Christian covenant and liberal freedom : a new approach to the modern marriage crisis.

Abstract

Today’s society is burdened by an overwhelming abundance of government regulations in what is commonly regarded as the private realm, and sizeable numbers of people of all political ideologies are scrambling to end those regulations they find offensive. Interestingly, those same would-be reformers who balk most loudly at some regulations are wholeheartedly committed to maintaining or adding to existing regulations when it suits their political agendas, indicating that people will willingly abandon their political principles when they conflict with their efforts to attain political power. To my knowledge, no one has given serious consideration to the elimination altogether of government regulation, especially in marriage law, as a means of advancing toward a more Christian standard of living. Herein, I demonstrate that the modern Christian obsession with maintaining legal exclusivity for heterosexual marriage is misguided while the secular liberal appeal for legalization of same-sex (or gender-neutral) marriage is equally ill-conceived. Instead, a libertarian approach to the formation of families is ideal for both the Christian and the secular liberal, for it allows the Church to tighten its hold on the definition of marriage and frees the individual to pursue whatever life choices she or she wishes to make. Prevention of the legal disestablishment of marriage ultimately feeds religious complacency, weakens the marriage bond, and distracts from the pursuit of holiness; it also enslaves the free individual to the capricious whims of the secular state.