Religious Marriage in a Liberal State

Abstract

Can a liberal state enforce religious marriage? For many liberals, the answer is in the negative. They perceive such enforcement as the paradigmatic case of illegitimate religious coercion. The purpose of our paper is to examine whether this is indeed the case. Let us start with three clarifications which will help to define the question we posed. First, there is a whole spectrum of possibilities regarding the attitude of the state towards religious marriage. At one extreme, there is complete denial of legal validity to such marriage, i.e. the view that marriage, as a public institution, is governed solely by state law, the law that applies equally to citizens of all religions under the jurisdiction of the state. According to this option, religious marriage is viewed by the state as a private matter carrying no legal force in itself. This is the legal arrangement in a few European countries, such as Germany.' Some of these countries, Germany and Belgium, for example, go further and prohibit religious marriage which was not preceded by a civil marriage procedure. 2 At the other extreme, there are states in which the only way to get married is by means of a religious marriage ceremony. On the face of it, this is the case in Israel3 (but see section IV below). Between these two extreme positions there is a wide range of possibilities. In some countries, for instance, the state acknowledges both religious and civil marriage ceremonies without granting the former any preference.