What Binds Marriage Forever? 

Going back to 2015 isn’t enough.  

The cultural revolution is on pause. Gender ideology, in particular, is in retreat. The fight isn’t over, but the momentum has shifted, especially when it comes to children. But to finish the fight, we must understand how things came to this—how did our society accept the sexual mutilation of children on the superstitious grounds that a boy can be born in a girl’s body or vice versa? 

This question draws out the divisions between opponents of gender ideology. A movement that has lesbian feminists alongside conservative Christians was always going to be fractious, but the divisions escalate as we argue over how to win, and what winning means. Liberal elements of the coalition are especially upset by conservatives’ continued opposition to same-sex marriage, rather than just trying to roll things back to around 2015—yes to same-sex marriage, yes to the Sexual Revolution, but no to transitioning kids and no to letting men into women’s spaces, sports, and so on. In other words, LGB without the T. 

But the LGB led to the T. After winning on same-sex marriage, the gay-rights movement immediately pivoted to transgenderism. Same-sex marriage enabled gender ideology’s sudden onset, for if male and female don’t matter in marriage, then they don’t matter anywhere. Conversely, if men and women are real, then this matters for sexuality and family beyond mere personal sexual preferences. We cannot get male and female right while pretending that sex (in every sense) doesn’t matter in marriage. 

This is why warnings about the slippery slope have been more prophecy than fallacy—for another example, note that liberals are now fighting for polygamy, with the New York Times reporting that, “From big cities like Seattle and Portland, Ore., to small ones like Astoria, Ore., proponents of ‘nontraditional’ romantic relationships are making headway in getting legal recognition.” Remember when conservative Christians were called alarmist bigots for predicting this? 

In contrast to this unchecked deconstruction of sex, marriage and family, Christians offer a robust and coherent understanding of our embodiment as male and female and its intrinsic place within the true nature of marriage. Our work of understanding and explaining these truths will be aided by a new book, or, rather, a newly-translated old book, What Binds Marriage Forever by Ida Friederike Görres.  

Görres was a Catholic writer whose life spanned the destruction of the old Europe and the establishment of a new order. She was born in 1901, her father an Austrian count and diplomat, her mother Japanese; one of her brothers was a leader of pan-Europeanism. Görres herself had the distinction of having her books, which were mostly about Catholic saints, blacklisted by the Nazis during WWII. What Binds Marriage Forever was the last book she wrote; she sent it to her publisher shortly before her death in 1971—the future Pope Benedict XVI gave her eulogy. The book quickly went out of print, but it has been rediscovered and translated by Jennifer Bryson, a colleague of mine at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. It is a short and easy read that is full of insight, casual erudition, and humor. Though some of the circumstances (e.g., annulment in 1960s Germany) that prompted this book are dated, its core remains relevant. Likewise, though some Protestant readers will find some of Görres’s Catholic edges rough, Christians of all denominations will benefit from her insights. 

Görres wrote in response to a Catholic Church in turmoil. Liberals, emboldened by Vatican II, were eager to revise Church teaching on marriage and family, while conservatives pointed to the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae vitae to insist that Church teaching remained unchanged on these matters. In particular, there was a push for the church to approve of remarriage after divorce. What Binds Marriage Forever rebuked this effort to create a “right to permissible serial polygamy within the Church,” which was, Görres argued, rooted in a “particular idea of ‘happiness’ as a state of wish fulfillment, predominantly in the erotic-sexual realm.” If this view of happiness is correct, then the right to pursue happiness includes a right to divorce and remarry in order to achieve one’s wishes in the “erotic-sexual realm.” 

Against this, Görres insisted that “Christian marriage grows out of the context of the whole faith.” Christian marriage is, well, Christian. It implicates our understanding of God as creator, Jesus as Incarnate Word and Savior, of the church, and of the human person both now and in eternity. And she knew that without these roots the Christian view of marriage “hangs in the air, illogical and incomprehensible.”  

But this uprootedness does not do away with marriage, or with the natural reasons for lifelong marriage. Though the post-Christian West views marriage as all about love, for most of human history love was only a part (and not the first part) of what marriage meant. The permanence of marriage has very practical roots. As Görres observed, since “humans are mortal, the actual bridges that keep passing on the legacy beyond the boundary of death are marriages. They are the guarantor of the temporal immortality of kinship. … Marriage does not complete a family, instead it continues one.” Marriage was about much more than the man and woman who were married; it was about the family and its future.  

Thus, pragmatic kinship-marriages, as Görres called them, have been the norm for most of human history because they provide, very literally, for the future of a family, of kin. As she noted, “Children are simply that which is to come, the future in person, for which all present achievements are done.” Intergenerational family life illuminates how lifelong marriage is indicated by our nature; it is not just a Christian invention, but it is rooted in our very being. As Görres observed, “only humans can form a covenant that connotes knowledge of death, the future and responsibility.”  

However, this natural basis for lifelong monogamous marriage is not without problems. Though it is socially beneficial, reducing marriage to its utility undermines it. Reducing the meaning of marriage to serving the interests of the clan or polity often becomes destructive. An obvious example is barrenness, which in kinship marriage is not only a personal sorrow (one Görres herself knew) but may become a crisis for a family or even a kingdom in the absence of an heir.  

Even setting aside such negative externalities, marriage without love is degrading. There may be (and usually is) hope that love will grow within the pragmatic arrangements of a kinship marriage, but that lack of love beforehand, and the lack of agency by those entering the marriage, is perilous. This is not news; as Görres put it, “Humankind has always known tension in the relationship between marriage and love, and tried to handle it in different ways.” Indeed, Christianity stood out for its requirement of freely given consent, thereby providing more space for love to be part of the choice of whom to marry. 

And Christianity was more alert to the evils that arise from decoupling love and marriage, such as a worldly tolerance for “adultery as compensation for a union without eros.” Though extramarital sex was casually accepted by the pagan world (at least for men), the Church, with its emphasis on male as well as female fidelity, consistently opposed it, teaching that husbands are to love and be faithful to their wives as Christ loved and was faithful to the Church, even unto death.  

In contrast to the historical norms of pragmatic kinship marriages, the modern world defined marriage as a matter of subjective love. But marriage rooted only in eros is also unstable and impractical. It is hardly necessary to reiterate how people, especially children, are hurt by broken marriages and relational volatility.  

And yet, despite eros’s volatile nature, it too provides natural roots for monogamy—those who are in love really do want their love to endure, to last, to bind them forever. The problem is that eros is rarely self-sustaining for a lifetime. It is Christian marriage that fulfills the natural longings for both stability and eros by binding them in a covenant that balances the practical realities of marriage with genuine respect for persons and their freedom. Though Christian marriage is ordered toward the practical goods of marriage, its validity depends on its being entered into freely. The core of this validity is covenant, rather than only material considerations or subjective eros.  

Marriage, in the Christian view, is a vocation most of us are called to that is both a foundation and a pinnacle. It is foundational to civilization while also providing some of the highest joys and greatest love this life offers—all while pointing toward something higher still. Marriage can be a “union that coalesces everything together: sexuality and friendship, eroticism and sacrifice, the urge to reproduce and the highest human longing for fulfillment in another, passion, play, trust, awe, everything that the ancients ascribed to very different, often quite hostile, deities. This seal of unity is a sign of the One God.”  

Yet though we recognize the glory and delights of such a marriage, it is important to recognize that many good and happy marriages do not attain the fullness of what Görres describes—nonetheless, they are good and happy marriages. Furthermore, even an unhappy marriage is still a marriage. And that is the rub—no one, as Görres pointed out, is concerned about whether happy marriages can be dissolved. The question is whether unhappy marriages are also binding. To modern sensibilities it seems wrong, even cruel, to insist that a loveless marriage is still a marriage.  

So what is it that binds marriage not only in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer and so on, but even in happiness or unhappiness till death do us part? Görres answers that it is “Covenant, law and grace—that is, sacrament.” These are “the ground, the enclosure, in which the modes of love I have mentioned find the complement of their natural shortcomings; they find their integration into each other.” This may seem an odd answer to the problem of a lack of love, but it is the answer we need. What binds marriage is God’s grace. Both the ordinary life and eros long for permanence, but only God’s grace can provide it. A good Christian marriage exemplifies grace perfecting nature. And when the natural reasons for marriage are on the ropes, marriage is preserved by looking beyond them to God’s grace. Persevering in an unhappy marriage is a sign of God’s faithful covenant love for his people. 

This perseverance is also the means by which love grows, matures, and even heals. And it is the means by which we assert ourselves as agents in the world. Like Hannah Arendt, Görres recognized the importance of promises as an expression of human agency. It is by binding ourselves with oaths, and then fulfilling them, that we demonstrate our freedom against the contingencies and caprice of the universe.  

Only a revitalization of the richness of Christian marriage will suffice as a bulwark against the insanity, exploitation, and selfishness of the gender and sexual revolutions. Our culture’s confusion creates opportunities for Christian witness; many people are realizing that something has gone very wrong with sex, gender, and relations between men and women. It is not enough to try to climb a few steps back up the slippery slope. Instead, we need to return to the firm ground of Christian marriage.

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