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Religious officials acting as state officials in marriage ceremonies

A marriage in Sweden can be carried out by any person that has been given the right to conduct a marriage, and can be performed in a secular or religious context. The Church of Sweden has, along with about 40 other faith communities, the right to conduct legally accepted marriages. In 2014 33% of all marriages were conducted by the Church of Sweden clergy. The authorization to conduct a legally binding marriage is given by a government agency (Kammarkollegiet) in two steps. Firstly, the faith community has to apply, and prove its organizational stability and ability to apply Swedish marriage law. Following this, the faith community has to demand the right for certain individual officials to conduct marriage ceremonies. This right is conferred after individual examination, so it is not given to all religious officials within a faith community. Currently around 4000 individual faith community officials have this right. The large majority of them are ordained clergy of the Church of Sweden. Until 1 May 2010 the Church of Sweden was an exception since the right was given to all ordained ministers. Following this date, the government made the right to conduct marriage ceremonies an individual right, in order to treat equally all religious officials. This change was also a way of marking the control state on the marriage right, and was thus part of the Church-state separation process. This change according the right to conduct marriage ceremonies means that ministers can lose it, if, for example, they do not follow properly the formalities of the procedures.

Same-sex marriage

A law on same-sex partnerships was introduced in Sweden in 1995, and a new sex-neutral marriage law in 2009. When the Church of Sweden General Synod took the decision in 2009 to adopt the sex-neutral marriage law, 176 of 251 Church synod members voted in favor of this proposal. This made the Church of Sweden the first major church in the world to accept same-sex marriages.

D 8 March 2016    APer Pettersson

CNRS Unistra Dres Gsrl

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