Couples Personalizing Role of Religion in Wedding Ceremonies

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/couples-personalizing-role-of-religion-in-wedding-ceremonies.html?_r=0

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
JUNE 26, 2015


The Rev. Meghan Gurley in Avondale Estates, Ga., on Thursday. Ms. Gurley received her online ordination from the Universal Life Church in 2009. Credit Kevin Liles for The New York Times

When Evan Wolfson was a high school student in the 1970s, a teenager with a quirky wit and perhaps too much free time, he discovered a mail-order religious organization called the Universal Life Church. He sent an application to an address somewhere out West and duly received a card identifying him as an ordained minister. “I carried it in my wallet and swelled with adolescent pride,” Mr. Wolfson, 58, said recently. “And that was that.”

Last year, Mr. Wolfson went online to the church’s website to be ordained once more. This time, his intent was anything but antic. Mr. Wolfson, the founder of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, needed the credential to officiate at the same-sex wedding of his office colleague Scott Davenport.

The distance in time and motive between Mr. Wolfson’s two ordinations from the Universal Life Church tells a story much larger than his own. It exemplifies the serious side of a recent boom in online ordination of wedding officiants, a trend that speaks to deep changes in the American views of marriage and organized religion.

Admittedly, it is tempting and even routine to treat the Universal Life Church as a folly. The church pumps out ordinations at an assembly-line pace, almost mocking a process that usually requires years of seminary study. Celebrities like Conan O’Brien, Joan Rivers, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and Rob Dyrdek of MTV, have all boasted about their ordinations by Universal Life.

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