When the church declines to speak the truth about marriage, it invites competing and false views to rob marriage’s purpose. Were the church to “get out of the marriage business” as some are tempted to demand, two mistakes will follow. First, the church will allow a false understanding of marriage to dominate the public square. Second, the church will becomes a secularized version of itself. Christians long ago insisted that a culture of no-fault divorce would not affect Christian marriages. But today, we’re all too familiar with the testimonies of scarred Christians who have endured divorce.

Christians are frequently tempted to excuse themselves from the kerfuffle over same-sex marriage by insisting that the church should get out of the marriage business altogether. Many suggest that we should separate the conception of marriage into the “sacred” and the “secular.” These evangelicals aren’t questioning the Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality. Some Christians just want to bypass debate and focus on weightier matters within the church’s walls—like preserving the theology of marriage from being corrupted by democratic fiat.

This argument assumes that Christians can maintain and safeguard their own definition of marriage by refusing to impose a particular viewpoint in the public square. Often with good intentions, some Christians wish to privatize marriage into a strictly ecclesial practice, treating it like we would the Lord’s Supper or baptism.

But therein lays the problem: The church’s theology on marriage, while certainly ecclesial, isn’t sectarian. Marriage leads one outside the walls of the church and into the public square because marriage, by design, reveals a certain cosmology about our essence as being made male and female. Marriage has an innately public purpose by bringing together the two halves of humanity. If you embrace man as man and woman as woman, you might be on the losing end of a culture war over marriage, but you’ll be on the side of truth when the dust settles about human nature.

One Type of Marriage

The government is not in the business of upholding theological positions or propagating sectarian ethics. The government forbids stealing, for example, not simply because the Decalogue forbids it, but because stealing violates the public trust. Because stealing undermines cooperation and a well-ordered civil society, common belief about the harms of theft leads to outlawing it. Of course, as evangelicals, we believe everything has God as its author, and so we view stealing as breaking God’s commandment. But that is not government’s interest in making theft illegal.

While marriage may be ultimately Christian, it’s not exclusively Christian. Arguments that conflate theological meaning with direct public application ignore this division and treat a theology of marriage as akin to a theology of baptism. How a church administers baptism, however, is an ecclesial ordinance where the church marks out its members. The same cannot be said about marriage. It is entirely permissible for the government to uphold a view of marriage that comports with theological truth, but that is not held or promoted for theological reasons.

When we speak of marriage as only a theological construct, we do a disservice to the institution’s public significance.

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