Evangelical abstinence campaigns have shifted their emphasis from "just say no" to sex before marriage to "just say yes"—within marriage, that is, says Christine Gardner. In Making Chastity Sexy (University of California Press), the Wheaton College communications professor examines the rhetoric of three evangelical abstinence organizations, comparing them with an abstinence campaign in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV/AIDS is a common threat. Christianity Today online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey spoke with Gardner about the larger ideas communicated to young people in the campaign.

What did you find upon examining the language of the U.S. abstinence movement?

This is a study of rhetoric in the classical sense—the study of the art of persuasion, focusing on three very specific church-related evangelical campaigns. These groups are using a savvy rhetorical strategy: They are using sex to sell abstinence. They are using the very thing they are prohibiting to admonish young people to wait. They are saying, "If you are abstinent now, you will have amazing sex when you are married." The argument then becomes a promise of marriage.

What are the limitations of this approach?

Such campaigns don't address the challenges of singleness. Also, what if you are gay? What if you do get married, but sex isn't all it's cracked up to be? There are many challenges with this kind of strategy, as savvy and persuasive as it is.

Evangelicals are quite good at interacting with secular culture. We have a long history of adapting secular forms for religious ends. The language of self-gratification in "sexy abstinence" is showing the ability of evangelicals to speak the language of the culture. But in doing so, are we actually transforming it?

You looked at how Africans view abstinence, saying they "saw their bodies as temples of the Lord and themselves as caretakers … a more deeply theological response."

I assumed that HIV/AIDS would be the big motivator for [African] young people to commit to abstinence. It is big, but I found this other undercurrent that was deeply theological. A leader of one of the programs told me that yes, they do talk about AIDS as a motivator for young people to commit to abstinence, but they noted that "you can get malaria and die, too." AIDS is not as much of a motivator as a Western researcher coming in would have assumed.

How do the American and African messages compare?

Americans have turned a prohibition into a more positive admonition. In this case, pleasing God is an end in itself. Pleasing God will have tangible benefits. In Kenya and Rwanda, it was more of a combination: "Avoid death. Avoid HIV/AIDS, and do it out of fear of God, because he wants you to do this."

Also, in the places I visited in Africa, the condom is viewed as a medical device, a tool for saving lives. It is not viewed as a tool for promiscuity, as evangelicals in this country largely view it. The same little piece of latex is described so radically differently by evangelicals in two different cultural contexts.

How does Western rhetoric translate to the African context?

It offers an understanding of self and empowers young people, especially women, to respect their bodies. This is, of course, fabulous and indeed, very biblical. But the language of individualism and self-gratification can seep in and pose a problem.

Labels: abstinence, Africa, Christianity, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, sex education, STDs

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The High Court in Mombasa has made a landmark ruling allowing a woman who was 'married' to another woman to inherit her late 'husband's' property worth millions of shillings.

Justice Jackton Ojwang ruled that Nandi customary law entitled Monica Jesang Katam and her children to take over the estate of her 'husband'.

He dismissed an application by Jackson Chepkwony and Selina Jemaiyo Tirop, who had moved to court to object the issuance of letters of administration to Katam for the estate of Cherotich Kimong'ony Kibserea.

In traditional Kalenjin culture, a barren woman could 'marry' another woman who would proceed to bear their children by men who would have no obligation towards them or their children. The children would belong to the barren woman or 'husband' as she had paid bride price. The practice also spread to neighbouring Kisii but has now largely died out. The name Chepkwony, meaning 'of a woman', traditionally signified that someone was a child of a marriage between two women.

Woman-woman marriage was found among Nandi, Kipsigis, and, since about the mid-twentieth century, among Keiyo. It is however not customary among other Kalenjin sub tribes.

A female husband is a woman that has taken some of the traditional male role on behalf of the family. The Kalenjin culture gives her the ability to allow her family name to live on, in a culturally accepted way. She provides a home and inheritance for the children in the family.

Labels: Africa, gender, Kenya, Marriage

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Three months before a major assembly of the Lutheran World Federation, church leaders in Tanzania and Ethiopia—who represent the two largest Lutheran constituencies in Africa—have expressed opposition to "same-sex marriages and those who support the legitimacy of such marriage."

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America last year urged members to allow congregations that choose to do so "to recognize, support and hold publicly accountable lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships," but delegates did not call them marriages--reserving that term for heterosexual couples.

Labels: Africa, Christianity, gay marriage, Lutheran Church, religion

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On most measures of the strength of a community’s social fabric, the town of Oakdale would score poorly. There’s the high divorce rate and appallingly low incidence of marital fidelity, the off-the-charts frequency of assault, murder, rape, and arson; the overlapping epidemics of kidnapping, identity theft, fraud, and wedding-day bridal abandonment. And there is a local justice system seemingly bent on imprisoning the innocent, leaving it up to intrepid family members and lovers to bring the truth to light.

Thankfully, no one lives in Oakdale, no one real. It is the fictional town where ”As the World Turns,” America’s longest-running current soap opera, has tumultuously unfolded for over half a century (this season will be its last). And while the Gomorrhic dysfunction of places like the fictionalized Oakdale, Ill., or Port Charles, N.Y. (”General Hospital”) or Pine Valley, Pa. (”All My Children”) is what makes them so entertaining to their loyal fans, few would describe these as places where people live exemplary lives. Soap operas, after all, are entertainment at its least believable and least nutritious.

The possibility, therefore, that people might be modeling themselves after characters on soaps might seem both farfetched and frightening. A spate of recent research, however, suggests that, all over the world, that’s exactly what’s happening. What’s more, we should be happy about it.

Soaps, it turns out, are shaping behavior in ways that are subtle, profound and, from the standpoint of global development experts, positive. A team of economists credits Brazilian TV ”novelas” for helping to dramatically lower a fertility rate that in 1960 was above six births per woman. Others have found that in India — where soaps dominate the airwaves — villages where people watch more TV give more responsibilities and rights to women and girls. Researchers in Rwanda have found that radio soap operas there can help defuse the country’s dangerous ethnic tensions. Turkish soap operas have set off a public debate about women’s roles in the Middle East. And research in the United States has found that health tips tucked into soaps have greater sticking power than with just about any other mode of transmission. In a surprising number of ways, soap operas are improving lives around the world.

”The evidence we have from these academic studies is that quite often [viewers] take away different attitudes toward things like how many children they want, what is acceptable behavior for a husband toward his wife, what is the breakdown in a household of responsibilities over things like finances, should we be sending girls to school,” says Charles Kenny, an economist at the World Bank who has written about global television habits, and the author of a forthcoming book on development. ”All of these seem to be generated by watching some soap operas.”

Labels: Africa, Brazil, culture, feminism, gender, India, Marriage, Turkey, women

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THOMAS MALTHUS first published his “Essay on the Principle of Population”, in which he forecast that population growth would outstrip the world’s food supply, in 1798. His timing was unfortunate, for something started happening around then which made nonsense of his ideas. As industrialisation swept through what is now the developed world, fertility fell sharply, first in France, then in Britain, then throughout Europe and America. When people got richer, families got smaller; and as families got smaller, people got richer.

Now, something similar is happening in developing countries. Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

At a time when Malthusian worries are resurgent and people fear the consequences for an overcrowded planet, the decline in fertility is surprising and somewhat reassuring. It means that worries about a population explosion are themselves being exploded--and it carries a lesson about how to solve the problems of climate change.

Worth a bundle

Today’s fall in fertility is both very large and very fast. Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain--from 1800 to 1930--took just 20 years--from 1965 to 1985--in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006--and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

Falling fertility in poor and middle-income societies is a boon in and of itself. It means that, for the first time, the majority of mothers are having the number of children they want, which seems to be--as best one can judge--two. (China is an exception: its fall in fertility has been coerced.)

It is also a boon in what it represents, which is greater security for billions of vulnerable people.

Labels: Africa, Asia, demographics, poverty

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...Yet these strategies — though invaluable — underestimate the complexity of the situation in certain countries. To be sure, China and India are poor. But in both nations, girls are actually more likely to be missing in richer areas than in poorer ones, and in cities than in rural areas. Having more money, a better education and (in India) belonging to a higher caste all raise the probability that a family will discriminate against its daughters. The bias against girls applies in some of the wealthiest and best-educated nations in the world, including, in recent years, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. It also holds among Indian immigrants in Britain and among Chinese, Indian and South Korean immigrants in the United States. In the last few years, the percentage of missing girls has been among the highest in the middle-income, high-education nations of the Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Nor does a rise in a woman’s autonomy or power in the family necessarily counteract prejudice against girls. Researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute have found that while increasing women’s decision-making power would reduce discrimination against girls in some parts of South Asia, it would make things worse in the north and west of India. “When women’s power is increased,” wrote Lisa C. Smith and Elizabeth M. Byron, “they use it to favor boys.” ...

What Das Gupta discovered is that wealthier and more educated women face this same imperative to have boys as uneducated poor women — but they have smaller families, thus increasing the felt urgency of each birth. In a family that expects to have seven children, the birth of a girl is a disappointment; in a family that anticipates only two or three children, it is a tragedy.

Thus development can worsen, not improve, traditional discrimination.

Labels: abortion, Africa, Asia, demographics, poverty, women

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...I traveled to Kenya in November 2008 on assignment for UU World to report on Unitarian Universalism’s rapid growth in Africa. Ten years ago, the continent counted only a handful of UU congregations—four in South Africa, where Unitarianism was introduced in 1857, and two in Nigeria, where a Unitarian church was founded in 1919. Recently, congregations have emerged in places such as Kampala, Uganda; Bujumbura, Burundi; and Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo. But the most spectacular growth has occurred in Kenya, where local leaders say sixty-eight congregations have sprouted in the Kisii province, a six-hour drive west of Nairobi. Several dozen more have emerged in Nairobi and central Kenya. ...

A few blocks from his home, Magara stopped at another house he owns, this one occupied by his other wife, with whom he has seven children. Theresa Magara, 54, lives with their widowed daughter and her five children, all of whom Magara supports. One of his sons by Theresa, Justine, oversees a second group of UU congregations in Kisii District. After a short visit, Theresa asked Magara to lead a prayer, and he obliged. As he left, he gave her a 50-shilling note (about 60 U.S. cents).

Unitarians in Kisii condone multiple marriage, which is part of Kisii culture. That stance sets them apart from other denominations in Kenya, which discourage the practice. Isaac Choti, who runs a Unitarian-sponsored elementary school in a nearby village, has two wives, both of whom are teachers at the school. “I had been a Christian all my life,” Choti said, “but my church had policies I didn’t like. Some churches make it hard for us. They say you can only come with one wife. But Jesus said come as you are. In UU, they welcome everyone.”

In other important ways, Kisii Unitarians embrace a progressive view of the role of women in society. For example, the churches take an activist position against domestic violence, which is a particular problem in Kisii, where women often are saddled with much of the heavy farming work while husbands idle away their days smoking and talking with friends. Female circumcision also remains a common practice. But the Magaras, and most Unitarians here, preach against it. ...

Okenyuri used to belong to another church, but she became interested in Unitarian Universalism “because I felt it was a church with freedom, a church that wasn’t always pounding people.”

“We found that Unitarians defend women very much,” she added. “We have a problem in Kenya and we are determined to change a system where a pregnant woman has to carry sticks on her head, push a wheelbarrow, or work in the field while the men sit around. Unitarianism teaches our husbands that we are equal. Those other churches tell us we must obey.” ...

Mbugua’s wife, Eliza Nyambura, said she stresses that message of inclusion in the congregation of seventy members that she oversees north of Nairobi. “What we tell them is that if you become a UU there is no difference between a Kikuyu, a Masai, or a Luo,” she said. “They are all the same in the eyes of God. That message really resonates with people.”

The social issues that bring many UUs together in the United States take a back seat for most Kenyan UUs. While domestic violence and women’s rights are important to Kenyan UUs, most of them are opposed to abortion and homosexuality. In fact, some Kenyan UU leaders joined a recent protest against abortion in front of Kenya’s Parliament.

“We promote positive practices like unity, peace, love, and the care of others,” said Justine Magara, Patrick Magara’s son and a KUUC director. “But we discourage people from homosexuality, alcohol, rape, and incest. Homosexuality is not all that common in Africa, anyway; it’s something we feel has been introduced by Western influences. But we do have a problem in Kenya with domestic violence.”

A church recently launched by Mark Kiyimba in Kampala, Uganda, however, has an active lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender group--in a country where homosexuality is against the law--and its congregants are mostly middle-class professionals. His congregation runs an orphanage and school for more than 200 children who have HIV/AIDS or who have lost one or both parents to the disease.

Labels: Africa, homosexuality, polygamy, religion

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