“‘Need a Minister? How About Your Brother?’: The Universal Life Church between Religion and Non-Religion”

Abstract

National media outlets have observed that weddings in the United States, especially for young educated people, are increasingly performed by ministers who are friends or relatives of the couple and who become ordained online just for that purpose. The primary organization licensing these ministers, and thus authorizing these weddings as legally valid, is the Universal Life Church (ULC), which has ordained over 20 million people since 1962. To date, there has been no focused study of the ULC or lifecycle rituals conducted under its auspices. According to my original survey, interview, and participant observation data, both ULC ministers and the couples who engage them typically self-describe as non-religious, usually as spiritual, seekers, humanist, or generically “not religious.” Similarly, they describe their weddings in “non-religious” terms, emphasizing the personalization of the ceremony to match their particular beliefs and tastes as well as the conscious exclusion of most “religious” language. These “secular” or “spiritual” wedding ceremonies reveal non-religious couples’ desires for an alternative apart from bureaucratic civil ceremonies or traditional religious rites. This article explains why “secular” people select ULC ministers for their weddings, how ULC ministers see themselves as “non-religious” while being members of a legally-recognized religion, and how ULC ministers and couples married by them label and valuate their “non-religious,” personalized wedding ceremonies. My examination of ULC membership and weddings reveals not only the diversity of non-theistic self-identification and lifecycle ritualization, but also how constructs such as “religious” and “secular” can be co-constitutive rather than purely oppositional.