So this particular article (Should a Christian Photographer Work at a Same-Sex Wedding Ceremony? – The Gospel Coalition Blog) is one of the more detailed I’ve seen discussion the whole “Should I provide any business services to a gay wedding, or does that mean I’m being sinful if I do so?” It’s short on sound bites, long on Scriptural reasoning. I don’t agree with it, but it’s worth parsing through more carefully.
The context is an evangelical Christian who is a professional photographer and has been asked to photograph a (legal in the state) wedding between people of the same gender. Russell Moore, who is the “president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention” weighs in on the (rather thoughtful) questions the photographer raises.
Moore starts by talking about some hypotheticals the photographer raised that that might be considered in the same light — serving a gay couple at a restaurant, photographing a gay couple at a birthday party, etc.
You’re right that this situation is more complicated than whether to serve someone at a restaurant (yes) regardless of that person’s sexual or marital situation. I would also argue that the situation is very different from photographing some other event, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the clients’ sexual or marital context. The fact that this is a wedding means there’s a different moral question for you.
I’m not sure I agree so quickly. Moore seems to think that involvement in an actually wedding ceremony is an affirmation of said marriage (which he considers invalid, nonsensical, and sinful, as we’ll see), but that anything that otherwise touches on a gay married couple’s life is not affirming their marriage. It’s an odd separation between the act of being married and the state of being married that simply doesn’t make sense to me, linguistically or sacramentally.
You are also right that your role as a wedding photographer is different from an officiating minister, a member of the wedding party, or even an invited guest. All of those people are part of the wedding itself, the assembled witnesses who affirm the lawfulness of the union and pledge to hold the couple accountable for their vows.
Here I agree with Moore. Indeed, it’s an area where I have some sympathy for people who decline to attend a wedding because they simply cannot support it or think it is fundamentally wrong (whatever the reason). To my mind, being a wedding guest is more than a simple social courtesy.
If you were, say, a photojournalist for a news service, there to report on the first same-sex marriage in your state, for instance, there would be no issue for your conscience. As a wedding photographer, though, you are in a third place between participant and neutral observer.
And we’re back to disagreement. A wedding photographer is no less a neutral observer (or neutral service provider) than, say, the reception center worker who sets the tables for the wedding dinner, or the bridal store worker who helps a bride pick out a dress and get properly sized for it.
The questioning photographer had observed that they’d done weddings where the couple involved was problematic (from a Christian evangelical perspective) in other ways: “I have photographed weddings of people who were divorced (and I didn’t investigate the background), people who were probably cohabiting, people who were most likely unequally yoked to one another, and so on.” Moore continues:
A same-sex wedding is different, I think, from the other problematic marriages you mentioned, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, while a biblical view of marriage would see that such people (fornicators, believers to unbelievers, unlawfully divorced, etc.) should not get married, and that the church has no authority to marry them, we also would affirm that such people, when married, actually are married. A pastor who joins a believer to an unbeliever bears an awful responsibility for doing something wrong, but the end result is an actual marriage.
The same-sex marriage differs not in terms of morality, but in terms of reality. It is not that homosexuality is some sort of wholly different or unforgivable sexual sin. It’s that the historic Christian view of marriage means that without sexual complementarity there is no marriage at all.
This is an interesting argument. It’s not that the marriage being proposed is any worse than the other cases the photographer raises, argues Moore, but that it’s simply not a marriage whatsoever.
Now, my first thought is, “It’s not really a problem then, because you’re not involved in an actual marriage taking place,” any more than taking pictures of a couple of 6-year-olds pretending to get married would be. But apparently pretending it’s an actual marriage, or believing that it is, makes participation sinful. That still begs the issue of whether a wedding photographer is a moral participant in same, and, if so, why that makes these occurrences more morally sketchy to be a photographer at than being one between one of those other unsuited couples.
More than that, you are right to note that your situation takes place at a moment of concerted cultural revisionism on the question of marriage as conjugal union. A same-sex wedding service right now is not merely personal, but, whether the couple intends this or not, political, with all sorts of corresponding questions.
On the one hand, I agree with Moore here that such weddings (for a fairly narrow timeframe) have social and cultural and political implications beyond just the participants. On the other hand, I simply don’t buy that makes a moral difference. If it is wrong for folks to be attend such a ceremony, it is wrong whether or not it’s the talk of the town the next day. Ditto if it is right. And none of that still has a solid connection to the role of the wedding photographer.
Your conscience is conflicted right now, but suppose there’s in the near future an evangelical or Roman Catholic or Muslim photographer whose conscience would be morally opposed to participating at all in a same-sex marriage ceremony. There’s a real question as to whether the civil state will penalize this person’s conscientious objection, at least in some parts of the country. And a state that will do that has over-stepped its authority.
There’s not a real question under the law. If a state (or, eventually, the federal government) includes sexual orientation in the civil rights laws regarding public accommodation (which essentially govern any publicly available service or good for purchase or hire, then having a conscientious objection to providing a service to a same-sex wedding is no different from having a conscientious objection to a mixed-race wedding or a mixed-faith wedding or the wedding of a co-religionists of faith you don’t agree with or a remarriage of divorced individuals. That’s not an overreach; that’s how a society keeps conflicting religious beliefs from tearing it apart.
I would say that the decisions you’ll make, generally, as a wedding photographer will correspond often with the Corinthian dilemma of whether to eat meat that had been offered to idols (1 Cor. 8).
The Apostle Paul says, first of all, that the idols don’t represent real gods (1 Cor. 8:4), in the same way that you would argue that a wedding without a bride or a groom isn’t really a marriage. If something’s put before you, the apostle writes, eat it to the glory of God, no questions asked.
But, the apostle says, if the food is advertised as sacrificed to idols abstain from it for the sake of the consciences of those around you (1 Cor. 8:7-9). This is the difference between investigating a doughnut shop owner’s buying habits before eating there and stopping in for doughnuts when the sign out front flashes: “Eat here and support our owner’s cocaine and prostitutes habit.”
This particular passage in 1 Corinthians has always interested me, because it holds people to a higher standard than just personal piety — holy and moral living takes into account its effect (positive or negative) on those around.
I don’t agree with Moore’s metaphor of the meaning here. The issue in 1 Cor. is not that the food is evil or even being used for evil purposes in its eating, or that its eating leads to evil results — it’s that people who don’t understand that food that’s been offered to idols is not wrong to consume will think that someone who consumes it is being immoral, and so following them will be immoral themselves:
7 But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. 8 But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do. 9 Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. 10 For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 11 So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. 12 When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. 13 Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall.
Moore’s “flashing sign” metaphor isn’t the same thing at all. For one thing, it does make a customer complicit (see also “Chik-fil-A”) — your money is going to go directly to something we’ll accept as immoral. But that’s not what Paul is talking about at all.
Indeed, the lesson of 1 Cor. would seem to be the opposite of what Moore was arguing earlier — as there is no actual marriage involved (in his opinion, though the law differs), it would seem that anyone who believes that need not worry about getting spiritual cooties from being involved in such a wedding.
Now, if Moore wants to argue that a wedding photographer going to a marriage of two gay people, which is not wrong to do, will give the impression that the photographer supports marriage between same-sex couples, and so they in turn figure it’s okay to do so and fall into sin, that’s a very different argument than the “flashing sign.” I don’t necessarily agree with it, either, but it’s a lot more arguable.
You need not investigate as a wedding photographer whether the wedding you are photographing is Christ-honoring. But when there is an obvious deviation from the biblical reality, sacrifice the business for conscience, your own and those of the ones in your orbit who would be confused.
Moore loses me here. He’s shifted back to a more traditional view of 1 Cor. (which is fine), but then argues that the problem is not with participation as a business service provider, but that it will create a scandalous misunderstanding of the photographer’s opinion (as if letting blacks sit at the lunch counter will imply that the restaurateur isn’t an upstanding Klan member). In this argument, there’s nothing wrong with taking pictures (or baking a cake, or leasing a meeting hall, or driving a limousine, or renting a tux), as long as nobody thinks you’re doing it for someone sinful. If nobody knows that the participants are evil scumbags, then it’s perfectly. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Yeesh.
That said, don’t be mean.
Yes, that’s Dr. Moore offering the wisdom of Buckaroo Banzai and (slightly rephrased) Wil Wheaton. And let me say it’s a remarkable thing to hear in this debate.
The couple asking you to do this wedding aren’t your enemies (Eph. 6:12).
An odd passage to quote here (“The devil made them do it,” in essence), which makes the previous statement a bit less un-mean.
They are made in the image of God and are loved by him, and so should be loved by us. As orthodox Christians we don’t believe this leads to the happiness they’re looking for, but we must stand with kindness as well as with conviction. Tell the couple that you wish them well, but that you have beliefs about marriage that won’t allow your conscience to participate in this way. Thank them for asking you but recommend a photographer who can click away with a clear conscience.
From a social standpoint, I think that’s a fine answer (I don’t agree with it, but it is as kind a way of handling the personal conflict as possible). Legally it runs into the problems described above. Theologically, I’m not sure I agree — it feels akin to “It”s un-Christian to charge interest on loans, so we’ll let the Jews do it” kind of a thing. If it is immoral to participate as a business provider to such a ceremony, is it moral to give a reference?
At any rate, even though I disagree with Moore on a number of points, his answer is at least more thoughtful and less inflammatory than “They’re EVIL SODOMITES and the LIBERAL GODLESS COMMIE ELITES are STEALING OUR FREEDOM and HATE JESUS” that has characterized so much of this debate, so kudos to him.