Category: Polygamy
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the pattern is remarkably consistent: a charismatic figure announces that traditional Christian morality is oppressive, outdated, or unnatural — and that true freedom, enlightenment, or spiritual power is found through sexual transgression.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.
Protestant pastor says polygamy is biblical: ‘He divinely ordained it’
A protestant pastor is not backing down from his claim that he can have multiple wives.
Rich Tidwell, a pastor in Canton, Missouri, has sparked an online debate about the acceptance of polygamy in Christianity and whether or not it is biblically justifiable.
‘I have two beautiful wives.’
To the expected amount of backlash, Tidwell recently made an announcement on his Instagram page that his second wife is expecting his eighth child.
“I have two beautiful wives,” Tidwell wrote in a long entry. “We’re thrilled for what the Lord has done for our family,” he added, citing Bible passage Luke 18:29.
The pastor wrote about his justifications in an article called “Plural marriage,” labeling the practice as polygyny, which refers to one man being married to multiple women.
“In 2019, I discovered the surprising fact that God not only never prohibited polygyny throughout the entire biblical narrative (as He did with polyandry or homosexuality), He divinely ordained it in several cases,” Tidwell claimed.
He then cited more passages.
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Exodus 21:10 regulates but does not prohibit the practice, Tidwell claimed, when it says, “If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights.”
Tidwell also noted 2 Chronicles 24:2-3, which mentions that “Jehoiada took two wives for him, and he became the father of sons and daughters,” as well as 2 Samuel 12:7-8:
This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: “I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more.”
The pastor continued with more citations and said that if God explicitly gave men more than one wife at any time in history, “Then it was not and is not sin.”
For those who argued that polygyny is not the original design for mankind, Tidwell countered, “Neither is death, nor clothing, nor eating meat.”
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In an article titled “Should polygamist families be welcome at church?” Tidwell shared a letter he wrote to an Anglican church in Missouri requesting to attend its worship services; he was soundly denied.
A priest replied, saying the bishop, clergy, and parish council “unanimously decided against” the family’s participation.
“On multiple levels, polygamy is forbidden in our convictions, interpretation of Scripture, and the Canons and Constitution of the [Anglican Church of North America],” the unknown representative wrote, citing the following: “Canon II.7: Of Christian Marriage, which defines marriage as a lifelong union of one man and one woman.”
“These convictions are non-negotiable,” the letter said. “If you ever repent and become functionally and theologically monogamous, you are welcome to participate.”
Tidwell is a pastor at the nondenominational Ormond Church in Canton, Missouri, according to Protestia.
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