Category: Cult
America’s old cultic trick: Sex, salvation, and the return of polygamy
American religious history is littered with cult leaders who promised a blessed life through deviant sexuality. From the earliest frontier movements to the modern era, the pattern is remarkably consistent: a charismatic figure announces that traditional Christian morality is oppressive, outdated, or unnatural — and that true freedom, enlightenment, or spiritual power is found through sexual transgression.
Today’s polygamy apologists are not offering anything new. Like cult leaders before them, they package sexual license as enlightenment and rebellion as honesty.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s can be understood as a much larger cultural wave of the same desire. “Any way you want it, that’s the way you need it,” became a slogan of liberation, echoing the older Luciferian maxim, “Do what thou wilt.” The point was not merely freedom from social constraints, but freedom from moral law itself.
The LGBTQ+ movement followed this trajectory and intensified it by questioning the very idea of nature altogether. Gender was no longer something discovered or received but something invented by the autonomous mind. Reality itself became plastic, malleable to inner desire. If the mind declares it, then it must be so.
That impulse represents the more openly “liberal” side of the sexual revolution. But today we are witnessing what some might call a more “conservative” version gaining traction: a renewed interest in polyamory and polygamy. This, too, bears all the classic marks of rejecting Christian marriage — only now it does so in a more crafty way, cloaking itself in appeals to nature, history, and even Scripture. This camouflage makes it especially dangerous.
The first move modern polygamy advocates is an appeal to what comes naturally. Men, we are told, are not designed to be with just one woman for life. What is the proof? Male desire. Men experience lust for multiple women; therefore, monogamy must be unnatural.
This argument collapses on closer inspection. It amounts to saying that because men experience disordered desire, they should not be expected to govern it. Lust becomes its own justification. By this logic, no appetite — sexual or otherwise — should ever be restrained. Gluttony, rage, greed, and violence would all be “natural” simply because they occur.
Others dress this same claim in evolutionary language. Men, we are told, are merely advanced apes whose biological purpose is to spread their seed as widely as possible. This argument is simply an abdication of moral reasoning. If evolutionary impulse defines moral obligation, then fidelity, sacrifice, and self-control become irrational. Civilization itself becomes a mistake.
Proponents of polygamy then pivot to the Bible. Didn’t Jacob have two wives? Didn’t David have many? And Solomon more than all of them?
Therefore — what, exactly?
These are not normative examples for the Christian. Scripture never presents polygamy as an ideal. At best, it records God’s tolerance of sinful arrangements within a fallen world, never His approval. In fact, the biblical record consistently highlights the misery, injustice, and disorder produced by polygamous households. The entire account of Jacob having children with four women is an account of their contest and jealousy.
Most strikingly, the very man most often invoked by modern apologists — Solomon — is the author of Scripture’s greatest celebration of monogamous love: the Song of Solomon. The man with many wives wrote the Bible’s most eloquent testimony to exclusive devotion between one man and one woman. That irony should give pause.
From the beginning, marriage was instituted as a one-flesh union. One man. One woman. One covenant. When adultery occurs,it is not the creation of a new marriage but the violation of an existing one. Bringing in a third, fourth, or fifth person breaks the union between one man and one woman as the man moves on to the next woman. This is why God uses adultery as His primary image for Israel’s sin. The prophets do not praise Israel’s “polyamory” with other gods; they condemn it as betrayal.
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Photo by Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images
In the New Testament, Jesus explicitly reaffirms this creational order. Appealing not to cultural norms but to Genesis itself, He teaches that from the beginning God made them male and female and that the two — not three, not many — become one flesh. Jesus was perfectly aware that pagans often practiced polygamy.
Paul makes this even more explicit in 1 Timothy 3. As the gospel advances into pagan cultures where polygamy existed, Paul does not relax the standard for Christian leadership. An elder must be the husband of one wife. Polygamist marriages of people who converted to Christianity were not dissolved, but they were not held up as ideal in the place of Christian marriage, which points us to Christ’s monogamous love for his church. A man should have known better, even as a pagan, and thus Christian leadership was preserved for those who understood what marriage pointed toward from the beginning.
From beginning to end, the biblical story is monogamous. The Old Testament image of God and Israel gives way to the New Testament image of Christ and His bride, the church. History itself culminates not in a harem, but in a wedding: the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Christ has a bride — not brides.
Today’s polygamy apologists are not offering anything new. Like cult leaders before them, they package sexual license as enlightenment and rebellion as honesty. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they aim not at hardened skeptics but at the unguarded and naïve.
Christians must be better equipped. Know the Scriptures. Understand the arguments. Do not be deceived by appeals to desire dressed up as nature or sin disguised as tradition. The sexual revolution — whether “progressive” or “conservative” — always ends the same way: with broken people, broken families, and broken faith.
Truth, by contrast, calls us not to indulge our lusts, but to master them. The Christian marriage points us to Christ’s monogamous love for his church.
Chosen at 13 to be the pastor’s ‘maiden’: Sex-cult survivor shares her horrifying story
When Lindsay Tornambe was just 11 years old, her parents and four siblings moved out to remote Minnesota to join a religious compound called River Road Fellowship. The group was led by a man named Victor Barnard, who claimed that God had ordained him to gather and shepherd the fragmented people of the Way International — a deeply heretical “Christian” sect — after its founder Victor Paul Wierwille died in 1985.
At first, things were almost idyllic. Lindsay spent her days playing with the other kids, tending to animals, and skating on the frozen lake. But it wasn’t long before Barnard’s sinister intentions shattered the pastoral facade he had created, condemning Lindsay and other victims to years-long servitude in a sex cult.
On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie Beth Stuckey interviews Lindsay about her decade as a “maiden” in a cult whose leader is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence.
After secretly grooming Lindsay, Victor, who had taken off his wedding ring, claiming he was “married to the church” like Christ, reportedly preached a sermon from the passage in Exodus where God commands the Israelites to “give” Him their firstborns, meaning redemption through small payments or temple service.
As many cult leaders do, however, Victor reportedly twisted the passage to mean that parents must literally give their firstborn daughters over to him.
“He read off a list of names. Mine was on there,” says Lindsay.
This all happened during the early 2000s, amid lingering influences from the 1999 “Summer of Love” — a notorious period in the Way International when leadership allegedly encouraged widespread sexual promiscuity among members, including married people, as a supposed expression of “God’s love.”
Victor, however, didn’t frame the girls’ role as sexual. They were merely being asked to serve Christ and the church. Lindsay, after seeing her friends eagerly volunteer, consented to being a “maiden,” having no idea what awaited her.
She, along with nine other young girls, was then removed from her family home and taken to live in Victor’s private living compound. The maidens were assigned different duties, like gardening, cooking, cleaning, and assisting Victor with various tasks, many of which were intimate.
“Things in the beginning were kind of okay,” says Lindsay, noting that she initially believed her time as a maiden was temporary.
“I was under the impression that I would serve there and live at the camp … and then I would go home and be homeschooled,” she says.
But a shepherdess who helped oversee the young girls told 13-year-old Lindsay, who had expressed excitement about returning home to her family, that her role as a maiden was a lifetime commitment. “You’re not going home. This is your home now,” she said.
“It was shortly after that that I was raped by Victor for the first time,” says Lindsay, adding that he justified his actions by claiming that “Jesus Christ had Mary Magdalene and the apostle Paul had Phoebe” as sexual partners.
He also claimed that “even though he would be having sex with me, I could remain a virgin spiritually,” she adds.
This abuse, which was often accompanied by physical and emotional abuse, lasted for years, she says.
Eventually, fear and manipulation brainwashed Lindsay into believing she genuinely loved her captor. “One thing that Victor would tell us is that the more we dedicated ourselves to him in this life and to God, the better place in heaven we would have, and so I think the thought of not being in heaven with the maidens and with Victor really scared me,” she says.
But Lindsay’s sympathetic view of Victor was a ticking time bomb.
In 2008, after most of the girls had been moved to another remote location in Washington state, one of the maidens was deported to Brazil after her student visa expired. Victor sent other maidens to live for temporary periods in Brazil alongside her.
When it was Lindsay’s turn to go, she was exposed to the outside world for the first time since her family had joined the commune. The taste of freedom was intoxicating.
When she returned to Washington, the maidens had started their own cleaning business. As a housemaid, Lindsay got another taste of life outside the cult, as she studied family pictures on walls and heard secular music drifting from radios.
This view of the outside world had already begun to sour Lindsay’s feelings for Victor, but then news came that he, still legally married to his wife, who lived next door to him, had been sleeping with married women in the community.
In Minnesota, it is against the law for pastors to have sexual relations with their congregants, so one of the women in the commune reported Victor to the police and even shared some information about his “maidens,” forcing him to flee. The infidelity broke up the original commune in Minnesota, sending Lindsay’s family back to their home state.
Lindsay, deeply disturbed by Victor’s philandering but still unaware of her own abuse, decided she was done being a maiden. Even though fellow maidens and Victor pleaded with her to stay — calling her Judas and accusing her of not loving God — Lindsay’s mind was made up.
She called her parents, who were still committed to the Way International and Victor, and they agreed to allow her to come home.
“They gave me $500 and bought me a train ticket, and I took Amtrak all the way from Washington state to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia,” says Lindsay.
Re-entering secular society at 23 proved difficult and confusing for Lindsay. “At that point, I thought the only way to make a man happy was to sleep with him, and so I slept around a lot. I lived in a lot of sin,” she says.
“I just was really interested in exploring and living life and making friends and getting away from my parents, because they were still supporting Victor.”
While her outside life looked fun and exciting, Lindsay’s internal world grew darker over the years, as she reckoned with her past life in the cult.
“I just kept thinking over and over again: If God is a God of love that I read and believed for so long, why would he let this happen to me? If heaven is so great, why don’t I kill myself now and not live in this internal pain that I feel?” she admits.
To quell the pain, Lindsay experimented with a gamut of “remedies” — self-love programs, crystals, witchcraft, even self-harm.
“I always came up feeling so empty, so unsatisfied,” she says.
But despite Lindsay’s doubt and sin, God was working in ways she couldn’t see. Single motherhood, unexpected friendships, and perfect timing wove together and allowed Lindsay to distinguish the real God from the phony one who had been used to warp and manipulate her as a child.
To hear the beautiful story of Lindsay’s redemption, including where her family is today and the trial that landed Victor behind bars, watch the full interview above.
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