Decolonising “Ìgbéyàwó”: Christian Marriage, Neocolonialism, and Ritual Political Economy among Evangelical Yoruba Christians

Abstract

This paper critically examines the ìgbéyàwó (Yoruba wedding) rites among evangelical Christians in south-western Nigeria, arguing that the prevalent three-tier wedding model constitutes a ‘captured hybridity’ in which indigenous marital logics are subordinated within a colonial framework of Eurocentric biblical hermeneutics and ecclesial authority. The core problem is the structural inadequacy of existing inculturation approaches: they graft Yoruba symbols onto a fundamentally colonial liturgical frame without dismantling its epistemological foundations, thereby perpetuating the epistemic marginalisation of Yoruba cosmological logics while imposing costly, sacralised wedding ceremonies as prerequisites for religious legitimacy and communal belonging. This produces compounded economic
stratification and spiritual exclusion among Yoruba evangelical parishioners. Deploying Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi’s decolonial ecclesiology (‘revealing’ and ‘reweaving’) alongside Ernest Ezeogu’s Afrocentric exegesis, the paper deconstructs selected biblical marriage texts weaponised to silence indigenous epistemologies and reconstructs a ‘third space’ ìgbéyàwó grounded in Yoruba principles of ídí meji (complementary duality), orí (personal destiny), and ebi (extended family). This third space offers not a return to a pristine pre-colonial past but a critically reconstituted liturgical alternative that reunites the legal, communal, and sacred dimensions of Yoruba Christian marriage fractured by coloniality.