Editorial: Church's role in question

It's odd the passion people bring to bear on the institutions they least believe in, currently shown in the fate of a wrecked cathedral and the somewhat diminishing state of matrimony.

Matrimony, like wedlock, is a word with a quaint resonance; the kind of word you found threaded through religious services back when you had to take part in them; words like "thee" and "thou", and "vouchsafe" and "keep thee only unto him", which meant be faithful to your husband in a range of ways that didn't need to be specified because you knew damn well how much trouble you'd be in if you didn't.

Such things mattered a lot when a husband and wife had to be a tight unit, mostly focused on raising a family and just surviving. It was a patriarchal world; men were the undisputed heads of households and generally laid down the law, women dealt with children and domestic life. Adultery - should you have the energy for it after ceaseless child-bearing - was a serious matter if you were a woman, and as we know from the Bible, could mean you'd be stoned to death. Some people get wistful over the clarity of those days, but universal education and reliable contraception, making women savvy and mutinous, have made matrimony increasingly irrelevant - to everyone but gays, it seems. Goodness knows they may be the only hope of saving it.

Britain's Conservative British Prime Minister, David Cameron, plans to change the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. "I don't support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative," he has said.

The Catholic Church is annoyed, as are many Anglicans, and no doubt other religious communities are quietly mutinous.

The logical solution might be to invent a new word for marriage, which only seems to mean a lot to people who are excluded from the religious ceremony that inconveniently refers to "man and wife." But do we have the right to dictate to the church, which so few people attend, what its attitude to marriage should be, and the vocabulary it should use?

I have some sympathy, too, for the Christchurch Anglican bishop, Victoria Matthews, who has upset locals with her decision to demolish the Anglican cathedral, wrecked in last year's catastrophic earthquake. She plans to just retain part of the walls.

The cathedral was one of a number of old stone buildings we were all fond of, almost all of which were destroyed last February. It was, along with ducks and punts and daffodils on the Avon, the symbol of Christchurch, a postage stamp picture that stated with certainty what the city's origins were, and the basis of its old-school snobbery. But that was a Christchurch where an earthquake was never going to happen, and you could pretend you were in the England of your imagination.

Berliners were faced with a similar problem after World War II. A protestant church in the city centre had been bombed by the Allies, and a decision had to be made about the rubble. They chose to preserve the bell tower, all that now remains of the original building, and put up an ultra-modern church around it.

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is now a sombre visual reminder of the destructiveness of war. A similar solution in Christchurch might stand as a reminder of how little control we have over greater forces - religion among them - that shape the world we live in and take no notice of our opinion.