The religious Right has thrown in the towel

The federal marriage amendment is dead. Many of the laws and state-level constitutional amendments passed in 2004 have been overturned by judges. Same-sex marriage is allowed in well over half the states in the union. The religious right arguably has less power within the Republican Party than at any time since before Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign for president.

And now First Things, the intellectually formidable monthly magazine that played a decisively important role in formulating the interdenominational and interreligious ideology that once galvanized the religious right, has decided to pick up its marbles and go home.

Maybe I’m overstating the significance of a brief article published on the First Things website earlier this week, but I don’t think so. Authored by editor R.R. Reno, “A Time to Rend” appears to put the magazine’s moral and intellectual weight (which remains considerable on the religious right) behind a movement that calls on churches to cease administering civil marriages.

That’s right, the magazine founded by the late Richard John Neuhaus to fight secularism and champion religiously grounded moral arguments in the public square now thinks that priests and ministers should refuse to participate in marrying parishioners by presiding at wedding ceremonies and signing state marriage licenses. I mean, sure, they would still perform private wedding ceremonies in churches. But those couples would then have to get married a second time at city hall to become married in the eyes of their home state and (via the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution) the rest of the nation.