Is there any sense that we're dealing with homonyms, here?

I.e. religious marriage vs. legal marriage

I can appreciate the idea that religious marriage is a sacred tradition.
It is true that legal marriage confers rights and privileges.

I can also appreciate that a purely religious marriage w/o the associated bureaucratic paperwork is not a legally recognized marriage. Vise-versa, a purely legal marriage involving only court documents is not necessarily sanctified by, say, the Catholic church.


Is this controversy (at least a little bit) due to a lack of clarity in separating these two things?