Covenant Marriage

Sunday School was a little unusual at the church we visited. The teacher is a very talented raconteur, telling the old stories in new ways, heavily relying on The Message. But the talent in the class itself is even greater, with retired pastors and missionaries and seminary professors; so it seemed a little odd to have no to-and-fro.

The lesson was from Malachi; first addressing the priests who didn't take their job seriously (and then where does that leave the people who relied on them?--but we didn't get into that question), and moving on to divorce.

At which point the talk went straight into fog. Was she referring to the command to put away foreign wives in Ezra? To the injunction not to divorce unbelieving spouses if they were willing to stay married? She didn't say, though perhaps these things had come up before and the class knew what she meant. And then came a reference to “the one God meant for you,” which only seems relevant in Genesis (“Madam, I'm Adam”). And then a reference to “covenant marriage.”

The phrase was new to me, and set off the old alarm bells. Marriage is a covenant, and except for common-law marriage is an explicit one; so what's with the coinage? I get nervous when people start qualifying words like that; the result often stands on its head: like “People's Democracy.”

Wikipedia is your—well, not “friend,” exactly. Acquaintance? Covenant marriage is a marriage that requires premarital counseling and limits the grounds for divorce (abuse, adultery, felony with jail time). In other words, something rather like what we thought marriage was in the first place. Although in practice all you have to do to evade the provisions is go to a state that doesn't recognize it (47 don't) and dump your spouse there.

”No-fault” divorce was advertised as a way to keep lawyers out of a painful process that few would want to try. Both clauses seem to have been lies: lawyers are still involved and the divorce rate is now staggeringly high. The word marriage stayed the same, but the legal definition changed under it to make marriage the most easily abrogated contract we have, so long as you don't argue about property or custody. (Although it is sometimes easy to cancel a magazine subscription.)

For someone who wants a binding contract, there aren't many options.

I think the name “Covenant Marriage” is less than ideal. The “covenant” part certainly got some people's underwear in knots (they seem terrified of any hint of religion). Perhaps the coinage “Real Marriage” would be more accurate. Or maybe “Marriage Classic,” along the lines of a famous soft drink.

”Hard cases make bad law.” No doubt some people's lives were better thanks to no fault divorce, but it seems to have been an overwhelming disaster nonetheless. I'm not sure that enacting the possibility of “covenant marriage” is going to help the national divorce rate much, and if it does it will take decades. On the other hand, repealing no-fault is by now politically impossible. Even logical mild modifications, such as a probationary period (longer if there are children), may be out of reach. The culture has ratcheted its understanding of marriage into a paradigm of “rights” rather than one of union, and people hate to give up anything they conceive of as a right.

I started puzzling this out deeply suspicious of “covenant marriage,” and I still think the name is misleading, but perhaps this is a good idea. Perhaps it can grow a grassroots alternative to the semi-marriage the laws have left us.

I know there are objections that this reflects a Western, and thus Christian, and thus “unacceptably parochial” view of marriage. But even in the land of triple talaq marriages are not so unstable as here; even in France there's a probationary period. Our current situation is a mess. We have to choose some standards for family law; why shouldn't we permit one with extensive precedent and cultural roots, that was the standard within living memory?