Rites and Rights

Mark Jordan has written another iconoclastic book. In it, he challenges us to both forget and remember the Christian history of marriage as we analyze the contemporary same-sex marriage debate. He considers history, straight (and gay) consumer culture surrounding the wedding industry, and the long chronicle of the queer relationship. Perhaps most significant, Jordan underscores the distinction between the state and its union versus religion and its blessing. Blessing Same-Sex Unions is a book for and about queer religious people and their rites, but it is also for and about anyone who wishes to experience or interrogate the institution of marriage, straight or queer. Jordan's reverence for and validation of queer religious experience makes this an extraordinary and unusual book. He asserts: "For the Christian churches, blessing same-sex unions might be just the opposite of an assault on Christian marriage. It might be the opportunity to find something Christian in what church-going Americans so blithely call 'Christian marriage'" (3). Jordan asks the churches: "What have you been doing all these centuries when you were marrying men to women—and what are you doing now?" (3). At the same time, he asks the LGBTQ movement(s): "Do you still count us as fully lesbian or gay if we insist on being Christian? And will you allow a same-sex relationship that looks like a Christian marriage to count as queer?" (3).

Jordan demonstrates eloquently that Christian marriage, as American culture has created it, is hardly Christian. He argues that the wedding planner is the new priest—for both straight and queer marriages—and that religion serves the function of decoration therein. Jordan deconstructs much of the ritual surrounding the planning of a wedding, indicting consumerism rather than hegemonic Christianity as the real oppressive force behind contemporary notions of marriage. With respect to queer culture, he questions whether a liberation movement can ever fully endorse couples, as opposed to single people. Here and elsewhere, Jordan suggests alternative Stonewalls—other sites of queer resistance—such as times when clergy in religious garb demonstrated publicly on behalf of gay rights. What a different narrative (with respect to both church and state) this authorizes!

Jordan problematizes the relationship between the queer union and the marriage ceremony, which articulates that "two men become a couple: they are not 'being together,' they are doing together" (74). Engagement ought to be a period for discernment; marriage should be the rite or ritual to seal the Christian community's vow to support the relationship. Instead, heterosexual engagements are exercises in materialism. Jordan equally critiques the superficiality of the gay and lesbian wedding planning industry. He further details Christian ambivalence, scriptural and otherwise, about the heterosexual married state. Given all this distress, should religious queers attempt to mold, or even "uncover," old rites to suit their own unions? To what extent do they need to make it new?

Jordan continues this analysis with John Boswell's much-contested "discovery" of Christian rituals for same-sex unions and Alan Bray's postulation that the history of same-sex friendship offers sites for reconsidering kinship and marital bonds. ¹ While respectful of their work, Jordan is cautious in his recommendations about how we utilize the past to construct contemporary rites. He also critiques an array of recently invented ceremonies for same-sex blessings. Rather than endorsing a reimagined past or rewritten present, Jordan stresses the importance of other rites for the queer religious person, such as public blessings on coming out, ceremonies acknowledging the end of a relationship, and the importance in recent decades of the AIDS funeral. Indeed, he suggests that these other rites are perhaps more indicative of the beginnings and endings of queer relationships than the more unstable categories of engagement and marriage. In general, Jordan is most sympathetic with rites that "appeal to tradition without claiming to retrieve a lost liturgical genealogy," that show "the persistence of tradition through invention" (146).

However much...