Kirk Franklin, the immensely successful musician with over 20 Grammys for his work in Christian hip-hop and gospel music, recently had some thoughts on marriage that he shared with former Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton on Newton's Funky Friday podcast.
“I believe that marriage has been weaponized in Western Christianity,” Franklin said. “It’s very much that ‘You living in sin. You need to get married,’ without realizing that marriage doesn’t fix sin.”
“It’s a prerequisite for identity and value that if you don’t have a man or you don’t have kids, that something about you is broken,” Franklin continued. “Do you understand how dysfunctional these messages are?”
Franklin then quoted scripture: “‘He that findeth a wife, findeth a good thing.’ But Paul also said, ‘I wish some of you were like me. I wish some of you could be single because some of you could be even more useful in the kingdom if you were single.’ Now, marriage is a good thing. Paul said, ‘But marriage is a necessary distraction.'”
Unlike Franklin, I am not a Christian. But I have studied Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and I think Franklin is missing some key context.
First, Franklin is correct that Paul taught it was “a good thing” for unmarried women and widows “to remain as they are.” This stood in stark contrast with existing Roman law, which punished unmarried women with higher taxes (widows were given a year reprieve from this mandate and divorced women only six months).
And the church very much welcomed single women, the never-married and widowed alike, into the community’s good graces. Single women could and did play meaningful roles in the church. But only if they remained celibate. “But if they cannot exercise self-control they should marry, for it is better to marry than to be on fire,” Paul wrote.
The same was true of men. Yes, Franklin is right, that Paul wished more Christians could be like him, single…and celibate. The church had no place for single men with baby mamas on the side. But Paul also recognized that most Christians, men and women, could not lead an honest, celibate life: "But because of cases of immorality every man should have his own wife, and every woman her own husband."
“A wife does not have authority over her own body, but rather her husband,” Paul continued, echoing what was common in the ancient world, but then he went on, “and similarly a husband does not have authority over his own body, but rather his wife.”
And that is what made Christianity so revolutionary. It gave not only the husband authority over the wife but the wife authority over the husband. This was definitely not the case in the Roman Empire, where Roman wives were not allowed to have sex with anyone other than their husbands but Roman men were allowed to have sex with anyone they wanted (as long as it wasn’t another man’s wife), including concubines, slaves, prostitutes, and young boys.
Christianity weaponized marriage against these wealthy powerful men who were sexually exploiting those around them.
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Speaking of sexual exploitation, Cam Newton, the man Franklin was talking to, has eight children with three different women, none of whom he is married to. What would Paul think about that?
If anything, marriage hasn’t been weaponized enough.
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