A few weeks ago, a clip of mine on marriage and equality went viral.
In it, I referred to feminism and equality as nonsense, and I referenced an experience at my alma mater in the United States in a way that some have construed to imply I expected that the audience should believe my views on the basis of where the experience occurred.
Both were wrong, and I want to correct them plainly. Feminism is not nonsense. It is a broad field spanning law, economics, philosophy and sociology. Some aspects of it are contested and scholars in the field will often agree as much as they will disagree.
At its core, feminism advocates for equal treatment of women in the same way that men are treated in all spheres of life. This is a fundamental premise on which we all agree, or ought to agree. Ugandan law already places all equal before the law and expressly prohibits discrimination based on gender.
Feminism advocates for the translation of equality into daily reality: equal pay, legal standing, a voice at home. The contesting views in the field do not diminish the centrality of feminism’s core.
Importantly, many people have devoted their lives to improving the lives of women and fighting for the practical realization of equality. Their work is responsible for a lot of progress and empowerment of women in marriage and other spheres of life for which society is much better.
Speaking of feminism and equality wholesale, as I did, responds to the most extreme reading of one strand as though it spoke for the whole family of ideas. That was my error, and I regret both the use of the word nonsense and the tone in which I spoke.
The clip arose from a much longer session in which we responded to the famous question about submission in marriage. Here is what I actually believe. Ephesians 5:21–24 calls both partners to submission, not one.
I believe, and have said before different congregations, that the standard placed on the husband is the higher one: to lead by loving as Christ loved, to the point of self-sacrifice. Not to rule over his wife.
Good marriages based on this view ask three things of a home: men lead, women submit, men love so completely that leadership becomes indistinguishable from service. There was never a place for rulership in the marital union.
It is the perception underlying the latter construction that sometimes evokes the radical debate on submission. That brings me to the narrower point I was trying to make, though I made it badly: empowerment is not license.
Some women invoke equality not to build a partnership but to withhold the very peace a marriage needs to function. They use rights as leverage for constant contest rather than resolution.
As a result, some men prefer to stay single than subject themselves to the possibility of conflicts in marriage, which they attribute to the feminist movement. The naming of this fact is not an acknowledgement that such men are right, or that they do so armed with or without a rounding understanding of feminism.
These are the patterns I sought to name and should have done so without attacking equality itself. It also matters to separate peace from weakness. A man’s choice of peace over conflict is not evidence of weakness, as some critics have suggested.
My view was, and still is, that some middle-aged men will prefer peace over conflict and choose to meet their parental responsibilities while removing themselves from environments that they feel diminish their peace.
Choosing peace is often the harder, more confident path. In some cases, it will be a quieter form of leadership. A man secure in his own identity does not need to win every exchange to know who he is.
And where a good man does reach the end of what he can carry, the honourable path is to find a way to preserve their peace. They will leave the marriage. In these cases, it is the honest option, rather than pretend a marriage still stands when it doesn’t.
The honourable way through this is through divorce, which we had covered earlier in that session. I did not intend to imply, as some have suggested, that a man should just desert the marriage or leave his partner in limbo.
The reactions to this clip raised several different questions which their own space. Responses ranged from agreement to serious pushback, including the argument that comments like mine reflect a broader failure to think critically rather than simply repeat inherited authority.
I take that challenge seriously enough to want to answer it properly elsewhere. It invites debates on deep critical theoretical analyses, including on questions of complementarianism, ontological equality and functional hierarchy.
Some of these are important and unsettled even among scholars. But these debates belong in a scholarly article, a debate hall at Makerere, a podcast, or a newspaper column like this one.
I do not want to fold them into this apology where they do not belong. People come to church congregations seeking help holding a marriage together. Their quest is for answers on how best to deal with the messy realities in a marriage.
They attribute some of those messy realities to be resulting from perceptions – right or wrong – on equality in marriage. It hardly seems appropriate to respond to these questions with a lecture on theory, even if those lectures are couched in homiletical perfection or exegetical exactitude.
The church needs more honest conversation about these tensions. But these conversations should be conducted with humility, and, in my view, anchored on a proper interpretation of the text of the scripture.
None of this excuses my tone. It is possible to hold a firm view and still express it badly, and I did. I regret the words I used and the manner in which I used them. I do hope that the debate about what it takes to build a lasting happy marriage will continue and not suffer the hinderance of my errors in communication and judgment.
The writer is an advocate of the court.