Acquired Error

I feel it is important to divorce some traditions we inherited from the people who brought the Gospel to us because not only are they unbiblical, they are for the most part the reason stable marriages are becoming a rarity and marriage itself has become a tragedy.

Let me start with the chicken and egg scenario. Which between love and commitment is the bedrock of marriage? In other words, why do people stay married?

I have argued elsewhere on the blog that love as a precursor to marriage is no guarantee for a good marriage. I even gave two scriptural examples that show that love developed before marriage may be detrimental to a stable marriage.

Then I remembered a very famous one, Amnon. Remember he lost appetite, became sick and even lost weight because of the love he had for Tamar? Yet what happened when he ‘married’ her?

Incidentally we need to distinguish between mature love and infantile love, a love that is not so different from infatuation, a love that untested from that butterflies level feeling.

You will realize that young love (allow me to call it that) is mainly driven by the externals. Yet it is so powerful that like it did to Amnon it literally consumes the lover. Sadly, that power is not logical in the least. It is so powerful yet very difficult to control, especially for young people. It is not much different if the bug bites later in life.

Our cultures knew that. That is the reason there were very strict guidelines concerning marriage. There was a season to get married, an age to get married, a clan to get married to, etc. In other words one didn’t just fall in love and get married. Even the process of betrothal was lengthened for the purposes of reining on that drive.

That is the reason in most communities young people are not entrusted with the responsibility of choosing their spouse. Incidentally, very few, if any such arranged marriages fail.

Yet on many communities young people were allowed to choose a spouse. But even then there were clear guidelines so that that ‘love’ does not run riot like we see today. Let me give you how it happened in our community.

When a young man spots a girl he fancies, or one that arouses butterflies in his bosom, he had to do a few things before he could marry her, however wildly his hormones raged.

It was a requirement that he gets to know the girl outside their relationship.

What do I mean?

We were taught that the best way to court a girl is to court her village age mates. It means that you will need to ask about the girl from her acquaintances, people who grew up with her. Then you will know the kind of wife you were getting. You will know of her industry, arrogance, her character. You will know how she treats children, visitors, parents as her peers will not be looking to impress anyone.

This will let you know the woman you will live with the rest of your lives.

The reality is that what we call dating is at best deception, two people acting at their best to impress the person they will spend the rest of their lives together.

Once you are satisfied (or deceived if you did not think it was important to investigate her character), you then told your parents that you have found a girl you want to marry. Incidentally you just said the family she came from and not her name (it was not important at that time). I would like to marry so and so’s daughter, would be the way you report.

 Your parents would then launch their own investigation. They would run a background check on her family.

Isn’t it interesting that we are insist on due diligence when buying a car or land yet overrule the same when it concerns one’s destiny as marriage is?

The parents would therefore launch a serious background check on her family. Are there covenants binding the two families’? Are there taboos? Has the family been involved in some issues? What does her family do and how do they do it?

After sorting out the thorny issues, they would then look at the compatibility of their two upbringings. Those are the things love would be unable to bridge as they could introduce tensions young people may be unable to handle, however in love they may be.

Incidentally the girl’s family would do the same on the boy’s family for the same reason.

Should there be issues; the courtship would have to break because it is better to break a courtship than wreck a generation. Incidentally I think many of our marriages are struggling for that single reason. They ought to have been stopped before they started.

Then enter Christian missionaries. They introduce their culture purporting it to be the Christian culture.

They trash our due diligence.  They trash our background checks.

All we need is love, a love that covers and replaces everything. What we need is a dating period of two years to know each other and all is fine. Past heritage and baggage is irrelevant.

It became possible for a thief who had just gotten saved and not been disciple to marry a pastor’s daughter. It became possible for a young pastor to marry a prostitute that had just joined the church.

What happens to those marriages?

Unless God dramatically intervenes (and He does not do what we are supposed to do), the struggles will start from day one. Unlearning vice before getting hitched is hard enough. How does one do it under the kind of pressure marriage puts one on?

Or take the example of a minister always on the move getting married to a farmer who never left their hood or even saw anyone doing so in their circles. No background checks, no prior training on the expectations and disparities between their upbringings.

Or this one who all their lives had money doing things for them getting married to someone who treated ‘outside food’ as poison and work done by another as slavery. Or take two rich families, one that treats their servants as slaves with another that takes them as members of the family so that a stranger would have a hard time differentiating one from the other. What happens when children from both families marry?

Let me give you my example to help you understand. My wife comes from a tribe whose way of hospitality is totally different from mine. Were it not for the fact that I was a missionary to that tribe and interacted extensively with them, I doubt we could have been able to handle the differences in that aspect. And I know that I cannot change her way of doing things because we cannot be able to talk about something that is in the bones, as is said.

Why do I say that?

Some things are taught. Culture is for the most part caught. It is therefore so ingrained yet has no logical explanation whatsoever. One does it like they have seen it being done in their formative years.

Let me explain further. Why is it difficult for someone to excel in their primary language (mother tongue) academically? Why is it that people who learn it as a second or third language beat the indigenes? They did not learn the language. They just found it spoken and caught it. Making it academic becomes a very tough call. How does one explain something they do instinctively?

That is why many Christian marriages are falling. We are bringing two people with opposed default values and expect them to live happily ever after without any preparation whatsoever.

Why do I seem to blame the missionary? The first reason is their running away from scripture. They brought us their culture instead of the Bible in matters marriage. When you read the Bible you will realize that the model we were brought by the missionary is completely unbiblical. And I am not ashamed to say that. Let me ask a small question to put this point across. Where in the Bible do you read that a man’s calling is validated by his wife?

The second reason is ignorance. Most thought (many still do) that Africa is one tribe, one nation of people. They therefore thought Africa has just one culture because we have one running skin pigment. They therefore treated the ‘darkness’ they were getting Africa from as one huge darkness.

Probably that is where this whole marriage problem started. Once people come from one darkness to their darkness (their culture) thinking it is the light yet it is not because it was not centred on the scriptures, they were supposed to embrace the light and handle the issues they left in their darkness which were similar in their understanding. They therefore would be going through the same challenges.

But Africa has thousands of different nations. Kenya itself has over forty different tribes, incidentally some which are composed of several others bound together by languages that are close though it might involve very different cultures.

What this means is that two people from different cultures are taught another culture in the name of Christianity and expected to merge seamlessly in marriage. The chaos that will be produced from such a mix may be monumental.

You may have realized that the first converts did not have such problems as many would be rejected by their community and so would have no fall back should the marriage fail. They had also trashed everything culture and treated it as evil as they were taught. Another reason is that they were under the supervision of the missionaries. The errors were therefore not noticed until another generation came after the faith became generally acceptable, even fashionable. Also, as the Romans did, they gradually sought to assimilate culture into the faith, making it not as odious as their fathers had treated it.

Then culture became an issue, especially since there was nobody we needed to impress with our ‘stable’ marriage. The blinders came off.

By the way I am talking about marriage between two believers with a stable and solid upbringing. I have not even scratched the surface of dysfunctional families that result from those marriages and their prospects for stable marriages. I have addressed the single mother elsewhere in the blog because this brings in another huge dynamic.

How do we handle this to help our children develop stable marriages, and not for the cameras?

We must go back to the Bible. We must trash everything that is unbiblical however progressive it looks. We must teach Christian marriage strictly the way the Bible teaches.

We must prepare our young people for marriage properly. We must trash dating as many times that is where the error begins. Let our young people interact in a healthy way and not in closets as many times where fornication starts there.

Let us resume due diligence as the church. Just because a person is born again does not delete their past involvement with witchcraft or fornication. It is important for the one getting married to them to know some of that baggage so that they can know how to deal with it.

Someone who has been raped has a past that can be very detrimental to a marriage if their spouse does no know it, a baggage that could as well wreck the marriage. But it is very difficult to share that painful past on a date. Yet a mature confidant would handle that issue with a wisdom that could make the marriage bloom despite that blot.

Those incompatible default behaviors can be bridged by knowledgeably confronting them before getting married. And that can only happen if the church becomes proactive.

And it is Biblical. Remember Abraham sending his slave to look for the right wife for Isaac? Remember Isaac being grieved by the wives Esau married? And how he charged Jacob to ensure he got a wife from the right people? Remember how strict God was about the person a priest married?

A friend told me as we were discussing this. There is a particular community (sub tribe it may be called) whose cause of marriage breakage is very interesting.

Whereas in many cultures a bride is shown in no unmistakable terms that as a married woman her position in her father’s house was now closed, this community leaves an option. In short, whereas in many communities the girl’s bed would be broken or dismantled publicly as a visual that she had completely moved to her husband’s house, this community leaves the option open. I remember hearing a mother speaking to her daughter during a wedding reception telling her that she now had another mother, or rather had changed mothers as her new mother was her mother in law.

It is no wonder that girls from that place would run back to their parents for the flimsiest of reasons. Getting married to those girls is akin to courting divorce even before getting married.

That is something the church should deal with ruthlessly as we cannot have believers who start considering divorce even before getting married. And the man getting married to that girl must know that even as he plans to get her as a soul mate.

We should have forums where young people are not only taught about marriage but are conditioned to agree with scripture that marriage is permanent and therefore requires adequate preparation, not just the folly called dating.

Trial or come we stay marriages should be proscribed by churches, being the automatic reason for excommunication, whoever it is that does it. Then it will be a requirement for young people to first go through guidance before getting hitched.

But the church should also avoid making weddings competition and fashion parades as many times that is what makes young people give up on the idea of a wedding, settling for short cuts instead.

I think this is where we should start. You have no moral authority to guide someone if you are unwilling to walk with them in a way they can manage. Insisting on a high budget wedding is a very rotten example. Yet it is the one a majority of pastors have been insisting on.

Making a wedding manageable (and who said it must have all those embellishments?) opens our young people to our guidance and counsel. Placing a premium on what they need to have a wedding blocks it. Putting money instead of adequate spiritual preparation before uniting a young man and woman is actually spiritual exploitation. It is not much different from most con games pastors are being accused of, only that this is on a very destructive level since whereas others steal money and things, these wreck lives and destinies in pursuit of class, class they know nothing of.

Who do you think carries the greatest blame when a young couple starts cohabiting because they can’t raise the loads of cash you require to get married and mess up because there was no spiritual preparation from the pastor?

We must eliminate extravagant displays from weddings and make them simple, though special ceremonies. We can be uniting couples in the process of a worship service. In fact that is how I wanted mine to be but I guess I was way ahead of time as nobody could even conceptualize what I was suggesting. Just like a baby comes whether money is available or not, marriage should be treated the same way. Money should not block or delay a couple that is spiritually ready for it.

We will then divert all the time and money we devote to the preparation of weddings to walk with young people until they marry right, or even clearly discover they are not meant for each other instead of getting into a sinking boat marriage.