Abstract
The late twentieth century was a time of profound change in attitudes and behaviours related to cohabitation, marriage and divorce in England. The Church of England responded to this by adjusting its teaching and practice in relation to matters such as cohabitation, marrying divorcees in church or ordaining those who have been divorced and remarried. This chapter begins by examining some of those changes using national and church statistics, and by noting some of the key teaching documents that were issued by the Church of England in the decades prior to and during the survey period. The data reported cover three items related to cohabitation and two items related to divorce and remarriage. The results show how opinion varied across different groups in the Church, and how the pattern changed between surveys as attitudes became more accepting. These changes affected most birth cohorts, but to different extents, altering the way opinion related to age between 2001 and 2013.
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Notes
- 1.
Technically, this may not have been the case in law. The Bill that gave rise to this notion (Lord Hardwicke’s Act 1753) was made to prevent ‘clandestine’ marriages in the eighteenth century, and it stipulated that those who lived in a particular parish must be married in the parish church. It did not say that parish residents had a right to be married there, but this is how it came to be been widely understood (Doe, 1996).
- 2.
The search items for cohabitation were ‘cohabit*’, ‘sex outside marriage’, ‘trial marriage’ and ‘living in sin’. For divorce and remarriage they were ‘divorce’ and ‘remarriage’.
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Village, A. (2018). Marriage and Divorce. In: The Church of England in the First Decade of the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04528-9_4
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