Learning Marriage Ideals and Gendered Citizenship in “God-Fearing” Uganda

Abstract

This chapter contributes to understanding the space between religion, gender and citizenship through a focus on teaching and learning about marriage in Ugandan churches. While pastors focused marriage teaching on the primacy of a church wedding, sexual purity and harmony through hierarchy, church-going women saw cohesion, spirituality and physical survival as cornerstones of an ideal relationship. By juxtaposing how women saw themselves as having learned these ideals, and how pastors saw themselves as teaching theirs, we illustrate that teaching and learning about gender, relationships and citizenship—and the character-moulding concomitant within these processes—occurs more in everyday lives than in places formally set out for the purpose. To achieve contextualized understanding of citizenship in religious contexts, it is important to pay attention to both religious teaching and practice and to develop methodological tools that identify how men and women actually learn about their worth, rights and responsibilities as citizens.

Purity rules in Pentecostal Uganda

“…In contrast, in Uganda, as elsewhere in Africa, PCCs have introduced new and 'modern' lexicons for discussing sexuality in church spaces: from public commentary of hard porn that feeds into hate speech (Klinken and Zebracki 2016), to the rhetoric of 'romance' and practices of marriage counselling (van Dijk 2013;van Dijk 2015). This 'pentecostalization' of the public sphere, combined with competition on the religious marketplace, has also pushed mainline churches to adopt new styles of preaching and practice (Bompani 2016;Alava, Amito and Lawrence 2022).…”