have said, in effect, “No more.”

In its December issue, the conservative Christian magazine First Things published “The Marriage Pledge,” by Christopher Seitz and Ephraim Radner, both Episcopal priests and theologians who teach at Wycliffe College in Toronto. The pledge commits clergy members not to sign “government-provided marriage certificates.” Its online version has attracted 370 signers.

“In many jurisdictions,” Dr. Seitz and Dr. Radner write, “including many of the United States, civil authorities have adopted a definition of marriage that explicitly rejects the age-old requirement of male-female pairing.” Therefore, to continue “with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the church in a false definition of marriage.”

The authors promise to “ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings.” And they “will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles articulated and lived out from the beginning of the church’s life.” In practice, they ask couples to be married in Christian rites with ministers or priests, then to have second services, with judges or justices of the peace, who will sign their state licenses.

R. Reno, a Catholic ethicist who edits First Things, said that he and fellow traditionalists had been mulling over such a statement for a while.

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