Polygamy And Polyandry

It is far from abnormal for actual Biblical morality to be controversial to both secularists and evangelical Christians.  What the Bible prescribes, allows, or condemns regarding things such as capital punishment, corporal punishment, slavery, divorce, and monarchy is often greatly misunderstood by Christians and non-Christians alike.  Another such issue is polyamory.

Monogamy is the state of only having one marriage partner at a time.  Polyamory, deviating from the monogamous norm expected at large in the Western world, is the state of having multiple spouses or dating partners at one time.  Polygamy occurs when a man has more than one wife at once, and polyandry occurs when a woman has more than one husband at once.  A married person having a romantic or sexual attraction to someone else is not the same as polyamory, as someone might not act on the attraction at all, or might not act on it in a polyamorous way.  Irrespective of the Biblical morality of polygamy or polyandry, such attractions are objectively nonsinful by Biblical standards.

The Bible does condemn mass polygamy/polyandry in the case of a monarch (Deuteronomy 17:17), and it does prohibit men from marrying a woman and her sister simultaneously (Leviticus 18:18), which by logical extension forbids women from marrying a man and his brother simultaneously.  But it never condemns having multiple spouses.  The very fact that Leviticus 18:18 condemns marrying two siblings at once, and not polygamy or polyandry altogether, shows that the Bible clearly does permit polygamy and polyandry because they are not sinful.  In fact, a husband and wife could both have multiple other spouses all at the same time!  Their plurality of spouses could even be inter-married with each other.  However, a married person having extramarital sex is condemned by the Bible (for instance, see Deuteronomy 22:22).  Sleeping with another person's spouse, outside of the very unusual, specific scenario I described two sentences ago, is still inherently wrong by Biblical standards.

The idea that humanity as a whole is "wired" for either monogamy or polyamory is asinine.  One person can have a vastly different personality than another, so it is fallacious to say anything beyond affirming that some people's personalities naturally lead them to monogamous desires and some people's personalities lead them to polyamorous desires (not that everyone even desires to have a romantic, sexual, or marital relationship of any kind).  Even so, it is true that some tendencies towards monogamy in contemporary America are very likely the result of nothing but a widespread view of polyamory as taboo or immoral.

Sometimes the taboo has a religious nature, and sometimes not--though the Bible itself does not condemn polyamory as long as it occurs in a marital context and does not involve a married person engaging in extramarital sex (or marrying two siblings at once, as mentioned above).  The Bible not only never condemns this, but says to not add to its commands (Deuteronomy 4:2) and features examples of divinely-authorized polygamy (Exodus 21:9-11).  For God to even permit polygamy or polyandry must by necessity mean that they are not sinful, since a morally perfect deity cannot provide unjust or illicit legislation (James 1:13).  To add to the commands of the Bible is to violate a demand of great clarity in the book of Deuteronomy, and the New Testament is clear when it teaches that moral knowledge can only come from divine revelation (1 John 3:4, Romans 7:7).  Logic, unaided by Scripture, proves on its own that morality only exists if there is a deity with a moral nature and that humans cannot have moral knowledge apart from revelation from such a deity [1].

Individual personality/preference and cultural conditioning are what determine if someone gravitates towards monogamy or polyamory, or whether or not they are even interested in dating or marriage to begin with.  There is no divine or biological source of a universal tendency towards one or the other.  Of course, it does not follow from someone either disliking or preferring polyamory that polyamory is right or wrong.  The moral dimension to polyamory is a totally separate issue than whether or not people gravitate towards one or the other.

In the case of the secular world, stigmas against any form of polyamory rest on nothing but social consensus, subjective preferences, and arbitrary feelings.  In the case of evangelicals, the opposition to polygamy and polyandry comes from either stupidity via the acceptance of baseless secular standards or from lack of personal education about the Bible.  In both cases the objections are illogical.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-nature-of-conscience.html