Introduction
The decentering of Christianity and the increase in social diversity are connected historical changes. As Christianity gradually loses its role as the unifying force in social life, societies become more diverse in many ways and undergo important changes in how they handle differences. In this diverse and often divisive environment, law gains new importance in shaping social imagination. Modern legal systems are responsible not only for recognizing and managing differences to encourage democratic coexistence among diverse moral perspectives but also for defining, and sometimes reshaping, the social boundaries of diversity itself.
In recent decades, the articulation of diversity has expanded across various dimensions: from individual expressions such as political opinions, religious affiliations, and ethical commitments to broader political recognition of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. Within this larger trend, practices once marginalised or criminalized, especially those related to sexuality, have increasingly received legal protection. Historically, narratives of sexuality were closely linked to the religious, and in our contexts explicitly Christian, regulation of marriage. Today, these narratives face growing challenge.
Through legal processes and public debate, the Christian heritage embedded in legal and moral systems has faced scrutiny in unprecedented ways, leading to major changes. These transformations involve not just expanding rights but also redefining the meanings of core institutions and categories. A paradigmatic example is the integration of same-sex couples into the institution of marriage, a process that began gaining recognition around the turn of the twenty-first century. While some rights had already been awarded to same-sex couples, the ongoing debate in many countries over the last two decades focused mainly on redefining marriage and family itself. In this sense, the legalization of same-sex marriage (SSM) did not just increase access to an existing institution; it entailed a structural transformation of marriage, detaching it from its traditional Christian, heterosexual, and procreative roots and rearticulating it through new frameworks of equality, intimacy, and citizenship.
This article examines how these transformations become visible in legal debates over same-sex marriage. Rather than analysing the controversies themselves, we focus on the discursive operations through which participants in these debates make the relations that define marriage publicly visible and recognizable within shared classifications. This occurs in contexts where Christianity no longer holds exclusive authority to regulate them. Our analysis asks two related questions: how do actors in legal debates publicly articulate the relations through which marriage is defined, and through which discursive operations are moral arguments about marriage made publicly legitimate in pluralistic societies.
This article builds on the analysis of empirical data initially collected for our research on same-sex marriage debates (Vaggione, Montero & Beaman 2026). In our book, we argue that the emergence of same-sex marriage as a legal category has enabled the development of new repertoires of value, which go beyond the biological and naturalistic frameworks within which Christian religious language has historically confined conjugal relations. Specifically, in the context of growing moral and religious pluralism, driven by the decentering of Christianity, we explore how repertoires that actors present and interpret as spiritual, emotional or religious are mobilised to create meanings in debates about marriage as a legal institution.
To pursue this objective, we examined SSM debates in seven countries—Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and the United States. This study is part of the broader Nonreligion in a Complex Future project that aims to understand the impact of the increase in nonreligion as a demographic reality and a structural shift. The country cases provide an analytical lens through which to explore how religious boundaries are constructed, contested, and transformed within legal discourse. While the book analysed these debates primarily as a controversy, the present article revisits the same corpus to analyse the main discursive operations through which actors qualify their arguments about marriage within legal arenas. This shift in analytical focus allows us to refine the concept of nonreligion, by examining how normative claims become publicly legitimate precisely by the suspension of explicit religious framing.
One of the central contributions of this article is to use legal controversies as a vantage point from which to observe the interplay of markers that actors publicly recognize as religious and nonreligious and their discursive materiality. To describe how such qualifications operate in practice we draw on Asif Agha’s notion of indexicality (2007), which highlights how linguistic forms point to socially recognizable registers of value and authority. Building on this perspective, we examine linguistic practices, naming conventions, and the categorization of moral and emotional utterances through which actors signal provisional boundaries between religious and nonreligious domains in legal debates.
To trace these indexical operations, our analysis focuses on the recurring invocation of two key argumentative patterns. The first mobilizes a normative transition that distinguishes civil from religious marriage. The second operates through argumentative strategies that universalize or de-universalize marriage as a social institution. Before examining these narratives and the ways in which they attribute social value and positive significance to same-sex marriage, it is necessary to situate them within the broader process of Christian decentering and its implications for the emergence and configuration of the nonreligious.
1. The Decentering of Christianity
The countries included in our study share a historical process that we describe as the decentering of Christianity. All of them were shaped by hegemonic Christian traditions established during colonial or nation-building periods—whether Catholic, Protestant, or both—and by various forms of institutional relationship between church and state. Although the intensity and trajectories differ, these societies have experienced a gradual weakening of Christianity as the primary framework organizing public morality and social norms. The decentering of Christianity does not imply the disappearance of religion. Rather, it refers to the erosion of Christianity’s capacity to function as an uncontested source of moral authority in public life.
This process unfolds through several interconnected transformations. First, patterns of religious identification have diversified. In many contexts, traditional forms of Christian belonging have declined, accompanied by new modes of religious self-understanding including individualised spirituality or hybrid forms of affiliation. Second, the ability of church authorities to regulate the beliefs and practices of those who identify as Christian has weakened. Many individuals continue to identify as Catholic or Protestant while interpreting doctrine autonomously or selectively. Third, demographic and cultural changes—including migration and global cultural flows—have expanded the religious diversity of societies.
At the same, many societies have witnessed a growing number of individuals who do not identify with any religious tradition. In sociological and demographic research, these populations are often grouped under broad categories such as “nonreligious,” “nones,” or “people without religion.” These labels encompass heterogeneous positions—including agnostics, atheists, humanists, or individuals who simply report no religious affiliation. Their increasing visibility is commonly interpreted in the literature as one dimension of the diversification of contemporary religious landscapes.
In this context, Christianity has not disappeared but has lost its status as a universal moral language capable of structuring public debates. Competing frameworks of meaning now coexist and dispute authority over the definition of issues such as sexuality, reproduction, and family. Legal systems increasingly reflect this pluralization, particularly through the gradual recognition of sexual diversity and new forms of kinship. What was once presented as a universally valid Christian moral order has become one normative framework among others.
A. Interpreting decentering: secularization and nonreligion
Scholars have interpreted these transformations in different ways, producing a wide range of theoretical and empirical accounts of secularization (Bruce 2011; Casanova 1994; Furseth 2018; Kasselstrand, Zuckerman & Cragun 2023; Taylor 2007; Voas 2009). One influential approach links them to processes of secularization,1 emphasizing declining levels of belief, religious practice, and institutional affiliation (Bruce 2002; Wilson 1966). Scholarship has documented decreasing church attendance, fewer religious weddings and baptisms, and the growing presence of individuals identifying as nonreligious (Clarke & Macdonald 2017). From this perspective, the contemporary social order is increasingly structured by what some authors describe as a secular epistemic framework that organizes the rhythms and values of public life.
Other approaches have focused less on decline and more on the transformation of religious experience. Concepts such as lived religion highlight the autonomy of individuals in constructing religious identities beyond institutional boundaries, emphasizing everyday practices, hybrid forms of belief, and personalised spiritual repertoires (Ammerman 2016, 2021; Bender 2003; Heelas et al. 2005; McGuire 2008; Orsi 1997, 2003).2
A related strand of scholarship examines the emergence of nonreligion as a social category within this pluralised environment. In many studies, nonreligion is approached as the identity of individuals who position themselves outside religious institutions or traditions (Cotter 2014; Frost, Edgell & Miller 2025; Lee 2015; Quack 2014; Strhan & Shillitoe 2019; Zuckerman 2008; Zuckerman, Galen & Pasquale 2016). An identity that has been described as part of a “secular paradox,” insofar as being nonreligious is understood as involving both the rejection of religion and participation in a worldview or belief system that resembles a religion-like tradition (Blankholm 2022).
Part of this scholarship considers gender and sexuality as key variables for understanding processes of religious change and disidentification. On the one hand, tensions or conflicts between an individual’s moral stance on sexuality and the official position of their religious denomination can function as push factors driving disaffiliation and transitions toward nonreligion (Cragun & Smith, 2024). On the other hand, individuals who identify as agnostic, atheist, or nonreligious tend to hold more liberal positions on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, sex education, and gender identity, although important variations persist within the nonreligious category itself (Aizenberg et al. 2024; Baker & Smith 2015; Dotti Sani & Quaranta 2020).
In this context, the growth of “nones” represents a new form of diversity that must be considered alongside religious pluralism. While these approaches illuminate important aspects of contemporary transformations, they often frame the phenomenon primarily in terms of demographic change or identity formation. As a result, they may overlook how religious and nonreligious distinctions are actively produced and negotiated in public debates. For this reason, rather than adopting secularization as the main explanatory framework, this article focuses on the discursive processes through which distinctions between “religious” and “nonreligious” are publicly produced and stabilised within legal controversies.
B. Decentering and public controversies
Our approach shifts the analytical focus from identities to public controversies. We examine how the decentering of Christianity (rather than the decline of religion) becomes visible in the discursive struggles through which actors define the legitimacy of different moral positions. Rather than treating nonreligion as a stable identity or demographic category, we analyse it as a discursive effect that emerges in the interaction between legal, political, and religious vocabularies. In public debates, actors mobilize heterogeneous repertoires—religious, legal, scientific, experiential—to argue about the meaning of marriage, family, and equality. In doing so, they produce shifting boundaries between what is presented as religious and what is framed as nonreligious.
As a result, public controversies become arenas in which different normative languages intersect, compete, and are strategically rearticulated. These interactions reshape the conditions under which certain moral claims can appear as publicly valid and universally acceptable in contemporary societies. Debates over same-sex marriage provide a particularly revealing site for observing these processes. They unfold in a context where no single moral framework holds unquestioned authority. Instead, multiple normative languages compete to define the meaning of marriage, family, and justice while legal institutions serve as key settings in which these definitions are articulated, translated, and contested.
Here nonreligion serves as an analytical tool for apprehending the discursive operations through which moral claims are articulated and made publicly recognizable in settings where Christianity loses its central normative authority. Within these debates, actors draw on heterogeneous normative repertoires that intersect and are recombined in different ways. In the course of these interactions, arguments are not simply given as religious or nonreligious; they are constituted as such through the ways they are framed interpret and recognised within the debate.
Our analysis, therefore, focuses on how these controversies reconfigures the conditions under which distinctions between religious and nonreligious forms of argumentation are drawn and made consequential. By examining the discursive dynamics of legal debates, we seek to understand how the decentering of Christianity transforms the ways in which marriage and family are publicly imagined, recognised and justified.
2. Same-Sex Marriage as a Public Controversy
In our previous discussion of this issue, we began our consideration of same-sex marriage by analysing the public controversy surrounding it in each of our project countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States (Vaggione, Montero & Beaman 2026). Whether historically Protestant, Catholic (or mixed) and regardless of church-state arrangements or levels of nonreligious identification, all countries arrived, sooner or later, between 2005 (Canada) and 2017 (Australia), at the recognition of same-sex marriage.3
Marriage has historically been the core gatekeeping mechanism for family, which is in turn intertwined with the nation. Families, it is often said, are the building blocks of the nation, and thus regulating them is integral to shaping the nation and the creation of the national imaginary. To be sure, there have been other public controversies related to family, such as divorce. We might thus read the debates over same sex marriage as simply another moment in the ongoing negotiation of the configuration of who and what constitutes a family.
However, same-sex marriage posed new challenges in that it severed marriage from biological procreation and abandoned the gender system of complementarity between men and women, both of which were linked to a Christian moral framework. It is not surprising, then, that same-sex marriage, like divorce, attracted considerable attention in the public sphere. In short, what was debated, through the reform of this historic institution, is heteronormativity as a system of power that not only organizes gender and sexuality (Warner, 1991) but also shapes various aspects of social, political, and economic life (Vaggione, Montero & Beaman 2026).
While we have previously approached these debates primarily as a controversy, the present article revisits the same corpus but focuses on the discursive operations through which actors render arguments about marriage publicly visible and recognizable within shared classifications in legal arenas. The next section introduces the semiotic and indexical perspective that informs our analysis.
3. Analytical Approach: Semiotic and Indexical Analysis of Public Argumentation
The empirical materials analysed in this article were produced within a broader collaborative and comparative research initiative conducted between 2020 and 2024 as part of the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project. The project adopted a comparative strategy centered on public controversies surrounding the recognition of same-sex marriage (SSM) in several national contexts. Each country team identified a specific moment of observation, defined as the institutional event in which SSM was formally recognised. These moments were selected because they concentrate public debates in which competing moral and legal interpretations of marriage become explicitly articulated (Vaggione, Montero & Beaman 2026).
For each case, researchers assembled a corpus of documents associated with these critical moments. The materials primarily included judicial decisions and parliamentary debates, complemented in some cases by newspaper coverage and other publicly circulating documents. These sources capture the arguments advanced by social actors who supported or opposed changes in the legal definition of marriage and, more broadly, the transformations in the normative understanding of family that accompanied these debates. Within this corpus, we identified recurrent discursive patterns through a comparative reading of judicial decisions and parliamentary debates. Particular attention was given to linguistic formulations that explicitly connected the meaning of marriage to broader normative frameworks such as religion, the natural order, equality, freedom, or history. These recurring formulations were treated as indexical cues pointing to recognizable registers of moral authority.
While the corpus derives from the broader comparative project, the analysis developed in this article is informed by insights from linguistic anthropology and semiotic approaches to language, which offer useful tools for examining how meanings are produced and negotiated in public debates. Our aim is not to conduct a strictly semiotic analysis, but rather to draw on some of its analytical concepts to better understand the uses of language through which actors frame the meaning of marriage, family, and sexuality.
In particular, the notion of indexicality provides a way to observe how different discursive repertoires become connected within public argumentation (Peirce 1931–1958; Silverstein 1976, 2003; Agha 2007; Keane 2003). Rather than treating religious, legal, scientific, or political vocabularies as separate domains, an indexical perspective allows us to examine how actors mobilize linguistic forms (such as evaluative expressions, narrative frames, metaphors, or classificatory categories) to link these repertoires in the course of debate. Through such operations, particular formulations come to signal broader moral orientations and align speakers with recognizable normative positions.
Legal debates here are approached not only as institutional procedures but also as discursive sites where the vocabularies available for describing kinship, intimacy, and civic belonging are rearticulated. Changes in legal language thus signal not merely textual adjustments but shifts in the ways these social relations are publicly imagined and justified.
Although emotions are not the primary focus of the analysis, affective expressions appear as a recurring dimension of the debates. Terms conveying indignation, compassion, fear, or moral concern function as indexical markers that help authorize particular positions and disqualify others. Even in judicial context – where actors are expected to maintain a formally neutral stance – affective markers often surface through narrative framing, evaluative vocabulary, and rhetorical emphasis.
By examining these semiotic and indexical dimensions of discourse, we map the ways that controversies surrounding same-sex marriage reorganize the symbolic resources through which actors publicly articulate competing visions of marriage, family, and social order.
4. Same-Sex Marriage Narratives and Nonreligion
A. Distancing civil and religious marriage: the naming centrality
In all the cases studied in our research it is the state that establishes the requirements and formalities for marriage as well as for its concomitant legal rights and obligations. However, the state’s governance of marriage has opened up a series of dynamics that involve, among other things, the absorption of competencies inherent to each country’s historical Christian stabilization of marriage conception. National states, through the regulation of procedures and restrictions, decide when marriage has legal existence and, in doing so, challenge or reinforce the legitimacy of Christian marriage as a universal pattern. The regulation by states of what counts as civil marriage has historically implied, and still does, a complex process of articulation and conflict between moral regulations and normative ideals regarding kinship.
Despite the differences in governance among nation-states, marriage plays a significant indexical role in the national imaginary. Reforming the legal status of marital relationships is part of a wider political agenda that, in these various countries connects the idea of marriage to essential social and political values in each nation, including multiculturalism (Canada), freedom (USA), pluralism (Brazil), human rights (Norway), and democracy (Argentina), among other normative frameworks (Vaggione, Montero & Beaman 2026). In this sense, debates over civil marriage are not only about family regulation but also about how moral claims are articulated and made publicly legitimate within pluralistic societies. The debate over civil marriage thus encompasses a broader conversation about how to accommodate diversity within complex societies.
The significance of this issue is evident in the controversy surrounding its very nomenclature. The use of distinct discursive repertoires to designate same-sex marriage serves as a focal point for both religious and nonreligious markings. The varying terminologies employed in public debates—such as “marriage equality,” “equal marriage,” or “same-sex marriage”—reflect not only a diversity of descriptors but also their differing degrees of alignment with legal discourse. The significance of nomenclature is further demonstrated by proposals in the examined countries to recognize same-sex couples’ rights through alternative legal mechanisms. Terms such as “registered partnership” and “civil union” were employed to foster a perception of equivalence—granting comparable rights without formally redefining marriage. Notably, conferring specific rights to same-sex couples, such as inheritance or pension benefits, generated little opposition or significant emotional backlash, suggesting that resistance was tied more to the symbolic institution of marriage than to the substantive legal protections themselves.
It was the fact that rights would be granted through a discursive production of an equivalence between the legal and religious status of marriage that was controversial and elicited emotional reactions. In this sense, what was at stake in several countries was not the rights of same-sex couples, but the tensions that emerge around the perceived need to re-index the standard configuration of the term marriage to include them within the boundaries of its designation. Legal and religious designations struggle to stabilize the meaning of the marital regime, the former to broaden its scope, the latter to ensure the maintenance of its historically standardised limits.
In some cases, allowing same-sex couples to marry was presented as undermining fundamental social values. In others it was described as a form of inclusion in a more egalitarian society. The variety of these ways of indexing marital status to collective values reveals the existence of different positions in this contested field in which religious and non-religious markers are differently mobilised. Therefore, it was essential that our analysis be able to identify how the dispute over the classification process that indexes same-sex marriage to different values and affections in each country alters the status of sexuality and society’s perception of it. This process extends beyond sexuality and involves debates on complex issues regarding each nation’s imagined future.
One central axis of SSM as a public controversy is the formal, representational or symbolic distance or gap between marriage as a civil and religious institution perceived in each country. Civil marriage, although constructed discursively as autonomous, does not lose its symbolic connection to religious marriage; it exists outside the realm of religious institutions but is also rooted in Christian heritage, even as it claims to distance itself from it. Although states set the formalities and content of civil marriage, they do so based on a moral narrative that reflects and incorporates much of the repertoire, style, and expectations historically linked to the ways of performing and representing religious marriages, since both share a common origin or genealogy. The passionate engagement by some religiously identified social actors is evidence of this entanglement of civil marriage and Christianity. The controversy over same sex couples marks a significant moment in the ongoing debate, creating a rupture in these naturalised symbolic connections and requiring the development of a new standard of reference that, to ensure its social legibility and legitimacy, somewhat integrates the legal-political repertoire with the traditional Christian one.
Each country has its own specific features regarding how the (dis)articulation between civil and religious marriages manifests in the debates. While the state regulates the validity of civil marriage, different legal frameworks exist to define its boundaries (real or imaginary) in relation to religious institutions. Most of the countries in this research have a dual system that grants legal effects to religious marriage rites as well. Couples can choose to have a religious ceremony, among others, and this ceremony, if performed with certain bureaucratic formalities, is recognised by the state. The state allows various individuals (religious or not) to conduct the ceremony and provide legal recognition to these private rites, as long as they adhere to certain formal requirements (such as being officially registered at the registry office).
Although the debate in all countries focused on the government’s authority to define marriage as a civil issue, resistance to that redefinition (which in some cases was simply an affirmation of the civil and religious processes for marriage) arose, often couched in legal framework of religious freedom and freedom of conscience or conscientious objection. This resistance was presented as an issue of clergy conscience and their ability to choose or refuse to perform same sex marriages. As a result of the anxiety shown by certain actors (religious leaders and clergy in particular) explicit protections were added in some countries that left the religious realm to manage the gatekeeping of religious marriage.
In Canada, the Supreme Court recognised that religious institutions have the right to refuse to conduct same-sex marriage ceremonies as a concession to religious groups, even though civil marriage, not religious marriage, was not the primary issue. Yet, as was the case in most of our study countries, religious groups sought to control civil marriage even as they themselves could continue to perform marriages as they previously had. Consequently, the Marriage Act eventually stated that “religious groups are free to refuse to perform marriages that are not in accordance with their religious beliefs” (see Beaman & Steele 2026) and that these groups would not face penalties for their refusal.
In the United States, marriage regulations are determined by each state. Nevertheless, certain formalities—such as obtaining a marriage license and holding a ceremony—are required for marriages, whether civil or religious, to be legally recognised. A central issue in the Supreme Court’s decision (Obergefell v. Hodges) was whether a state can ban same-sex marriage without engaging in unjustified discrimination or violating the principle of equality under the law. In this case, the definition of civil marriage derived its legitimacy from its connection to the discourse of equality. But, as we know, in the United States, the discourse of freedom, particularly religious freedom, underpins all other rights and a great deal of public discourse. Although the case that legalised same-sex marriage focused only on civil marriage, the respect for the religious, in its indexation with freedom, appears in the justices’ main arguments challenging the civil recognition of marriage. The conflict between same-sex marriage and religious freedom continued to spark controversy in subsequent legal disputes involving companies refusing services for same-sex marriages, employment policies, and adoption or foster care services provided by religious organizations (Campana & Vaggione 2026).
In Australia, the definition of same-sex marriage is standardised at the federal level, and, as in other contexts, celebrants may conduct either religious or civil ceremonies. However, similarly to the United States, same-sex marriage was framed by some sectors as a threat—even a form of persecution—against the rights of religious actors (see Warren & Banham 2026). This perceived threat was also extended to human rights, which, according to these authors, were constructed as a zero-sum game: protecting same-sex couples from discrimination was seen as infringing upon the right to practice one’s religion. To resolve the debate, a non-binding postal survey was conducted in 2017 to measure public opinion. The results showed majority support for recognizing same-sex relationships within marriage (61.6%), with high voter turnout. Consequently, Parliament passed legislation adopting a gender-neutral formulation that replaces references to “bride” and “groom” with the term “person,” defining marriage as “the union of two persons, to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life” (see Warren & Banham 2026).
The indexical operations of marriage in Denmark and Norway follow a distinct logic due to the presence of an official state church, which blurs the boundary and autonomy between religious and civil marriage. Although Norway no longer has a state church as of 2017, the Church of Norway remains state-funded. In Denmark, when discussing the requirements for civil marriage, the regulatory role of the Church of Denmark (Den Danske Folkekirke) is simultaneously scrutinised. An important area of debate is the often-ambiguous distinction between matters that are solely the concern of the Folkekirke (Church inner affairs) and those that should be regulated by Parliament (outer affairs) (Donskov Dige & Kühle, 2026). This issue also exists in Norway, where marriages are still considered a “religio legal” matter. For this reason, changes to the legal framework regarding marriage are generally viewed as an interference with religious autonomy and, consequently, a limitation of religious freedom (Årsheim & Skandsen, 2026).
The context in which Argentina operates its legal definition of same-sex marriage is different from that of the Nordic countries. It has a distinct legal system where only marriages conducted by state officials may be considered civil and therefore have legal validity. Religious ceremonies (including those performed by clergy) are considered purely “symbolic”, meaning they cannot produce concrete rights. This monopoly of legal authority over the indexicality of marriage becomes evident in the rule that defines the religious ceremony as only taking place after the official registration of the stable union. Consequently, the current parliamentary debate focused exclusively on civil marriage, as the right of religious institutions (such as the Catholic Church) to define their own criteria for religious unions remained unchallenged. However, Catholic indexicality which is inherent in Argentina’s morality, and culture also subtly shaped parliamentary discourses. For example, freedom of conscience (rather than religious freedom per se) emerged as a key framework for negotiating and protecting faith-based objections (although conscientious objection was not recognised in the reform).
Finally, the Brazilian case is especially interesting because it highlights yet another possible arrangement in the relationship between civil and religious marriage in this transitional zone. The legal debate in this case did not focus directly on marriage, but rather on defining the status of same-sex couples. Legal narratives constructed “stable union” as a bond equivalent to “civil union.” This association authorised its legal recognition as a family unit. This equivalence allowed the Federal Constitution to recognize that stable unions can be “converted” into marriage (as provided in Article 226). In this context, civil marriage, and even religious marriage, became a potential option within the legal case under analysis. Similar to discussions in other countries, the debate in Brazil also connects civil marriage to religious dimensions associated with canonical-legal regulation (rooted in notions of nature and morality), which has greater potential to confer social legitimacy to marriage than civil law (Montero et al. 2026).
Emotion was embedded in the public debates, even in the legal forum that ostensibly deals in ‘facts’. Logically, there was no legal reason for religious groups to intervene in discussions about civil marriage, as they retained their own domain over marriage and the family. But the idea of same sex marriage prompted anxiety, fear and perhaps even anger. At the same time, some social actors mentioned love. In some cases, it was weaponised to exclude (ie, marriage is a sacred space in which opposite sex couples can express their love), and in other cases it was linked to notions of justice and used to include (when couples love each other, it does not matter what their gender is). In Argentina, for example, “same love, same rights” was a slogan used for those who advocate same sex marriage. Hope also played a role, with a view to a future in which all couples could access the marriage ritual and be considered to be families.
These examples highlight the instability of the formal distinction between civil and religious marriage. Although both institutions are perceived as autonomous and governed by separate normative frameworks, the discussions surrounding civil marriage are closely linked to various perceptions of the religious, and vice versa. All the countries in our project have or have had a majoritarian Christian church whose authoritative and socially validating forms remain active even when membership and participation are in decline. Importantly, the inclusion of same-sex couples in civil marriage framework represents a part of a larger process of differentiation and autonomy between the religious and the nonreligious forms.
Through this process, the term marriage loses its self-referential character—or, at least, undergoes a significant weakening—previously naturalised through its conventional association with the transcendent. In turn, it acquires a series of qualifiers (civil, religious, egalitarian, affective) that redefine it as a social and legal institution within which questions of inclusion and pluralism are actively contested.
We previously noted that connecting marriage to cultural and religious repertoires is a recognizable linguistic pattern for assigning social value to different forms of conjugal relationships. We now shift our focus to images of history to understand its role in the production and representation of marriage during these discussions.
B. State laws and Christian heritage: narratives of history
Law serves not only as a regulatory mechanism that distinguishes between religious and civil marriage, but from our vantage point as social scientists, also as an arena to observe the use of Christian heritage to transfer its conventional moral and cultural authority to the legal field (Beaman 2020).
State regulation of marriage does not necessarily exclude forms of language and imagination publicly recognizable as Christian from legal discussions; instead, it incorporates, adapts, and transforms them. In countries where a major religion, whether Catholic or Protestant (or both, as in Canada and Australia), is dominant, state law does not fully remove forms of language or imagination that are publicly recognizable as religious from its way of imagining social order. Instead, it reinterprets the connections between these religious terms and the world of objects, changing their meaning and legitimacy. Therefore, the debate over how the State should regulate marriage always involves a dispute over the meaning of terms like love, fidelity, and family, which shape conflicting moral expectations.
The debates over same-sex marriage offer an analytical moment from which to observe how the boundaries of what becomes recognizable as religious and non-religious are established. Examining the repertoire, arguments, and images mobilised in these debates makes visible how the proposal to extend the term marriage to same-sex relationship rearticulates established ways of speaking about marriage, displacing some of their conventional associations with religious traditions while reframing them within a civil register.
This process, in which narratives shape and justify similarities and differences between “civil marriage,” “religious marriage,” and “same-sex marriage,” shows how norms that actors label as religious or non-religious become interconnected and stabilised within legal discourse. As mentioned earlier, legally changing the marriage regime involves disrupting the conventional connections that link the term “marriage” to the idea of “a complementary relationship between two opposite sexes” and to a specific goal, “a biological reproduction.” To promote this disconnection, a significant part of the debate in various countries has focused on reviewing the past.
Indeed, examining how debates are structured in different nations revealed the importance of the past in the stories actors tell. Therefore, analysing how the past is narrated, reconstructed, or reimagined to justify ideological views on same-sex marriage was crucial for our reflection. Christian decentering opens the public space for, among other things, the emergence of alternative discourses through the historicization of marriage as a legal institution. This pluralization, by describing marriage in different ways, highlights its instability and its worldly and human aspects. The debates over same-sex marriage provide a reflective look into these changes, showing the connection between the fragmentation of universalist stories and the rise of non-religious ideas.
A common narrative across the countries we studied was grounded in the positive portrayal of a past as a pre-existing legal and moral order that same-sex marriage would threaten or disrupt. The core of this narrative considers marriage to be monogamous, enduring, and heteronormative and as the foundational institution that safeguards this past. This view treats the unchanging nature of marriage as a source of social cohesion and shared values because it is based on a natural, pre- or supra-human order. In this narrative, the true essence of marriage is rooted in the past and linked to a transcendent order that ties marriage to unchangeable factors beyond human control. Thus, the past is referenced to uphold the traditional Christian association between marriage and the necessary complementarity of man and woman, forming the basis for procreation and the continuation of society.
For example, in the Canadian context (as elsewhere), historical narratives of the past are used to justify the claim that marriage has an inherent, pre-historical nature—one that is outside of human agency and therefore outside of the state’s authority. It connects to the essential and transcendental aspects of marriage, serving as an unavoidable foundation for religious and human laws. The following is an example from one of the interveners in the Canadian Reference case.
Marriage, a foundational social and religious institution in Canadian society, was not created by law. It is a societal and, primarily, religious institution which has existed for millennia. It pre-existed the law [… it] confers the status of husband and wife, and has been recognised by all major religious faiths and societal groups as existing uniquely between one man and one woman. (Affidavit of John Witte).
Even in the Canadian Parliamentary debates the transcendent nature of marriage was invoked:
Some people accept a divine creator, God, behind these laws of nature. Others still accept natural law and common law but without acknowledging a divine intelligence behind them. The fact still remains that until a very few short years ago, neither group felt intellectually, philosophically or religiously compelled to alter a millennia old definition that actually predates governments and even predates the church, synagogue and mosque (Stockwell Day, Member of Parliament, Parliament Second Reading – Sitting 74, 4590)
Similarly, in the United States, historical narratives are deployed to reinforce the notion of universal constructions and principles that ostensibly demand state recognition and deference. Justice Roberts, a member of the U.S. Supreme Court and a dissenter in the same-sex marriage ruling, argued that marriage possesses a universal definition that is not a “historical coincidence” and that it exclusively encompasses the union of a man and a woman and their offspring. In his dissent, he maintained:
This universal definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman is no historical coincidence. The marriage did not come about as a result of a political movement, discovery, disease, war, religious doctrine, or any other moving force of world history—and certainly not as a result of a prehistoric decision to exclude gays and lesbians. It arose in the nature of things to meet a vital need: ensuring that children are conceived by a mother and father committed to raising them in the stable conditions of a lifelong relationship (p. 5 of Roberts dissenting vote).
This way of narrating marriage as rooted in a past pre-religious and pre-legal, whose form is determined by the very “nature of things,” removes it from the flow of time. The Church and the Law simply inherit this natural order of things. In this discursive process, the “religious” aspect of marriage is erased, and marriage is taken out of the realm of debate, making competition between possible alternatives of marriage such as civil, religious, same sex, unthinkable.
This same erasure of the boundary through which marriage becomes recognizable as religious appears in the Argentinian material. During the Argentine legislative debate, a representative considered that:
Many here argued from their faith and there was a recrimination that we were legislating for a lay state. But in reality, in Judeo-Christian history, this is very closely related. If we want to absolutely forget religion or look at limitations and regulations from positivism, we will see that in almost all the penal codes of the world robbery, murder, rape, sexual abuse are penalised. In fact, if we go to the origin of the Judeo-Christian religion, the Ten Commandments don’t do any other thing but penalizing: do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not rape, etc. That is to say that even though we want to separate them there’s a moment where because of our own history and our own tradition they have a common argument. (Liliana Negre de Alonso, Chamber of Senators).
In this passage, the deputy erases Judeo-Christian regulation and the ‘lay state’ in order to “forget” the debate’s connection with religion. These interpretations of marriage, based on narratives of a past imagined as pre-social, seek to dissociate it from Christian normativity, which is clearly historical, and place it within a transcendent ontological order that exists beyond or outside the reach of human regulatory constructs. It is only up to positive legal systems to formally recognize them.
This discursive strategy operates through a dual movement: first, it posits an ontological order as the foundational ground of marriage; second, it reifies complementarity as an extra-social imperative, thereby displacing it from the realm of political contestation and rendering it resistant to rearticulation.
In contrast to narratives that place marriage in a fixed and immemorial past, we found opposing narratives in all the countries studied, which, conversely, connect it to the flow of historical time to highlight the changes and the process of diversification of its forms. This discursive strategy reflects a broader conceptualization of historical time, rather than a pure linguistic operation. It aims to disavow the past as an immutable legacy by connecting marriage with alternatives and perishable configurations that have been progressively authorised in recent years in these countries, such as divorce, single parenthood, and marriage without reproduction.
In these cases, a discursive framework is observed where historical time is seen as a continuous and inevitable progression of social changes in marriage that naturally lead to same-sex marriage and, as a result, the need for its recognition. In this teleological narrative of history, legislators and judicial actors become key agents in standardizing and stabilizing this change through recognition.
In this imagined version, history links same sex marriage both to the concept of emancipation and to a path of egalitarian growth, with marriage equality being another step in this progressive path. This approach was taken by the Supreme Court of Canada. In its discussion the Court situated a typified Christian interpretation of marriage, “where marriage and religion were thought to be inseparable”, located in the past, (Hyde v. Hyde 1866). The judges produce a clear rupture between marriage and religion, separating the civil domain from the ecclesiastical one.
The reference to “Christendom” is telling. Hyde spoke to a society of shared social values where marriage and religion were thought to be inseparable. This is no longer the case. Canada is a pluralistic society. Marriage, from the perspective of the state, is a civil institution. The “frozen concepts” reasoning runs contrary to one of the most fundamental principles of Canadian constitutional interpretation: that our Constitution is a living tree which, by way of progressive interpretation, accommodates and addresses the realities of modern life (at para. 22)
In the case of the US Court decision, the majority’s opinion also acknowledge that marriage was traditionally defined as a union between a man and a woman, acknowledging that this has been the traditional (Christian) definition of marriage. But they pointed out that this definition had also evolved. In fact, they mentioned “changes, such as the decline of arranged marriages and the abandonment of the law of coverture, have worked deep transformations in the structure of marriage, affecting aspects of marriage once viewed as essential” (Obergefell, p. 6) as examples of how the understanding of marriage has changed over time.
Similarly, the Brazilian Supreme Court connects same-sex couple legal recognition to an ‘emancipatory achievement’ analogous to women’s legal and social emancipation. This judicial reasoning reflects a broader temporal shift from reproduction-based family paradigms to affect-centered models. For example, in its role as ‘representative of societal interests,’ the Office of the Prosecutor General argued in the case that:
[There is] no doubt that the constitutional order protects the family, but this does not mean that it has placed it in a legal box, sheltering it in the face of liberal and egalitarian trends that are taking shape in contemporary society, which includes the gay rights movement. On the contrary, the Constitution of 88 established a new paradigm for the family, based on affection and equality. (Deborah Duprat).
Finally, in Argentina, some legislators craft historical narratives as a progressive dismantling or disentangling of Catholic principles from state law. Within this framework, they regard the religious foundations of the political-legal system as a historical relic, while asserting secular statehood as the defining paradigm of the current era.
I think we should insert the debate in terms of the growing secularization process that several aspects of human life have shown throughout history from a past in which there was a theological predominance over those aspects. Thus, the term ‘secularization’, that I would like to replace for ‘worldliness’ [mundanización], has served to designate the progressive independence of the political power from the ecclesiastical power and also to refer to the cultural weight of the Church in the contemporary world. (Samuel Cabanchik, Chamber of Senators).
In the discursive space of those legal debates on same-sex marriage in different countries, the term “history” functions not merely as content, a narrative of the past or the future formation, but as an indexical operator—a way of pointing to and legitimating competing sources of authority over the meaning of marriage. One narrative invokes history to index a naturalised moral order in which gender complementarity and procreation are framed as timeless, universal, and divinely ordained imperatives. In this usage, without invoking religious beliefs and values, history becomes an index of ecclesiastical authority: it signals a presumed continuity between divine law, natural order, and state regulation. This indexical chain aligns legal discourse with Christian ontology, suggesting that state recognition of marriage must follow sacred norms, because millennial, and thus denying the legitimacy of state authority to redefine them.
In contrast, the opposing narrative mobilizes history in a de-universalizing move: here, history indexes contingency and change, foregrounding the constructed nature of marriage as a socio-legal category. This reindexes the authority of the state as autonomous from religious institutions, positing the legal definition of marriage as subject to democratic contestation rather than theological decree. In this frame, historical discourse points to ruptures and revisions, authorizing a legal regime that de-imbricates Christian norms from civic institutions.
These competing indexical operations—one aligning legality with ecclesiastical permanence, the other with secular mutability—make visible the ideological struggle over who has the authority to define marriage. What emerges is a moment of normative de/re-imbrication, in which the boundaries between religious and legal domains are not only negotiated but are themselves objects of dispute. The invocation of history thus functions metapragmatically: it organizes the very terms through which legitimacy, governance, and moral order are publicly imagined and contested in a pluralistic society.
4. Conclusion
In a context where Christianity’s centrality in public life is increasingly contested, debates on same-sex marriage (SSM) in seven different countries with Christian backgrounds offer a critical discursive site through which to trace the ideological tensions and indexical operations that mediate the evolving relationship between legal, religious, moral, and cultural domains. This analysis foregrounds how linguistic forms—especially the strategic deployment of terms such as civil, religious, history, natural order, and freedom—function to signal broader normative alignments and claims to authority. The varied discursive strategies distinguishing civil and religious marriages and/or linking marriage to the past, as mapped in this study, do not simply reflect pre-existing ideologies. Rather, these linguistic operations actively constitute and transform the conceptual terrain upon which what becomes recognizable as “religious” and “nonreligious” repertoires is negotiated within legal discourse.
The debate around same-sex marriage marks a moment of indexical rupture in the normative architecture of marriage. Civil marriage is increasingly redefined in legal discourse through terms that point away from forms of reasoning publicly recognizable as religious, such arguments framed in reference to theological doctrines, and toward legal ideals of equality, individual rights, and state neutrality. This process of de-imbrication—where legal actors signal a departure from meanings conventionally associated with religious traditions (and particularly Christianity)—intensifies the distinction between civil and religious marriage. Even as some religious groups mobilize support for sexual diversity, the legal framing of marriage often asserts state authority as autonomous from ecclesiastical and other religiously grounded traditions. This reconfiguration provokes counter-indexical claims: references to objections of conscience and religious freedom emerge as a reflexive reaction, pointing to an underlying anxiety about the erosion of forms of Christian moral authority historically associated with the regulation of kinship and public morality.
Although emotion was not always foregrounded, it played a role in the constitution of the debates, both as an argumentative resource and a way of presenting claims as matters of fact. Love and hope were prominent emotional registers deployed in the debates and legal decisions. However, other affective registers such as anxiety and moral panic were also mobilised, indexing concerns about the inclusion of same sex couples within marriage and within prevailing imaginaries of the family.
The analysis of same-sex marriage debates across national contexts highlights divergent ways of connecting histories of marriage—that is, different ways of invoking the past to position Christianity either as foundational to or separate from modern legal orders. These historical narratives serve to affirm or contest the legitimacy of church authority in contemporary legal norms. The debate thus becomes an arena for requalifying what becomes recognizable as “the religious”, demonstrating that its boundaries are not fixed but continually re-introduced and renegotiated within the shifting discursive logics of modern governance.
What emerges from this analysis is not a simple binary opposition between perspectives publicly recognised as “religious” and “nonreligious” perspectives, but a dynamic field in which meanings are contested and reframed through indexical cues. These cues mediate the authority of law itself—whether it is construed as an extension of claims framed as grounded in “religious truth” or as a distinct, autonomous authoritative language. The indexical analysis of the uses of language in those debates thus provides a powerful lens through which to examine how legal discourse participates in (and reshapes) the conditions under which distinctions between what becomes marked as “religious” and what is seen as “nonreligious” domains of action are drawn.
By identifying these indexical processes that re-signified marriage and religion, the article contributes to broader sociological and anthropological understandings of how what becomes recognizable as “religious” is brought into tension with the legal discourse, and in the process reconfigured or disarticulated. It shows that the ideological struggle over same-sex marriage is not merely about rights, values, or traditions, but about competing indexical regimes—each projecting a vision of moral order, legitimate authority, and the proper relation between law and religion. More broadly, this analysis offers an analytical contribution to the study of contemporary public controversies by demonstrating how linguistic authority operates through indexical cues that animate ideological divisions. This approach opens up new possibilities for understanding the constitutive tensions of pluralistic societies, where what is becomes publicly marked as “religious” and its “nonreligious” counterpart is not a stable category but dynamic, contested, and co-produced within discourse.
Notes
[1] The literature on secularization is vast and cannot be reviewed here, particularly as it is not central to our argument. Wohlrab-Sahr and Kaden discuss nonreligion as occurring within secularization (2014). As Zwilling and Årsheim note in the introduction to their volume Nonreligion in Late Modern Societies “the growing interest of academics in non- religion could arguably be read as course correction in favour of a more specific, modest and materially relevant concept for further examination than the woolier and less verifiable notion of secularisation.” (Zwilling & Årsheim 2022, p.3). Moreover, there are subtle and important variations within the literature, depending upon whether the focus is secularization, the secular or secularity. For the latter, which takes a social constructionist approach, see Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt (2012). The recent open access book series Global Secularity: A Sourcebook underscores the wide range of possible interpretations as well as social, cultural and contextual nuances (Kleine et al. 2024–2025).
[2] Other related concepts and approaches include Grace Davie’s notion of vicarious religion (Davie 2007); see also Day (2011) and Hervieu-Léger (1999).
[3] The legalization of same-sex marriage followed different trajectories across national contexts. In Canada, for example, the 2004 Reference re Same-Sex Marriage affirmed the constitutional validity of same-sex marriage, followed by the federal enactment of the Civil Marriage Act in 2005. In Norway, Parliament amended the Marriage Act in 2009 to grant all consenting adults over the age of 18 the right to marry regardless of gender. Argentina legalised same-sex marriage in 2010 after a heated parliamentary debate, while Denmark did so in 2012. In 2011, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court extended the constitutional regime governing “stable unions between a man and a woman” to include what it defined as “homoaffective unions.” Two years later, the National Justice Council ruled that notaries must license and perform same-sex marriages and convert existing stable unions into marriages if couples so desire. In the United States, a key moment in the process was the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which held that “the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person,” and that same-sex couples may not be deprived of that right under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Finally, in Australia, Parliament approved same-sex marriage in 2017 following a voluntary, non-binding national postal survey. More detailed contextual information on each country, as well as on the processes of same-sex marriage debates and approval, can be found in Vaggione, Montero & Beaman (2026).