Religion has always known what secular modernity has been slow to acknowledge: that some bonds between people are so significant that they warrant divine witness. The blessing is the religious form of public commitment; it calls on a power beyond the two parties to ratify what they have declared to each other and to hold them accountable through a moral universe larger than social reputation alone. The religious blessing of friendship — when it has existed — has been among the most powerful forms of chosen kin commitment available, precisely because it has invoked the weight of the sacred to ratify a bond that secular law and social custom might otherwise treat as optional.
The tradition is real and substantially older than most people know. The adelphopoiesis rite of the Eastern Orthodox Church — literally "brother-making" — was a liturgical ceremony that created a formal bond between two men, performed at the church altar, with prayers drawn from the same liturgical tradition as wedding prayers. The earliest surviving manuscripts date to the ninth century; the practice was widespread through the medieval period and was performed in churches across the Byzantine world. The rite was not a romantic ceremony — it was a kinship ceremony, creating a formal chosen brotherhood that carried social and in some jurisdictions legal obligations. It was a religious blessing of a chosen kin bond that the church recognized as significant enough to warrant liturgical acknowledgment.
Other traditions have parallel forms. Judaism has the brit ahuvim — the covenant of lovers — which has been adapted by some contemporary rabbis to bless same-sex partnerships, but the underlying form of the brit (covenant) has also been used to bless deep friendship in communities that recognize the covenantal tradition as applicable beyond marriage. Islamic tradition recognizes the muwakhat — the brotherhood bond established by the Prophet Muhammad between the Ansar and Muhajirun in Medina — as a model for chosen fraternal relationship that carries religious significance. Buddhist traditions in Southeast Asia include formal friendship ceremonies in some lineages, and Indigenous traditions across the Americas have ceremonial friendship-making practices that invoke spiritual witness. The traditions are not identical; they reflect different theologies, different social structures, and different understandings of what friendship is. But they converge on the recognition that friendship — at its deepest — is a spiritual event as well as a social one.
The decline of these traditions in modernity followed the decline of the institutional religious contexts that housed them. The Protestant Reformation's suspicion of extra-biblical ceremony, the Enlightenment's subordination of social life to rational-legal forms, the secularization of public life in Western modernity — each of these historical forces pushed friendship out of the sacred register and into the secular one, where it has had no institutional home. The contemporary religious communities that are recovering friendship blessing practices — the liberal Jewish communities adapting the covenantal tradition, the progressive Christian communities developing friendship liturgy, the neo-pagan communities for whom ritual kinship creation is a central practice — are doing recovery work: retrieving forms that existed, adapting them to contemporary theology and social understanding, and reintroducing them into communities that have forgotten they once had them.
The collective significance of religious friendship blessing is not only for the individuals blessed. A religious community that blesses friendship — that treats it as spiritually significant, that provides liturgical forms for its celebration, that witnesses its commitment before God or the sacred — is a community with a different available social vocabulary than one that does not. It is a community where friendship is not a secular residual category (what you have when you don't have family) but a spiritual category of its own, with its own dignity, its own obligations, and its own claim on the community's acknowledgment.
Law 5 — Revise — applied to religious tradition means recovering what was lost, understanding why it was lost, and rebuilding it with the theological and social clarity that its absence has made more necessary. The blessing of friendship is not a novelty; it is a recovery. And the recovery is, in multiple traditions simultaneously, underway.