#533: Twenty-One Questions to Ask Before Attending a Wedding

An Aid to Discernment

MLA: I’m keeping most of this behind the paywall, so this is a reminder that American readers can get a copy of Called into Questions by becoming a member at $20 a year. I will be sending a public essay next week on asceticism….because this newsletter is always So. Much. Fun. If you want to listen to the Mere Fidelity episode on the subject of weddings, it’s a good ‘un.

I’m not going to lie: I have been awed by how long evangelicals have sustained their interest in the question of whether to attend a same-sex wedding. When the challenge to Alastair Begg first erupted, I thought that we were probably in for a single week of discussion. 

Silly me. 

The land-rush to stake out positions opposing Begg has been especially impressive considering that I suspect the immediate practical question of whether to attend a same-sex wedding only applies to a very tiny minority of Christians at the moment.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with people seizing their slice of a controversy, of course, but we should recognize the moment for what it is: an opportunity to ensure we are signaling the strength of our commitment to the doctrine of marriage by framing anyone who disagrees as “weak” or “unbiblical,” rather than an a real attempt to offer moral discernment to those faced with the task of deliberating about whether they may attend a particular wedding or not.

As it happens, this newsletter in recent months has taken up a practical case where someone’s conscience was troubled over attending a family wedding—not a same-sex wedding, mind you, but a wedding where the participants might have been opposed to procreating. In the past five years, this is the second ‘wedding case’ I have written about, neither of which had to do with same-sex couples.

Rather than answer such questions directly, I opted to write a ‘Pro et Contra’ about them—that is, to present the reasons on both sides of the situation. One of my reasons for adopting that format is that accompanying others in their process of discernment demands honoring the limits of our understanding of the situation.

In moral discernment, after all, angels are in the details as much as the devil is (in a manner of speaking). Offering counsel that sketches both sides ofthe case allows certain emphases to come out that might be absent otherwise, and positions the reader to form their own judgment in light of their (probably) superior, more-full understanding of the actual realities at work. Which is what happened in my latest effort: the reader found a way through that I had not seen, and happiness and joy abounded. 

The task of moral discernment, though, also involves putting questions to a situation. With that in mind, I thought I would assemble a deliberately incomplete list of questions that one might ask in determining whether to go to a wedding.