Nick and Sarah Jensen are smarter than you think

In 2015, Nick and Sarah Jensen announced that if Australia legalized same-sex marriage, they would divorce one another in protest. Nick explained that he loved his wife but insisted that “any attempt to change the definition of marriage by law is not something in which we are able to partake.” They were widely mocked: a couple so self-important that they would scupper their own marriage to spite the homosexuals. Since the referendum, those with good memories and a sense of schadenfreude have been eager to remind the Jensens of their promise. They have now announced that they will not be getting divorced after all: “a VERY humiliating backdown”, crows the Daily Mail.

But the Jensens are not stupid. Their position is extreme, but their understanding of the history and theology of marriage is sophisticated, more so than their critics recognize.  How many of their sceptical readers understood their reference to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753? The Jensens are intellectually consistent to a fault. In fact, they are uniquely consistent among religious opponents of gay marriage. They take the religious argument against same-sex marriage to its logical (and absurd) conclusion.

The religious argument against gay marriage is worth taking seriously. Few advocates of gay rights do so. We know that we rationalize our prejudices. Theological arguments against same-sex marriage seem obscure and convoluted to non-specialists. It is therefore easy to dismiss them as disingenuous efforts to make pre-existing homophobia intellectually respectable. I suspect that this is precisely the case among many people who claim to oppose gay marriage for religious reasons. But there is also a theology at play here, and when religious people feel that that theological concerns are not understood, or even listened to, they might well conclude that they are being persecuted by secular liberalism.

Marriage – and (perhaps) heterosexual marriage – is important to Christianity. It is not simply a case of following Old Testament laws to the letter and without question. Marriage is important theologically. Jesus Christ is joined to the body of believers in a perfect union. That union is marriage. It is generative: it bears forth certain fruits. Human marriage imitates the marriage of Christ and the church. Some theologians insist that for this mechanism to work, marriage must be heterogeneous and it must be reproductive. Are they right? As a non-Christian, I don’t know and I don’t especially care. I am inclined to be sceptical about any religion that is unable to accommodate homosexual love, but I don’t see the question as any of my business.

According to Nick and Sarah Jensen, the state should not determine the meaning of marriage. If marriage is “sacred institution, ordained by God”, they write, it should not be defined by secular authorities or secular considerations. As they regretfully point out, the state has been increasingly intruding on this territory for several hundred years.

The Jensens identify a turning point for marriage in the British Empire with the passage of Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act in 1753. Common law marriages had traditionally been solemnized by local communities by a simple process of affirmation before witnesses. Following Hardwicke’s Act, marriage would now require authorization by the Church of England.

Officially titled An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriages, the law was justified by a paternalistic concern for the vulnerability of women in common law marriages. In fact, the authors of the Act were just as concerned with protecting the marriage market for the male propertied elite. Common law marriages threatened patriarchal authority. An advantageous match between aristocratic families could easily be ruined by individual desire. Women only had to produce witnesses to a pre-existing common law marriage to defeat the designs of patriarchal marriage brokers.

The effect of Hardwicke’s Act, beyond securing the aristocratic marriage market, was to increase the state’s control of marriage, via the Church of England, the official state church. Thanks to the Act, dissenters from the Church of England (including the Baptists, the Jensens’ denomination) lost the right to get legally married in their own chapels and by their own ministers. They protested Hardwicke’s Act as an infringement on the civil rights, and won redress in 1836, when a new Marriage Act allowed dissenters to register their marriages directly with the state. The new law restored the civil rights of denominations such as the Baptists, but – ironically – further expanded the state’s control of marriage by introducing the concept of civil marriage. Dissenters such as the Baptists could now celebrate their own marriages and then register them with the state as a civil marriage.

Hardwicke’s Marriage Act is little-known except among specialists in eighteenth-century British religious history, but the Jensens’ interpretation of the Act and its consequences is entirely correct. We see control of marriage passing from the hands of the church into the hands of the state. For the Jensens, this is the crux of the issue: who has the authority to say what marriage is?  Same-sex marriage, for them, is not in itself the problem. Rather, it represents the escalation of a problem which has existed for over two-and-a-half centuries, and which has now reached a point which the Jensens find intolerable.

The Jensens distinguish between their civil marriage and their Christian one. If we get divorced, Nick explains, “we’ll… continue to refer to each other as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ and consider ourselves married by the Church and before God.” Although this part of their announcement has been widely misunderstood, the Jensens are not proposing to separate. Rather, they are recognizing that what the state calls marriage and what they call marriage are not necessarily the same thing, even if the two might sometimes coincide.

But the Jensens’ argument works the other way. What the state calls marriage need not be the same thing as what the church calls marriage. Civil marriage plays a host of civic, social, and legal functions; it can exist on its own without impinging on the theological mechanism discussed above: the union of Christ and the church. In fact, it already does. Marriage is not an exclusively Christian institution. For better or for worse, it has long since ceased to be so in Australia. That ship sailed in 1753.

SHOOTING THE MOON: MARTYRDOM AND SACRED KINGSHIP IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Shooting the Moon: Martyrdom and Sacred Kingship in the Twenty-First Century

Only Buddhists and Anglicans: Moderation and the Church of England

http://jhiblog.org/2015/10/28/only-buddhists-and-anglicans-moderation-and-the-church-of-england/

A post for the summer wedding season

The Bible was an important source of authority for early modern political theorists. Verses could be found which supported the people’s right to resist tyrannical government, or conversely their duty to obey and submit to the ruling powers. Among the latter was 1 Corinthians 13, 4-7, best known to modern audiences as the reading that inevitably gets chosen for weddings:

“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Here it is again in the King James Version:

“Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”

Surprisingly, then, this verse was used by eighteenth-century preachers not as a celebration of romantic love, but rather as an exhortation to the duty of non-resistance and unlimited submission to government.

In 1775, for example, the loyalist American missionary Samuel Andrews preached a sermon condemning the Continental Congress for entering into rebellion against George III. Andrews asked his congregation, “Where is that charity, which beareth all things believeth all things, and hopeth all things, to be seen in our land?”

Here the verse is again, in a print satirising the Archbishop of York, William Markham, for condemning the rebellious American colonists in a sermon. The print depicts Markham as William Laud, the seventeenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury whose absolutist political program contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. The print has Markham waving a flaming torch, and reading the words, “Charity thinketh no Evil, &c.””

An account of a Ladies’ Debating Society, 1780

“Nov. 4. Accompanied Mr. Dalglish to La Belle Assemblée, or Ladies’ Disputing Society. The question proposed was: “Would it not be prudent and proper, considering the great demand for public supplies, and the difficulty of raising them, to lay a tax on old bachelors?” The lady who first spoke, moved to alter the question and include old maids, which was objected to by a fine young lady, who answered in a lively, pleasing manner; her objection was, however, overruled by a vote put by the president. Question then stood as including old maids. Twelve female speakers stood forth in succession, and the question was carried in the affirmative. There were many excellent thoughts expressed and some witty ones; some acquitted themselves to the approbation of the company. A few, through diffidence or forgetfulness, stopped short in mid-race, and sat down, unable to proceed; these met with polite and kind indulgence, and were clapped by way of encouragement.”

Journal and Letters of the Late Samuel Curwen, Judge of Admiralty, Etc., An American Refugee in England, from 1775 to 1784, ed. G. A. Ward (New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1842), p. 285.

The clergy and food: gluttonous hypocrites or agricultural improvers?

The overweight clergyman is a figure who appears repeatedly in satirical cartoons from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was a critique of the religious establishment that operated at many levels: political (the established Church was self-interested and excessively wealthy); theological (it was more concerned with this world than with the hereafter); and administrative (it was sluggish and inefficient). In this print, dated 1793, four obese clergymen celebrate a Fast Day by toasting to “our old friend…the Church”.

Fast Day!
Fasting and Prayer, attending the Church Bell,
That, that’s the way, good Christian, to live well!

In this drawing of a corpulent Bishop from 1830, the caption reads “Sin I cure”, a play on “sinecure”: technically an ecclesiastical office without cure of souls, but used to describe any office with income but no work.

This third example satirises the established Church’s reaction to the passage of “Catholic Emancipation” in 1829, parodying the insistence of many churchmen that they had been betrayed by the government. The Church is depicted as an abandoned wife left sobbing pathetically by her husband, the King, and surrounded by podgy little clerics clamouring for “another fat living” (a reference to the widely-condemned practice of plural office-holding).

-Bishop: “Very well Sir! Leave me & the Children do Sir & go after your Hussy’s, there’s Mis Liberal as they call her, & the Harlot in red – Oh you Brute!!”
-Cleric: “Mother I’m so hungry give me another fat living”
-Wellington: “Never mind Her.”

Satirists’ tendency to depict the religious establishment as greedy and hypocritical is not surprising. The political establishment was depicted in the same way. What I find fascinating about these images is that they also hint at another, less familiar story about the eighteenth-century Church: the clergy as agricultural improvers. Alongside their ecclesiastical duties, clergymen frequently pursued a range of academic interests and hobbies, such as botany. Toby Barnard’s work on the Church of Ireland clergy has documented their concern with physically improving the landscape in a supposedly “backward”  country, for example by creating gardens. In Norfolk, the Revd Charles Poyntz continually discussed his experiments in beekeeping in his letters to clerical friends. The papers of Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London from 1787 to 1809, include an entire file of letters from clergymen with proposals for various ways of reducing Britain’s reliance on wheat, in response to an invasion scare during the war with France. These examples suggest that the place of the clergy in the history of food is more complicated than the gluttony that their critics loved to parody.

An eighteenth-century sexual assault

My dissertation research has made considerable use of the archives of the wonderfully-named Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), an Anglican missionary society. The SPG missionaries were required to write to the Society every six month with a report on the state of their parish. Today there is a huge collection of these letters at Rhodes House Library, Oxford. They contain a wealth of information about social life in the British colonies, and – like many church archives – they ought to be of interest to historians beyond those working on religious history.

As an example, here is an account of a missionary who got drunk and attempted to “to discharge his brutal Lust” upon a fifteen-year old boy. The letter is written by a neighbouring missionary.

“‘I must now inform you of a most unhappy affairs which has greatly afflicted, and troubled me. The worthy Doctor’s Johnson, & Barclay, a few years ago recommended one Mr Milner for holy orders; and, to the Venerable Society. For particular reasons I then had, I did not join in the recommendation. The Society upon his obtaining orders were pleased to appoint him their Missionary at East & West Chester. His Levity of Disposition, when settled there was such, as rendered his Services of little avail; but in time he might have left off these Follies, if he had proceeded no further. Most unfortunately for him, and the Church in those parts, he went about four months ago to administer the holy Communion at New Rochelle, as Mr Houdine the Society’s Missionary there had been confined by a fit of the palsy a long time. After he had performed the most solemn part of our most holy Religion he imprudently accepted of an invitation to Dinner, from a wild Blade, in preference to one given him by one of the Church Wardens. As there was no Service in the afternoon, he spent it in drinking, more than he ought to have done (a Crime which to do him Justice he was not addicted too). The worse for Liquor, he, towards evening, went to Mr Blecker’s, a man of Note & Reputation & one of Mr Houdine’s wardens, and there behavied in such a manner as convinced the Family, that he was far from being sober. Mr Blecker seeing him in this unhappy Condition, prevail’d upon him, to spend the Evening with him, and also to lodge there, & set off for Home in the Morning. About ten o’Clock, after drinking still more, for he would have it, he went to bed quite intoxicated. Mr Blecker has a son of fifteen years old, whom Milner persuaded to sleep with him. The Father consented, as he did not know but he might be sick, in the Night, after what he had drink; but alas! soon after the Family were all asleep he began to torment the poor Boy (I am now relating the Boys Story) and attempted several times to discharge his brutal Lust upon him. The Lad was so surprised and astonished at his shocking Speeches, and brutal Attempts, that after struggling some time he broke loose from him, and went crying down, into the Kitchen among the Servants: Upon being asked what was the matter with him, he at once told what Mr Milner had said & done to him. The speeches will not bare repeating. The Servants were astonished, and after some consideration, acquainted Mrs Blecker with the Affair. She her Husband. So enraged seeks for Milner, but he was gone: upon which he came & acquainted me with the affair. I never was more astonished in my Life. I pacifyed him for the present, & sent for Milner, & taxed him, before Mr Cooper, with it. He confessed that he had drank too much, owing to the heat of the day, which had occasioned his being very thirsty, but absolutely denied, that he had said, or done any thing to the Boy: however as the Lad would swear it, & the Father was determined to prosecute him, we advised him, to leave his mission, provided the Family would for the sake of the Church hush the affair. This he readily consented to, and Blecker also declared that if he would leave the Province, it should not be spread: but as things of this kind will get wind, so it now happened, for while I was in Boston the story flew all over the country, and Milner went away, but where, or where he is now, I cannot say. Thus I have related this shocking affair, to you, as it happened. But one thing I must observe, that since I have heard that the Boy has a bad Character: but be it true or false, as the Boy will swear to the truth of it, and Milner has fled (tho’ its said he will soon return) the world will believe it, and his usefulness as a Clergyman is now intirely over. His Congregation declare that he will never put his foot into their Church again, and look upon his Absconding as a Resignation, and will I suppose soon petition the Society for a new Missionary. I wish they may get a good one, for they have been miserably supplyed ever since I have been here. This inflamed behaviour, (if true) of Milner’s is matter of great Joy and Triumph to our many, and inveterate Enemies, and of great grief to our Friends and well wishers.”

Remembering the Dead

Last Wednesday, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau murdered Nathan Cirillo, a soldier on ceremonial duty at the National War Memorial, before attempting to storm the Canadian Parliament where he too was shot and killed. For Bruce MacKinnon, a cartoonist for the Nova Scotia Chronicle Herald, the imagery of the war memorial provided a powerful symbolism to make sense of the events. MacKinnon’s cartoon, published the next day, shows one of the bronze soldiers tending to Cirillo’s body, while the hand of a second soldier reaches down, presumably to lift Cirillo up onto the memorial. The cartoon received high praise and was widely shared on social media, resonating with Canadians’ patriotic response to this symbolic attack on the nation’s political heart.

The success of MacKinnon’s cartoon brings to mind Benedict Anderson’s account of the powerful national symbolism of the war memorial. In his classic Imagined Communities, Anderson remarks that the anonymity of the Unknown Soldier buried in a cenotaph is crucial to the purposes of the war memorial. By transcending the particularity of a specific war to encompass all those who have died or will die for the nation, the anonymity of the Unknown Soldier fosters a sense of immortal belonging.

In some ways, this kind of national symbolism provides an appropriate way to commemorate and explain Cirillo’s death: he was targeted because he was a soldier; he died while serving his country. However, we should be wary of the implications of this intellectual move. Most obviously, the symbolism of national belonging can work to exclude as well as include. Far-right groups in the UK have sought in this way to appropriate the death of Lee Rigby, a British soldier killed in a similar attack last year.

More subtly, this move treats Cirillo as a casualty of war, and implicitly a war against foreign enemies. Zehaf-Bibeau had visited extremist websites, but according to current information there is nothing to suggest he was being manipulated by Afghan warlords or funded by Saudi petrodollars. Rather, he was a loser: a recovering addict with a criminal record that included drug possession and robbery, estranged from his wife and facing serious financial problems. To remember Cirillo as a casualty of war seems to dignify a deluded and violent individual with the status of a soldier. This in turn opens the prospect of an unending war against an indeterminate and undefinable enemy, and with it the indefinite suspension of peacetime rights and liberties. The symbolism of the war memorial is emotionally compelling, but it is not the only way to commemorate the victim of a senseless violent crime.

What were the consequences of American independence for British identity?

The flag of the new nation?

Considerable attention has been paid to the future of the Union Jack if Scotland votes to become an independent country on Thursday. Readers of the Daily Mail were outraged to learn that the blue and white St Andrews Cross might be removed from the flag of a truncated South Britain, leaving it an unappealing red and white. The Union flag of 1606 was chosen by James VI & I from among the more overbearingly English proposals, as a deliberate show of even-handedness to his English and Scottish subjects. It is only logical that Scottish independence would leave it lop-sided. Yet it is this issue that seems to have caught the public imagination, overshadowing discussion of some of the more substantive consequences of a ‘yes’ vote.

Alternative proposals for the 1606 Union Flag.

English commentators have moved from complacency to panic in recent weeks, as potential South Britons wake to the realisation that a substantial portion of their identity rests in the hands of the Scottish electorate. Comparisons might be drawn with a previous contraction of ‘Greater Britain’: the secession of thirteen American colonies from the British empire in 1776. In American national mythology, the War of Independence was the founding of a new nation, but it was also a civil war. The rebels sought to defend their inherited rights as Englishmen, and only renounced their allegiance to George III reluctantly. From a British perspective the rebellion were inexplicable, precisely because the colonists seemed to claim a more expansive set of rights than were enjoyed by Britons living at home. It was only as the rebels joined a military alliance with France and Spain that the British came to see them as foreigners. What, then, were the consequences of American independence for British identity?

An identity crisis. British national identity had long been defined in opposition to Spain and especially France. The contrast was obvious: they were Britain’s geopolitical rivals, and they were Catholic. Both were absolute monarchies, providing an appealing contrast to British civil and religious liberties. As the American war escalated, Britons now struggled to define themselves against their English-speaking, Protestant brethren. Had the Americans been different all along? Could identities be assumed and cast off at will? Historians have detected new ways of thinking and talking about ‘the self’ in the 1780s as a result of the ensuing identity crisis.

A restatement of gender norms. David Cameron recently visited Scotland to plead on behalf of the British ‘family of nations’. While Scotland’s relationship with England is routinely compared to a marriage – whether a successful or a broken one – the preferred analogy to describe Britain’s relationship with its American colonies was that of a parent and child. Could the colonies legitimately complain of unjust government by the ‘parent state’, on which they continued to depend? Were they still in a state of political infancy, or had they matured to the point of independence? The prevalence of these familial metaphors had unexpected consequences. The rebellion of Britain’s ungrateful children produced a new anxiety about patriarchal authority within the family, seen for example in the moral panic greeting Dr Martin Madan’s proposals for polygamous marriages in his Thelyphthora, or a Treatise on Female Ruin (1780).

Polygamy Display’d; or Doctor Madman restored to his senses (1780)

Political polarisation.  Britons agreed that defeat in the War of American Independence demonstrated the need for reform. Lessons should be learnt, and atonement made for an unprecedented national calamity. There was less agreement over what shape reform should take. Some believed that a less corrupt Parliament may have handled the crisis better. Others hoped to effect a ‘reformation of manners’, and formed popular associations to implement long-forgotten legislation against vagrancy, drunkenness, prostitution, and other forms of immorality. Proposals were made for the abolition of the slave trade: a cause which, among other things, served to highlight the hypocrisy of American slaveholding. With these competing reform projects came political polarisation. To make matters more complicated, the political centre ground had shifted as a result of American independence. British radicals were inspired by the experiments in liberty being carried out by the new American republics, but simultaneously found themselves without the support of their transatlantic allies.

Unfortunately, historical parallels cannot predict the consequences of Scottish independence. What they can do is show how national identities have continually evolved and continually been contested, responding to crisis and disruption in unexpected ways. A ‘yes’ vote on Thursday may consign the Union Jack to history; it is less likely to mean the end of Britishness.