(RNS) What's the surest way conservative pastors can avoid any government mandate to perform same-sex marriages? According to one prominent religious journal and a growing number of ministers, the answer is not to perform any civil marriages at all.

First Things, a conservative religious publication, has launched a movement encouraging pastors to refuse to perform marriages as representatives of the state. A signing statement called "The Marriage Pledge" has been posted to the journal's website, where ministers can affix their names electronically. The pledge was drafted by Ephraim Radner, an ordained Anglican and professor of historical theology at Toronto School of Theology's Wycliffe College, and Christopher Seitz, an ordained Episcopal priest and senior research professor at Wycliffe.

"In many jurisdictions, including many of the United States, civil authorities have adopted a definition of marriage that explicitly rejects the age-old requirement of male-female pairing," the pledge says. "In a few short years or even months, it is very likely that this new definition will become the law of the land, and in all jurisdictions the rights, privileges, and duties of marriage will be granted to men in partnership with men, and women with women."

The document concludes: "we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign government-provided marriage certificates. ... We will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles articulated and lived out from the beginning of the Church's life."

As of Thursday (Nov. 20), nearly 150 people had signed the pledge, including ordained clergy, laypeople, chaplains and at least one bishop.

On Tuesday, First Things' editor, R.R. Reno, teed up the effort with a column titled, "A Time to Rend."
Reno wrote: "For a long time Christianity has sewn its teachings into the fabric of Western culture. That was a good thing. ... But the season of sewing is ending. Now is a time for rending, not for the sake of disengaging from culture or retreating from the public square, but so that our salt does not lose its savor."

The concept that civil and religious marriage should be separate is not entirely novel. At U.S. Catholic, columnist Bryan Cones has asked, "Is it time to separate church and state marriages?" And writer Len Woolley raised similar questions at the Mormon-run Deseret News.

But the idea isn't just limited to conservatives.

Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, proposed the idea as early as 2009. By 2011, three North Carolina church pastors and at least one in Virginia quit signing marriage licenses as a way of opposing state bans on same-sex marriages they felt violated their conscience.

And in July of this year, Paul Waldman argued at The American Prospect, a progressive publication, that religious couples should fill out state-mandated marriage forms and then have the religious ceremony of their choosing. "The wedding, in other words, should be a ritual with no content prescribed by the state, no 'By the power vested in me by the state of Indiana' at all."

Waldman added: "The state doesn't tell you how to celebrate Christmas or Ramadan, and it shouldn't tell you how to get married."