Shame on the church: 'Marriage Week' is nothing but a PR stunt

This Saturday February 8 at 5.15pm there will be a new Guinness World Record attempt for the most number of married couples reaffirming their wedding vows at the same time. The previous record was set in 2009 by 1,087 couples in Ohio, but British spouses will be flocking to churches across the UK this weekend to take part in mass ceremonies, hoping that their promises will make a tiny bit of history.

The record-breaking endeavour has been called The Big Promise and is a marketing campaign to launch Marriage Week 2014 which runs from 7-14 February, an annual initiative supported by several Christian bodies, including the Church of England, which is intended to encourage and support the institution of marriage, with the view that “healthy marriages bring benefits for all of society”.

However, the ‘encouragement’ and ‘support’ that this so-called Marriage Week is meant to offer seems a little scant. In fact, it seems as if all the effort has gone exclusively into the goal of setting a new world record. There are no further resources on the website other than some downloadable logos and a few ‘top tips’ such as: “Write love notes and leave them around your home for each other to discover.” As well as the lack of substance to the campaign, the very fact that they've gone for such a PR-laden approach seems a shame to me.

The organisers have obviously anticipated accusations of gimmickry and offered the following justification: "Setting a world record is a practical and tangible way of getting the press to notice and report on the importance of marriage vows at the heart of society – it's a means to an end, not the end itself." However, whilst I respect the intention, rather than elevating the status of marriage in public life, this PR stunt runs the risk of trivialising it. For the problem with marketing is that it’s inevitably reductive – its job is to boil things down into pithy catch phrases and one-off events, which are a long way from the long and challenging journey that is marriage.

For the 1,000 plus couples taking part in Saturday’s nationwide event, it may well be a very impactful occasion. You could argue that there’s something powerful about reaffirming such important promises in a public setting to engender a renewed sense of commitment. And yet I suspect that the couples taking part in the Big Promise, or indeed any couples who choose to renew their vows, aren’t really the ones who need to rededicate themselves. They’re not the ones who are truly struggling, the third of all couples whose marriages end in divorce, who need more than words and certainly more than the temporary fuzzy feeling that marketing campaigns produce.

It’s these struggling couples who wouldn’t go near such an event (or dream of leaving love letters around the house for each other) that this campaign simply fails to reach. Moreover, it presents marriage, and the church for that matter, as a squeaky clean institution with the sole job of preserving the moral rectitude of society – when, as my own excellent vicar once said to me: “The church is meant to be a body of broken people being made whole.”

That’s why long-term initiatives like The Marriage Course, devised by Holy Trinity Brompton, are a much better use of the church’s time, money and effort, as well as being a much truer outworking of its calling to actually help people, rather than just make moral pronouncements. It’s an eight week course that covers everything from ‘The Art of Communication’ to ‘Good Sex’ delivered in a non-preachy way which can be accessed equally by people of faith and none.

What’s more, recent research suggests that these kinds of marriage guidance initiatives could save taxpayers a huge amount of money by preventing family break up which costs Britain between £20 billion and £44 billion a year in associated expenses such as extra benefits for single parents. This seems to me a much better way for people of faith to "benefit society".

For whilst the church may have a responsibility to deliver prophetic statements now and again, and to stand up for what it sees to be true and good, it has an equal if not greater responsibility to meet people where they’re at in all the messiness of life. The Big Promise campaign, like so many other interventions by religious organisations, tips too far towards the former and will only drive real people facing real issues further away.