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Actual meaning and what it means to the public are not always the same thing. You can have a word that officially means one thing while it is used in public to mean something totally not related to the meaning of the word...and have that public meaning being the generally accepted meaning even if the actual definition of the word has not changed.
The ones caught up in the ideology and making the largest amount of noise are those that want to keep marriage as "sacred", thus religious.
That might mean more in the United States than in other countries. We have a fairly large population that still has religious ideals in mind without being directly involved with their own religions anymore. These are the people that still hold on to the ideal or tradition of a church wedding. Regardless of what it means or doesn't mean.
Some of this is just tradition. Some of it is the older style "girls dream" of the wedding dress. Some of it is that they hold a god (or gods) as a higher authority than the government and thus it is the legal paperwork that is the formality while the ceremony is the real deal.
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