Kirk Franklin is a proud Christian man, but he doesn’t agree with every belief held by his fellow followers of Christ.
The 54-year-old gospel artist recently called out Western Christianity for “weaponizing” marriage against single people.
The Fort Worth, TX, producer joined Cam Newton on his Funky Friday show and listed three things that have been weaponized in Western Christianity: marriage, giving, and sexuality.
The Billboard chart topper held nothing back when expanding on the marriage point.
“I believe that marriage has been weaponised in Western Christianity,” he said.
“It’s very much that ‘You living in sin, you need to get married,’ without realizing that marriage doesn’t fix sin.”
He referenced his own marriage, saying, “[Tammy Collins] and I have had to walk through deep waters of a lot of the bad beginnings of religious dogma.
"That’s why it is very important for people to understand the fullness of faith and to not allow the culture of Christianity to dictate what God wants for them.”
Kirk Franklin continued, giving the example of a single woman attending a family reunion. “Don’t be no 30-35 year old single Black woman and go to the family reunion,” he said.
“All the older women are gonna do nothing but they gonna look at you and wonder and question you and challenge you. ‘Why you not married?'”
Newton added in some more hypothetical questions: “‘Where your man at? Where your kids at?'” Franklin continued his rant by discussing how marriage, or lack thereof, is used as a broader assessment of one’s overall being.
“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,” he said. “Do you understand how dysfunctional these messages are?”
He hit his biggest point when he combined that perspective with its relevance to carrying out God’s work.
“How we superspiritualise these messages: ‘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.'”
Kirk Franklin revealed that he had friends who had been told that if they were to be in ministry, then they could not be single.
“‘We’re not going to let you work with the youth ministry if you single, you can’t do this if you single,'” he recounted.
“And so what people do, they quickly get married thinking that they’re fulfilling God’s will for their lives, but they are fulfilling man’s dogma. You can be single and be used by God. You can be single and have a purpose. Being married is not a prerequisite for God’s hand in your life. It is not, but we’ve weaponized it.”
The “Looking For You” artist closed his moving rant by also bringing up how those same people who rush to get married get crucified when their marriages fail and they get divorced.
Franklin has been married to Tammy Collins since 1996. They each brought one child into the marriage and conceived two children together.
Source: Vibe.com