Should Christians attend gay weddings?

Question 12059.

Should Christians attend gay weddings? This is one of the hardest practical questions I am asked, and it is hard precisely because the people asking are not culture warriors. They are usually someone whose brother, colleague or oldest friend has sent an invitation, and who loves that person and does not want to lose them.

I am going to give you my answer, but I want to earn it first by taking both sides seriously, because anyone who finds this question easy has probably not been in the situation.

Why gay weddings put believers in a genuine bind

The difficulty is that two obligations pull in opposite directions. Christians are called to love people, to be present in their lives, to eat with them and to be known as friends of sinners in the way our Lord was. We are also called not to give approval to what God has called sin, and a wedding is by its nature an event of public approval.

If it were simply a party, there would be no question at all. I have been to plenty of gatherings where I did not endorse everything present. But gay weddings are ceremonies in which the assembled company is asked, often explicitly, to witness and to celebrate a union. Presence at a wedding is not neutral in a way that presence at a birthday is.

That is the bind gay weddings create, and it is why sincere believers reach different conclusions. Anyone who tells you the answer is obvious has flattened one side of it.

What is not in question

Let me be clear about my starting point so that nobody has to guess. I hold that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, instituted at creation, affirmed by Jesus when He said that from the beginning He made them male and female and that a man shall hold fast to his wife, Matthew 19:4-6. I do not believe the church has authority to redefine what God instituted.

I also hold that homosexual practice is among the behaviours Scripture identifies as sin, consistently across both testaments, and I have set that out at length in my answer on what the Bible says about homosexuality. That is not a fringe reading and it is not a matter of a few disputed verses.

What is equally not in question is that people who identify as gay bear the image of God, are owed courtesy and honesty, and have frequently been treated by churches in ways that were cruel rather than simply truthful. Both of those convictions have to be held at once, and holding only one is a failure whichever one you drop.

What attending actually communicates

A wedding is a public act with a public meaning. The guests are not spectators, they are witnesses. In many ceremonies they are asked whether they will support the couple in their marriage, and the whole social grammar of the occasion is celebration and endorsement.

This is why gay weddings cannot easily be treated as an ordinary social invitation. Attending gay weddings says something, and what it says is heard by the couple, by the other guests and by any other Christians present. Intentions do not control meaning. I may attend with private reservations and still communicate approval.

There is a further consideration that gets little attention. A believer’s attendance may be read by a younger Christian in the family as settling the question, and Paul takes that kind of effect seriously when he discusses causing a brother to stumble, Romans 14:13.

The case for going

Let me make it as strongly as I can. Jesus was accused of being a friend of tax collectors and sinners, and the accusation was true. He ate with people whose lives were not in order and He did not require them to reform before He would sit at their table. If my presence at a meal signals approval, then His did too, and He seems to have accepted that risk.

Second, refusal has consequences. A relationship built over decades can be ended by one declined invitation, and with it any opportunity to speak of Christ. Those who argue for attending are usually thinking about the long game, about staying in the room, about being the Christian who is still welcome at Christmas.

Third, an unbeliever is not disobeying a Lord he has never professed. Paul says he has no business judging outsiders, 1 Corinthians 5:12-13. If two unbelievers marry, they are doing what unbelievers do, and my attendance is not a ruling on the state of the church.

Fourth, some argue that we attend the second marriages of divorced friends without inspecting the biblical grounds, and that a sudden precision about gay weddings looks selective. That is an uncomfortable point and I think it lands.

The case for staying away

The counter-argument about gay weddings begins with the nature of the event. Jesus ate with sinners, but there is no record of Him attending a ceremony that solemnised something contrary to God’s design. Eating with someone is fellowship with a person. Attending gay weddings is participation in an act.

Then there is the matter of witness. Christians who decline are not making a statement about the couple’s worth; they are declining to say publicly, by their presence, that this union is what God intended. In a culture where silence is read as consent, presence is read as celebration.

There is also the question of integrity. If I attend, applaud, sign the book and pose for the photographs, what happens to my credibility if I am later asked what I actually believe? A friend who discovers that I was smiling through something I regarded as sin will not thank me for my tact.

And there is the matter of conscience. Paul’s principle that whatever does not proceed from faith is sin, Romans 14:23, means that a believer who attends gay weddings with a troubled conscience has sinned even if the act itself were permissible.

Where I land, and how I hold it

I would not attend. I want to say that plainly rather than hiding behind a survey of the options. For me the ceremony is the problem, because it asks me to be a witness to something I believe God has not joined, and I do not think I can do that honestly.

But I hold this as a matter of conscience rather than as a test of orthodoxy. I know godly believers who have attended gay weddings out of love for a family member, who did not for a moment change their convictions about marriage, and who have gone on to have gospel conversations I would never have had. I am not prepared to say they sinned, and I would not discipline a member for going.

What I would insist on is that the decision be made prayerfully rather than by social pressure in either direction, and that it be made honestly rather than by finding a convenient excuse to be out of the country that weekend.

Two questions that clarify the decision

The first question I would ask is what the couple themselves believe I am doing by coming. If they have invited me knowing my convictions, and have said plainly that they do not expect agreement and simply want me present, the meaning of my attendance has been partly renegotiated in advance. That does not settle the matter, but it changes it.

The second question is what I would say if asked, on the day, what I think. If the honest answer is that I would deflect, change the subject or give an impression I do not hold, then my presence is already functioning as a small lie. I would rather be absent and truthful than present and evasive, and I think most people would rather be told the truth than managed.

Those two questions have been more use to me in counselling than any general rule about gay weddings, because they force the person to think about meaning and integrity rather than about etiquette.

What about a Christian asked to take part?

Being a guest is one thing. Being asked to read, to sing, to give a speech, to photograph the day or to provide the flowers is a different question, because participation in the ceremony is a more direct act than attendance at it. Here I would decline without hesitation, and I would say so kindly and early.

For those in business, the legal position in this country is genuinely difficult and has been tested in the courts, so I would not advise anyone without proper advice. What I would say pastorally is that a believer should be willing to serve any customer with equal courtesy while declining to create a specific message he does not believe. That distinction is not always understood, and it is not always accepted, but it is the honest line.

Ministers face the sharpest version of this. No minister of the gospel can solemnise gay weddings without denying what he believes marriage to be, and no congregation should ask him to. That is not a matter of conscience but of doctrine, and it is one of the places where a church will eventually have to be willing to bear a cost.

How to decline without wounding

If you decide not to go, how you decline matters as much as the decision. Do it early, do it in person or by voice rather than by text, and do it without a sermon. The moment you begin explaining your theology of marriage to someone who has just been rejected, you have made the conversation about your reasoning rather than about them.

Say that you love them, that you are sorry to miss it, and that you cannot be there because of what you believe about marriage before God. Then say clearly that you want to remain in their life, and mean it. Offer something concrete, a meal, a gift, a visit, a standing invitation.

And then absorb the consequences without complaining about them. If the relationship cools, that is a cost you accepted. Christians who decline and then present themselves as the injured party have missed the point entirely. The one thing you must not do is decline and disappear.

The reception, the gift and the smaller questions

People ask about the surrounding events, and my answer is that the further you move from the ceremony the more room there is for conscience. The ceremony is the act of solemnisation. A reception afterwards is a party, and a party is a different kind of thing, though many will not perceive the distinction.

A gift for one of these gay weddings is another matter for judgement. I would not want to signal approval, and I would also not want a friend to conclude that I had cut them off. Some believers send something for the home with a warm note that says nothing about the marriage. Others find that dishonest. I do not think Scripture settles it.

Photographs and speeches sit closer to endorsement, because both are public and both are recorded. If you have declined the ceremony on grounds of witness, appearing in the album undermines the very reasoning you offered.

Family, and playing the long game

Most of the people who ask me about gay weddings are dealing with family. That changes the texture of everything, because a family relationship is permanent in a way a friendship is not, and a decision made now will be remembered for thirty years.

My counsel there is to invest heavily in the relationship before and after the event, so that your absence is understood in the context of consistent love rather than as the only data point available. If the last significant interaction was an argument about sexuality, your refusal will simply confirm what they already suspect about you.

Be the relative who turns up when someone is ill, who remembers the birthday, who takes the phone call at midnight. Truth spoken by someone who has proved they are not going anywhere lands very differently from truth delivered by someone who only ever appears to disapprove.

When Christians disagree about this

Churches need to be able to hold this disagreement without fracturing. Romans 14 was written for exactly this sort of situation, where believers with the same doctrine reach different conclusions about a course of action, and Paul’s instruction is that each should be fully convinced in his own mind and that neither should despise the other, Romans 14:5.

What is not open for disagreement is the underlying doctrine of marriage. A church can accommodate different judgements about attending gay weddings. It cannot accommodate the claim that God blesses such unions, because that is a matter of revelation rather than of conscience.

Leaders should think about this before they are asked. A pastor caught unprepared tends to give either a harsh answer he later regrets or a vague one that helps nobody. It is worth teaching the principles in calm weather, as I have tried to do in my answer on loving the sinner and hating the sin.

So, now what?

If an invitation to one of these ceremonies is sitting on your mantelpiece, pray about it and then decide, rather than letting the date arrive while you avoid the question. Talk it through with someone mature who will not simply confirm what you already want to do, because gay weddings are exactly the sort of decision we are tempted to make first and justify afterwards.

Whatever you decide about gay weddings, decide also how you will love this person for the next twenty years, because that is the decision that will actually matter. Write it down if you have to. Put the birthday in the diary. Make the phone call you have been putting off.

And examine your own heart for the sin of feeling superior, which is a good deal more dangerous to your soul than attending a wedding would be. If our convictions about marriage have made us cold rather than compassionate, whose approval are we actually seeking?

He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?”

Matthew 19:4-5, ESV

For Further Study

Millard Erickson provides a careful survey of the theology of marriage as a creation ordinance, which is the foundation of everything argued above. Charles Ryrie and Lewis Sperry Chafer are worth consulting on the believer’s liberty and the operation of conscience in matters Scripture does not directly command, since a good deal of this question turns on Romans 14 rather than on the sexuality texts themselves. For the biblical material on sexuality, Robert Gagnon’s study remains the most thorough treatment available and repays the effort even where his conclusions are contested. J. Dwight Pentecost’s work on the Christian life is useful on the practical outworking of conviction in relationships, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum is helpful on the continuity of the creation ordinance across the dispensations.