On Church and Family

Another interesting phenomenon that merits investigation is the relationship between church and family.

In there, is to be found a curiously uncomfortable  overlap, which sooner or later culminates in a usurping of the family’s importance and roles by the bigger and more ‘influential’ partner, to wit – the church.

Because of their insistence on metaphorically referring to themselves as The Family of God or Family of believers – religions have had the significant effect, for many people, of reducing the significance of the birth-family and relegating it to secondary position in people’s lives.

Most religious scripture quotes its central figures as instructing their followers to pay less attention to their earthly families and focus more on the heavenly family – usually with very grave ramifications.

On this, Christianity's Jesus is very clear in Mathew 8:21-22, Mathew 12:47-50 and Mark 10:29-30.

Two celebrated African authors, the late Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thi’ongo have examined this phenomenon in two of their more popular books:

In Achebe’s Things Fall Apart – we witness Nwoye, Okonkwo’s firstborn and heir, abandoning his father’s gods and traditions in favor of the newly introduced ‘‘White-Man’s Jesus’’ – much to his father’s chagrin.

This is one of the final straws in several confrontations between tradition (embodied by Okonkwo) and the colonizer’s modernism, which climax in Okonkwo’s suicide.

In Ngugi’s The River Between, we are presented with a similar but reversed phenomenon in which Nyambura, Joshua’s eldest daughter, goes against the known wishes of her father (a Christian Priest), not to take part in the Gikuyu traditional initiation ceremony involving female circumcision.

The irate Joshua, who sees the ceremony as a pagan practice akin to the devil’s work, responds by disowning his disobedient daughter.

Clearly – the conflict between church and family; and its attendant sub-textual clash between tradition and modernism, isn’t a new phenomenon.

I invite you to examine two separate (and archetypal) cases, in the contemporary African context;

One – the suburban family; fairly schooled or literate parents, practicing believers, essentially second-generation Christians who willingly send their children to Sunday school, priding themselves in nurturing their children within the ‘safety net’ of Christian theology and tradition.

As the children ‘grow in faith’, they sooner or later begin to encounter the conflict of interest inherent in Christianity (and all other religions) – whether to bear unquestioning allegiance to their earthly fathers and mothers, or to take God’s ‘‘directives’’ for their lives, usually communicated through Church leaders, as insuperable.

The children, even at younger ages, begin to clash with their parents on matters of church doctrine, in domains where parents traditionally held sway.

For instance many parents, for ‘‘political’’ reasons (ethnicity or class), may not want their children to mix freely with children from less affluent neighborhoods (notwithstanding that they too may be Christians) - yet the children’s Sunday school teachers encourage them to play freely with all other children irrespective of class, since all are made in ‘‘God’s image’’.

Of course, the intrinsic class-apartheid of African churches usually resolves this – since families belonging to particular classes attend churches that correspond with their social and economic class.

As an example – one would be hard pressed to find a genuine pauper attending Watoto Church or All-Saints' Cathedral in Kampala, except when being paraded as recipients of charity. (The Catholic church, like the Islamic Caliphate, are exceptions for reasons that needn't detain us here, namely - that they're built on the model of political empires).

As expected too - the Sunday-School teachers have their own caveats in the matter of child-play, and are at the forefront of preventing children from religious mixing i.e. playing with their Muslim friends, for example, to avoid spiritual ‘contamination’.

The child is therefore conflicted, from a very young stage, between who to obey; their parents, or ‘God’ – as spoken for by their Sunday-school teachers?

As the child grows older, and becomes a young adolescent – the conflicts of interest begin to take on a more acute edge.

For instance – with the exception of hyper-Westernized families; what the youth Pastor at Church says about dating, which is usually that ''it’s okay to have a boyfriend at fourteen'', will hardly ever be acceptable to average African parents, who want their daughter to ‘‘focus on studies’’ and stay away from the ‘‘sinful’’ behavior of premature dating.

In some of the more traditional and conservative churches (especially Catholic and Anglican); parents find themselves allied with church leadership on the matter – which turns their young adolescents into a  target for ''double exorcism''.

The result of this is that the children begin to abandon their parents’ churches and join-up on the more liberal Pentecostal/Evangelical congregations whose post-modernist and libertarian interpretations of the gospel allow their young adherents to have boyfriends and girlfriends without being accused of demon-possession.

Very interestingly, the Catholic and Anglican churches have noticed this generational exodus to Pentecostalism, and are desperately trying to ‘liberalize’ their own structures by setting up Charismatic Orders and erstwhile ‘unnecessary’ Youth Ministries – in order not to lose out on an entire generation of ‘’Sunday taxpayers’’.

A dramatic case of Pentecostal Revival in my secondary school involved the radicalization of the Scripture Union by a local church pastor; who encouraged students to escape from school in the night to attend overnight services.

His reasoning was quite clever – if ‘secular’ students could escape to intoxicate themselves and play billiards – how much nobler then; it would be, for his charges to escape in God’s service!

As you might imagine, this didn’t go down well with school authorities who summoned the culprits’ parents.

The mostly Christian parents obviously decried the activity, and enjoined their sons to change; but the interesting difference was in the respective secular and pious reactions of the students;

The ‘secular’ boys agreed to change, even expressing shame for their actions. On the other hand, the ‘holy’ boys were defiant – of both school authorities and parents – declaring that they were proudly serving God by escaping, and would not stop serving him unless God himself told them to! (I recall one of them quoting Mathew 6:1, from the Christian-Greek scriptures.)

The second type of family I’ll discuss is the non-urban or rural African family; generally of illiterate parentage; converts to the more conservative sects of either Islam or Christianity; in many cases practicing a hybrid of Western religion and traditional African spirituality; and in some cases being purely animist.

Unlike their urbanite counterparts discussed above – the country family is less tolerant of ‘dissent’ and usually reacts in dismay and angst when they come to learn that their child has left the ‘‘way of truth’’.

These are usually the families one hears Christians referencing during the ‘Testimony Hour’ of church services.

The poor families are often referred to as heathens, pagans and devil-worshipers, who out of paranoia set out to bring their lost sheep back into the fold by dispatching legions of ancestral spirits and demons to visit the new-convert at night and remind them of their first love, namely – the family’s age-old spiritual traditions.

In other instances – the ‘jilted’ families are accused of malice and the intent to silence (kill) their dissenting children by dispatching spirits, not as messengers, but as ‘’assassins’’.

And boy – don’t ‘’sharp’’ pastors take advantage of this to fleece their paranoid congregants!

   

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In many a young person’s life, the conflict between family and church usually takes on egregious proportions, when they emerge into early adulthood.

This is usually in relation to critical life decisions like choice of career, marriage partner, job position etc.

The reason for the amusing-nature of the conflict is that at this point, one is mostly economically independent of their parents – and can therefore defy either them or the church without much ‘consequence’ to one’s economic welfare.

In some pious families, parents have been known to stop paying their children’s fees, expel them from the house, or altogether disown them - because of conversion to another religion, refusal to pursue the parents’ preferred career at University, marriage to someone from another faith, or other such sheepish reason.

In many cases, parents take these decisions in consultation with the local priest, witch-doctor, pastor or Imam.

The young adult – being economically independent and thus largely free from this church/family despotism; should therefore, ideally be free to choose a third path for themselves.

The less daring and more indoctrinated among them tow a path of ingratiation – always consulting with their pastor or parents before choosing who to marry or accepting a job appointment.

It goes without saying that if the parents’ and pastor’s opinions differ – it is the pastor’s which will emerge victorious since the pastor ‘speaks for God’, while the parent is merely an ‘earthling’.

The more daring and independent-minded youngster, will listen to what each party has to say before they make an autonomous decision - but living with this decision, which at times rubs both family and church the wrong way, becomes another delicate balancing act.

If for instance, a pious young lady raised in a traditionally Christian family falls in love with a young Muslim man – each will try vigorously to get the other to convert, in order to mollify their respective families.

In the event that either conversion fails, the young people often either have to abandon the relationship, under the rationale that each God has other plans for each of them.

In the event that they choose to go ahead with the inter-faith union, the young couple has to live with the incurred wrath of their families and their church/mosque communities for the rest of their marriage.

Sooner or later – the strain becomes too great and the marriage fractures.

One is left wondering if, despite their exclusive claims to being responsible for a broader, more-inclusive and egalitarian human family, religions aren’t actually the architects of a schismatic society in which the organic family-unit has been all but destroyed.

For most people – the story of the family starts in the church or mosque – with a form of matrimony akin to slavery.

 In the sense that if five years down the road a woman discovers her husband to be an abusive and philandering sot – she cannot walk out on him because divorce (except the patriarchal case in which wife has been caught cheating) is ‘sinful’; and wifely submission is considered divine. (Ephesians 5:22, Mathew 19: 6-9)

In the Catholic Church, women who divorce their husbands, no matter the condition, are invariably excommunicated. In the Protestant churches, ostracism usually follows the woman around like a rabid dog all her life. I can’t even imagine what Islam teaches about the subject.

The moment a young couple has their first child – the church has to shove in and demand their pound of flesh; by baptizing an infant that doesn’t know red from blue, hence claiming it for one of the church’s own for the rest of its lifetime.

Several other ‘sacraments’ and rites of passage are mandatorily required of the growing child – each successive one administered representing a progressive ‘ownership’ of the individual until one has a family of their own and is compelled to repeat that vicious cycle with their own child.

But when all has been said and done, everyone must breathe their last.

This is how at the funeral – the individual’s right to self-determination is dealt its final blow, when the religious figure officiating proclaims knowledge of the deceased’s soul’s destination they certainly can’t have!

‘Rest easy,’ the Reverend says, ‘for this child of God is at this moment in heaven …’

Sadly – no one ever asks the deceased where they’d have preferred to go.