Digital Secularisation: A Content Analysis of Marriage Discourse in Kenyan Christian Online Spaces

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 scholarship), a comparison set of international Christian teaching pages, and Kenyan legal and public commentary on cohabitation.A deductive coding framework captures the framing of marriage, the locus of decision-making authority, the grounds for permanence and dissolution, premarital norms, gender roles, and the sources of authority invoked.Fourteen items were coded as predominantly covenantal, one as mixed, and seven as predominantly secular, with orientation aligning strongly with source type: covenantal framing concentrated within Christian content, while individualistic and legal-contractual framing dominated Kenyan public commentary.The study contributes a working analytical framework and an empirical account of how marriage is communicated online, and offers the Friends Church a basis for engaging the digital channel through which much secular influence now travels.