The New England Way

For weekend blogging by Mark Silk visit his blog, Spiritual Politics. He will continue filling in for Steven Waldman on Monday, March 23.

Gay marriage is on the march in New England. On Friday, Vermont's state senate judiciary committee unanimously approved a bill to permit same-sex couples to wed. If both houses of the legislature agree (expected), and the governor signs (unclear), Vermont, the first state to approve civil unions, would join Massachusetts and Connecticut as the only states in the union where couples can marry regardless of gender. Meanwhile, similar bills are on tap in New Hampshire and Maine. Rhode Island may not be far behind.

What explains stolid old New England's readiness to be out in front on this most contentious of social issues? To some extent, there's a geographical domino effect when it comes to social change. Massachusetts, which once owned Maine and borders on every other New England state, has not dissolved into moral disarray (any more than usual) since gay marriage was instituted there in 2005. Demonstrably, civilization as we have known it in Red Sox Nation has not come to an end. But there's a religious dimension to the story as well.

Roman Catholicism is by far the biggest religious tradition in the region, and its several bishops have not been shy about putting their shoulders to wheel to stop gay marriage. Unfortunately for them, however, New England Catholics don't tend to like imposing their church's religious views on others. They remember when they were objects of religious strong-arming by the Puritan Yankees who were there ahead of them. And then, the moral standing of the New England episcopate has not, of late, been high. The Boston archdiocese was the epicenter of the great pedophile cover-up scandal of 2002-04, and lost a cardinal in the process.

But finally, as the just released American Religious Identity Survey makes crystal clear, Catholicism is in stunning decline in the region, while the number of those who claim no religion has been on the rapid rise. Vermont is now, by far, the least religious state in the nation, with fully one-third of its adult citizens answering "none" to the question, "What is your religion, if any?" The religious opposition to gay marriage that exists in America today is, simply, a lot weaker in New England than elsewhere.

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