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Digital Secularisation: A Content Analysis of Marriage Discourse in Kenyan Christian Online Spaces
Subject area: Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities · Area of research: Religion
Abstract
Christian marriage; content analysis; digital secularisation; Friends Church; mediatisation of religion
Keywords
Secularisation increasingly operates through digital media rather than through formal institutional argument, yet its expression in African Christian online spaces remains under-examined. Prior survey evidence from the Friends Church in Trans Nzoia County identified media and social-network influence as the single most prominent mechanism challenging marriage principles, but that evidence measured members' perceptions rather than the online discourse itself. This study addresses that gap by examining how marriage is framed in publicly available online content relevant to the Kenyan Christian context, and by assessing the extent to which that framing reflects a secular, individualistic and contractual model as against a covenantal and communally regulated one. The study adopts a descriptive qualitative content analysis design and draws on a corpus of 22 publicly accessible items, comprising a core of Kenyan Christian sources (clergy commentary, denominational statements and Kenyan schol
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How to cite this paper
@article{1723996,
author = {Andrew Mulosi Sirengo},
title = {Digital Secularisation: A Content Analysis of Marriage Discourse in Kenyan Christian Online Spaces},
journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
year = {2026},
volume = {10},
number = {4},
pages = {2152-2159},
issn = {2456-8880},
url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1723996.pdf},
abstract = {Christian marriage; content analysis; digital secularisation; Friends Church; mediatisation of religion},
keywords = {Secularisation increasingly operates through digital media rather than through formal institutional argument, yet its expression in African Christian online spaces remains under-examined. Prior survey evidence from the Friends Church in Trans Nzoia County identified media and social-network influence as the single most prominent mechanism challenging marriage principles, but that evidence measured members' perceptions rather than the online discourse itself. This study addresses that gap by examining how marriage is framed in publicly available online content relevant to the Kenyan Christian context, and by assessing the extent to which that framing reflects a secular, individualistic and contractual model as against a covenantal and communally regulated one. The study adopts a descriptive qualitative content analysis design and draws on a corpus of 22 publicly accessible items, comprising a core of Kenyan Christian sources (clergy commentary, denominational statements and Kenyan schol},
month = {October},
}