Religion has long been recognized as a powerful tool capable of shaping the lives of people in many societies. In this study, we draw insights from discursive psychology to explore the influence of religious beliefs and practices on the perpetration of husband-to-wife abuse and the entrapment of victims in Ghana. Semi-structured focus group discussions and in-depth individual interviews were conducted with 40 participants, comprising 16 (60%) perpetrators (men), 16 (60%) victims (women), and eight (20%) key informants from rural and urban Ghana. Participants’ discursive accounts suggest that both perpetrators and victims invoke religious instructions on gender norms to legitimize male authority over women in marriage. While perpetrators construct husbands’ conjugal authority over their wives in terms of prescriptive religious norms, victims construct their entrapment in abusive relationships in terms of proscriptive theology of divorce in the bible. The double-edged role of religion in providing both motivational and inhibitory support for wife abusers is also discussed.

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Colonialism was not only a political imposition but also a cultural one that both affected and infected institutions and ways of knowing and being of colonised societies. The vestiges of colonial power that originated during the colonial period of European global domination persistently influence minds and behaviour associated with the institution of marriage through the axes of meta-colonialism, and represent forms of epistemic violence against indigenous people. The depiction of modern/colonial mentalities about marriage (e.g., the so-called White wedding) as an optimal expression of human nature and love—and thus a key to personal happiness—have become part of the Ghanaian/African cultural experience. For example, Eurocentric practice of White wedding has been systematically naturalised and pushed down on Ghanaian/African people as the most enlightened, valid and standard form of marriage, supplanting the indigenous and ancestral forms of knowledge and being associated with marriage. Drawing insights from cultural psychology, we discuss the coloniality of mind and being associated with marriage, particularly the popular practice of White wedding, and examine how marriage practices in Ghana have become associated with Western social, cultural and economic interests propagated by colonial discourses of modernity, social change and development. We argue that the valorisation of European White wedding and the inferiorisation of African traditional marriage practices are corollary of colonial and meta-colonial narratives that promote(d) White normativity. We posit that psychological knowledge and practice, informed by Western ontologies and epistemologies, provided ideological support for colonisation and the perpetration and perpetuation of scientific racism. We thus contend that, given its complicity, the present discipline of scientific psychology cannot be an effective tool to dismantle the ill-effects of past and present unequal power relationships that result(ed) from colonisation. A decolonial psychological science that enables critical consciousness and serves as a necessary catalyst for liberating minds and being is thus required.

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