Bad Priest
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Apparently, fewer and fewer people are getting married in religious settings with religious leaders doing the officiating. It used to be that almost everyone got married in some sort of church context with only a few getting married by a "justice of the peace." Today, though, larger numbers of people are actually having friends and family doing the officiating.
Clergy are being left out entirely and this may have significant consequences down the road for religion and people's relationships with churches.
A study last year by TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com showed that 31 percent of their users who married in 2010 used a family member or friend as the officiant, up from 29 percent in 2009, the first year of the survey.
Although the majority of brides and grooms still use members of the clergy and other professionals, including judges (61 percent last year, according to the study), the shift toward nontraditional officiants seems to be further evidence of another, broader trend: the movement of Americans away from organized religion.
Recent studies show that most Americans aren't a regular part of an institutional faith community, and many people say they don't know a member of the clergy well enough to want to be hitched by them. ...
While people who choose secular officiants might not want a cleric in their faces when they exchange vows, many often still want a traditional experience: exchanges of rings, a request for community support and even explicitly religious rituals slightly reformatted.
A spokesman for the nonprofit Universal Life Church Monastery, the largest of multiple groups that produce insta-certification for officiants, said the organization uses the lingo of organized religion, even though its mission statement stresses total freedom of religious belief or lack of it. The group says it "ordains" 700 "ministers" each day.
Source: The Washington Post
One of the most important and perhaps even intimate ways that clergy can exercise influence over people's lives is through marriage. Clergy limit whom they will marry, functioning as a sort of gate-keeper to the institution of marriage. This has been aided by attitudes which treat non-church weddings as somehow "less" than full-blown church affairs. Clergy can condition their role in wedding ceremonies on attendance at marriage counseling sessions where their religion's ideas about male and female roles can be impressed upon couples.
For many, a wedding is one of the most important events of their lives and the clergy take center stage, doing most of the speaking and delivering a sermon on what their religion expects of couples, of men, of women, and of the two people getting married in particular. Clergy also exercise influence latter on through other types of marriage counseling -- people turn to clergy for counseling in part because of an already-existing relationship with a church and in part because of an already-existing relationship between some member of the clergy and the marriage itself.
All of this disappears, either entirely or mostly, once clergy are removed from the marriage ceremony itself. If no one has to "apply" to a member of the clergy and ask them to officiate, no one has to be "in good standing" with any particular church. This eliminates one reason for them to ever think about what a church or priest thinks about their behavior or decisions.
People doing this don't have to attend pre-marriage counseling where they are told what a church expects of them, what a church thinks women should be doing, what a church thinks men should be doing, etc., which means they can escape one more way churches have for encouraging traditional faith-based gender roles. (Though to be honest, some sort of counseling before marriage is often a good idea).
Because no connection is established between a couple and a church through the wedding ceremony itself, there is no connection for churches and clergy to use later as a means for exercising influences on the marriage, like through later counseling, through children, etc. People can thus more easily become even more disconnected from churches, free to follow their own path that has nothing to do with the demands of church tradition or dogmas.
In the long run, then, this particular trend could have a significant impact on the secularization of American society.
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