Marriage Quote by George Carey

Carey’s line is a small masterclass in ecclesiastical gatekeeping: it sounds conversational, almost commonsense, while quietly tightening the boundaries of what the church is allowed to recognize. The opening move is a neat rhetorical trap. He lists broadly appealing virtues - union, fidelity, monogamy, love - then slides in “blessing,” as if it were just another neutral term. By the time he lands on “it sounds like marriage to me,” the listener has already nodded along. Who could object to those values?

That’s the point. Carey reframes the debate away from the couple or the social reality and toward semiotics: the fear that if the church blesses relationships outside its authorized category, people will read the blessing as marriage in all but name. “Sounds like” is doing a lot of work here. It admits the church’s authority is partly a matter of perception; sacrament depends on a public grammar of symbols, not just private theology.

The sharp edge is the second sentence. “Undermining” turns pastoral accommodation into institutional sabotage. The subtext isn’t only doctrinal purity; it’s anxiety about precedent and contagion - once you bless what looks like marriage, you’ve conceded the moral center. Spoken in the late-20th/early-21st-century Anglican context, this is a defensive posture against shifting sexual ethics and growing calls to bless same-sex unions. Carey’s intent is to keep the church from being culturally drafted into recognition while still sounding like he’s merely protecting the integrity of a sacrament.