Blessing Same-Sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance
and the Confusions of Christian Marriage
by Mark D. Jordan
University of Chicago Press. 256 pages, $29.
RICK SANTORUM, who could some day be packaged as a Republican candidate for president, believes gay marriage is a threat to his own marriage, which has produced six children. Same-sex marriage, which a decade ago seemed like a logical—and harmless—extension of civil rights to a group of disfranchised citizens, has instead become one of the key rallying points in the Christian Right’s attempt to merge religion and politics. This may be pure opportunism, but same-sex marriage has become the issue of our time, and the arguments from the Right must be answered.
Mark Jordan, a professor of religion at Emory University, has been a scholarly and lively voice in this debate for several years. His most recent book, Blessing Same-Sex Unions, is a thoughtful, humorous, and at times obscure assembly of ideas about romance, sex, rituals, and Christian marriage theology. Jordan describes his book as a comedy of manners, and structures it as the story of a couple moving from their first romantic encounter to engagement to marriage and finally to divorce. The frequent references to popular culture give the book a hip quality that will appeal to readers familiar with Queer as Folk as well as those up on their New Testament. Indeed Jordan is quite capable of going from an exegesis of scriptural passages on marriage to a commentary on an eight-part series on gay weddings broadcast on the Bravo network. At times, the amount of detail brought to bear overwhelms his central arguments. I never fully understood what Jordan meant by “gay engagements,” and couldn’t find a clear distinction between a wedding and a blessing. The chapter about sexual exclusivity and polyamory—relationships in which couples agree to have multiple sex partners—gives sex a prominence that it usually has only for younger men. Despite the narrative device of following a gay couple’s life history, the chapters read more like discrete elements than a continuous whole. As Jordan acknowledges in his introduction, the book was written over a period of several years and thus reflects the progression of his scholarly interests over time. Blessing Same Sex Unions offers two powerful rebuttals to opponents of same-sex marriage. First, it skillfully challenges accepted notions about Christian tradition. The early Christian church held celibacy to be a higher state than marriage. Procreation was used to justify sex in marriage, not marriage itself, which might surprise Senator Santorum, who, like many conservative Christians, believes procreation to be the purpose of marriage. Over time social and economic forces contributed as much as religious ideals to the tradition of marriage. Second, Jordan argues persuasively that Christian theology, with its ambiguities about the indissolubility of marriage and its conflicts about erotic sexuality, has served heterosexual couples as poorly as it has gays and lesbians. In discussing a theology of marriage, Jordan recommends starting with process, not fixity, with the divine presence taken to exist in the loving relationship of two people. This presence, in Jordan’s words, is ultimately “indescribable and incomprehensible,” and thus “Christians should never expect a complete or certain marriage theology.” Invoking evidence both funny and frightening, Jordan also demonstrates how the wedding industry—that conglomerate of planners, bridal boutiques, reception halls, photographers, and florists—has turned this event into an occasion for “coupled consumption” that has little to do with the union of two people. Jordan amasses his evidence about the absurd state of straight weddings from Modern Bride magazine. But he doesn’t stop there: equally damning testimony comes from The Essential Guide to Lesbian and Gay Weddings, a book that saw two editions in the 1990’s. Jordan’s message is clear: “unless they are very careful,” GLBT Christians are just as susceptible to the allure of the wedding industry as straight Christians. Jordan challenges lesbian and gay couples to decide what they really want from the ceremonies that bless their unions: an imitation of a straight white wedding, their own version of planned, coupled consumption, or an alternative rite of blessing that embraces what Jordan calls “liturgical camp”? In the culture wars over gay marriage, Blessing Same-Sex Unions is an impressive display of learning and a clear warning against the dangers of mass marketing and the false certainty so characteristic of the Christian right. Daniel Burr (burrda@uc.edu), an assistant dean at the Univ. of Cincinnati College of Medicine, teaches courses on literature and medicine.
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