Polgamy

Lifestyle Religion, Spiritualism & Philosophy
1

Disclaimer: I have never seen a polygamous marriage IRL. The ones Ive heard of are usually serial monogamist where you leave one woman/man for another consecutively like Elizabeth Taylor. Even those unions are deeply troubled . So am not an expert on the subject. As Ive stated before in my maternal and paternal homesteads/villages Ive never seen polygamyous families so. Infact many men and women do not remarry after the death of their first wife. I have 2 paternal uncles and one maternal uncle who has never remarried after being bereaved by a wife.

The first is the status of women. Polygyny is associated with higher rates of domestic violence, psychological distress, co-wife conflict, and greater control of women, according to research by the Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott. Not exactly the direction the United States wishes to head for women, right?

Second is child well-being. Children are more likely to flourish, and to become good citizens and workers, if they get high levels of attention, affection and financial support from their fathers in a stable, two-parent family. Children from polygynous families are less likely to get such investments from their fathers, which may be why research suggests that children in polygynous families do worse educationally and psychologically than their peers in monogamous families.

The third harm is to liberal families. The psychologist Joseph Henrich has pointedout that the two-parent family “best ensures that men and women are treated with equal dignity and respect” and is most likely to engender a spirit of mutuality in the family; polygynous families, by contrast, tilt in a heavily patriarchal direction less conducive to liberal virtues like equality and independence.

So, advocates of the laissez faire model of family life need to face this basic truth: their support for polygamous families — should such families gain a major foothold, as they have in some European countries — may ultimately clash with their commitments to women’s rights, child well-being and an egalitarian family ethos.

2

A new study out of the University of British Columbia documents how societies have systematically evolved away from polygamy because of the social problems it causes. The Canadian researchers are really talking about polygyny, which is the term for one man with multiple wives, and which is by far the most common expression of polygamy. Women are usually thought of as the primary victims of polygynous marriages, but as cultural anthropologist Joe Henrich documents, the institution also causes problems for the young, low-status males denied wives by older, wealthy men who have hoarded all the women. And those young men create problems for everybody.

“Monogamous marriage reduces crime,” Henrich and colleagues write, pulling together studies showing that polygynous societies create large numbers of unmarried men, whose presence is correlated with increased rates of rape, theft, murder, and substance abuse. According to Henrich, the problem with unmarried men appears to come primarily from their lack of investment in family life and in children. Young men without futures tend to engage in riskier behaviors because they have less to lose. And, too, they may engage in certain crimes to get wives—stealing to amass enough wealth to attract women, or kidnapping other men’s wives.

As marriage historian Stephanie Coontz has pointed out, polygyny is less about sex than it is about power. Rich old guys with lots of wives win twice: They have more women to bear them babies and do household work, and they also gain an advantage over other men. After all, in such societies a young man in want of a wife cannot simply woo her. There is too much competition, and he probably has too little to offer. So he winds up having to do work for a more powerful, polygynous man, bringing him gifts and tributes, in hopes of someday being rewarded with one of that man’s many daughters. “Often the subordination of women is in fact also a way of controlling men,” says Coontz, who was not involved in the study out of the University of B.C.
That polygyny is bad for women is not necessarily intuitive. As economist Robert H. Frank has pointed out women in polygynist marriages should have more power because they’re in greater demand, and men should wind up changing more diapers. But historically, polygamy has proved to be yet another setup that screws the XX set. Because there are never enough of them to go around, they wind up being married off younger. Brothers and fathers, realizing how valuable their female relations are, tend to control them more. And, as one would expect, polygynous households foster jealousy and conflict among co-wives. Ethnographic surveys of 69 polygamous cultures “reveals no case where co-wife relations could be described as harmonious,” Henrich writes, with what must be a good dose of understatement.

That polygyny is bad for women is not necessarily intuitive. As economist Robert H. Frank has pointed out women in polygynist marriages should have more power because they’re in greater demand, and men should wind up changing more diapers. But historically, polygamy has proved to be yet another setup that screws the XX set. Because there are never enough of them to go around, they wind up being married off younger. Brothers and fathers, realizing how valuable their female relations are, tend to control them more. And, as one would expect, polygynous households foster jealousy and conflict among co-wives. Ethnographic surveys of 69 polygamous cultures “reveals no case where co-wife relations could be described as harmonious,” Henrich writes, with what must be a good dose of understatement.

Children, too, appear to suffer in polygamous cultures. Henrich examines a study comparing 19th-century Mormon households, 45 of them headed by wealthy men, generally with multiple wives, and 45 headed by poorer men, generally with one wife each. What’s surprising is that the children of the poorer men actually fared better, proving more likely to survive to age 15. Granted, this is a small study, but it’s consistent with other studies, including one from Africa showing that the children of monogamous households tend to do better than those from polygynous households in the same communities. Why? Some scholars suspect that polygyny may discourage paternal investment. Men with lots of children and wives are spread too thin, and to make things worse, they’re compiling resources to attract their next wives instead of using it on their existing families

Must polygamy always bring these social ills? Is it possible to be polygamous in a way that’s good for you and everyone else? Maybe. Historically, problems have cropped up when polygamy is widespread in a culture with great disparities in wealth, and a few men hoard all the women. But it has worked in small cultures where there aren’t a lot of differences in wealth and status. Coontz points to past Native American societies that occasionally engaged in what’s known as sororal polygyny, in which a man married to one woman might also marry her sister, perhaps after the sister’s husband died.

It’s possible that even in a large, deeply stratified society like ours, rare instances of polygamy wouldn’t foster gender inequity and roving bands of unhappy single men, provided those instances were spread out among a largely monogamous population. But it’s hard to imagine that, because it isn’t how it has played out here. Instead, American polygamy occurs in close-knit fundamentalist Mormon communities, in which young women often do appear to be subordinated and from which young men—the so-called “lost boys”—are exiled to reduce the competition for wives. Has fundamentalist Mormon culture shaped the expression of polygamy, or has widespread polygamy shaped fundamentalist Mormon culture? It’s hard to separate the two.

And this is exactly Henrich’s point: Polygamy may actually exacerbate inequities in wealth and gender that hurt societies, even if the institution itself appears neutral. Crime and chaos are threatening. Christianity may have brought monogamy to Europe and many other places, but those cultures succeeded because monogamy happened to suit them. In other words, as far as social evolution is concerned, the best form of marriage for a given society isn’t really about what’s moral, but what works.

3

[SIZE=5]Good reasons why polygamy is a bad idea[/SIZE]
Posted by John on December 16th, 2011 | 39 Comments
I’ve been reading the 335-page legal decision upholding Canada’s laws against polygamy, and boy is it juicy.
Before I dive into it, I want readers to understand why I am covering this topic: this evolutionary perspective doesn’t just inform how we eat, how we run, or how we sleep. It informs things as fundamental as how we date, how we marry, and how we organize society. Now back to the case at hand.

Here is the evolutionary portion of the decision, which is well worth reading in full. Two evolutionary psychologists testified in the proceedings, describing typical outcomes that can be expected from polygynous mating arrangements. Recall that polygyny means one male and multiple females (and is vastly, vastly more common in human history than polandry, which means one woman and multiple men).
Dr. Henrich explains the cold mathematics of polygyny:

This illustration reveals the underlying arithmetic that can result in a pool of low-status unmarried men. Imagine a society of 40 adults, 20 males and 20 females ⦠Suppose those 20 males vary from the unemployed high-school drop outs to CEOs, or billionaires ⦠Letâs assume that the twelve men with the highest status marry 12 of the 20 women in monogamous marriages. Then, the top five men (25% of the population) all take a second wife, and the top two (10%) take a third wife. Finally, the top guy takes a fourth wife. This means that of all marriages, 58% are monogamous. Only men in the to 10% of status or wealth married more than two women. The most wives anyone has is four.
The degree of polygynous marriage is not extreme in cross-cultural perspective ⦠but it creates a pool of unmarried men equal to 40% of the male population who are incentivized to take substantial risks so they can eventually participate in the mating and marriage market. This pattern is consistent with what we would expect from an evolutionary approach to humans, and with what is known empirically about male strategies. The evidence outlined below shows that the creation of this pool will likely have a number of outcomes.
(Readers may remember my post on increasing (sexual) inequality.)
Why does this matter? Here are the four sections of his testimony, focusing on polygyny’seffects on men, children, women, and society (admittedly speculative).

One more note before going into this testimony: I don’t know Dr. Henrich, I haven’t read his other work, and I don’t know his reputation. He is in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Here’s his academic homepage. Judge for yourself.

1. Polygyny’s Creation of a Pool of Unmarried Low-Status Men
Marriage civilizes men:
Dr. Henrich begins with an ample body of research that shows marriage makes men much less likely to commit crimes such as murder, robbery and rape. One such study showed that marriage reduced a manâs likelihood of committing a crime by 35%. This study was particularly compelling as it did not simply compare the criminality of married and unmarried men, but used longitudinal data to track boys from a reform school from age 17 to 70. In this study, crime rates not only decreased when those men were married, but increased when they divorced or were widowed. Other studies are consistent in showing the association between monogamous marriage and decreased male criminality.
He cites studies (not listed in the decision) that examine the relationship between crime and 1) the degree of polygyny across countries, 2) the percentage of unmarried males, and 3) sex ratio of males to females in countries like China, as a result of their one-child policy and a desire to have sons and abort / kill daughters.

2. Polygyny’s Effects on Male Parental Investment
Men in polygynous societies aren’t very good fathers:
Another major predicted consequence of widespread polygyny is decreased male parental investment. The underlying theory is that since married men would remain perennially in the marriage market, high-status men could choose to invest their resources in acquiring more wives rather than investing in their children. Similarly, the pool of unmarried men would be forced to invest their resources in attempting to improve their status so as to improve their chances of finding a bride.
As support for this proposition, Dr. Henrich relied on findings from 19th century census data from Mormon polygynous communities and from contemporary studies of African societies.

The study of historical Mormon polygynous communities showed that the children of poorer men (from the bottom 16% of wealth in that community) had higher survival rates than those of the richest men in the community (from the top 2%). The poor men had an average of 6.9 children survive until age 15. For the rich men, despite having more total offspring than the poor men and having over 10 times the wealth, only 5.5 children survived until age 15 on average. Dr. Henrich concludes that this data supports the idea âthat in polygynous systems poor, but married, men will have no choice but to invest in their offspring while rich, high-status men will invest in getting more wivesâ (at 47).
The patterns observed in recent studies of polygamous African societies are similar. The seven studies of this nature cited by Dr. Henrich reported that âchildren of polygynous families are at increased risk of diminished nutritional status, poor health outcomes, and mortalityâ (at 47). One study found that amongst the Dogonof Mali, even though per capita resources were equivalent between monogamous and polygamous households, children under age 10 in polygynous households were 7 to 11 times more likely to die.

3. Polygyny, Age of marriage, the Age Gap, and Gender Equality
Allegedly, when the competition for brides go up, men try to secure brides at younger ages. Male kin learn the value of their female relatives, start treating them like an economic resource, and exert control of women’s reproductive lives.
Competition drives men to use whatever connections, advantages, and alliances they have in order to obtain wives, including striking financial and reciprocal bargains with the fathers of daughters (this is the very common practice of brideprice). Once girls and young women become wives, older husbands (and brothers) will strive to âprotectâ their young wives from other males (to guarantee paternity of any offspring), and in the process dampen womenâs freedoms and exacerbate inequality.

4. More Speculative Predictions
Did monogamy lead to long term economic growth and greater democracy?
Dr. Henrich also predicted additional consequences of polygyny that he acknowledged were more speculative and could not be as thoroughly supported by empirical evidence.
One such prediction is that imposing monogamy may have the effect of increasing per capita GDP. Studies applying a theoretical economic model to the data from highly polygynous states showed that when monogamy is imposed âthe fertility rate goes down, the age gap goes down, saving rates go up, bride prices disappear, and GDP per capita goes way upâ (at 32). This model was based on the assumptions that men and women care about both having children and âconsumingâ, that men are capable of reproducing during much more of their life than women, and that men tend to prefer younger women. In this model, when a ban on polygyny prevents men from investing in obtaining further wives, they instead save and invest in production and consumption.

As noted earlier in the historical review of monogamy and polygamy, Dr. Henrichalso speculates that the spread of monogamy may have helped create the conditions for the emergence of democracy and political equality. Anthropological research demonstrates a strong statistical linkage between democratic institutions and monogamy. The theory is that imposed monogamy may eventually lead to democracy by dissipating the pool of unmarried men that rulers harness in wars of aggression, and by imposing a basic principle of equality among men; the king and the peasant become alike in only being able to have one wife.

Fascinating stuff. There seem to be some good reasons why polgamy is a bad idea. I’m convinced.

Why is this important?

Well, in some circles, marriage is viewed as antiquated or quaint or tainted with religion or staid or defended irrationally. But we would be wise to examine long-standing traditions and see if there might not have been some reason for their continued existence. We are entering a brave new world of sexual dynamics, which will inevitably be a mixed bag of outcomes — some good, some bad. And the most important social dynamic will not be what happens to gay marriage, but what happens to monogamy under the onslaught of modernity.

4

A longtime reader of desiringGod content and a podcast listener who lives in Africa, writes in with an honest question: “Pastor John, I am a married man with four children and recently I met another woman. I love her and have told my wife about her. What I would like to know from you is whether or not it is wrong to have two wives as a Christian?”
Before you answer, Pastor John, of course we should keep in mind a number of African countries do allow polygamous civil marriage, as of course is true in the Middle East, as was true in the Old Testament in the Bible. Closer to home, in the state of Utah, polygamy is technically illegal but not enforced. More broadly, a Gallup survey has been tracking opinions on key moral issues in America since the early 2000s. In 2001, 7% of Americans said polygamy was morally acceptable. Today that number is 16%. Popular American TV shows are spotlighting polygamy and are perhaps pushing this. And the SCOTUS decision opens the door for all types of so-called “marriages” now, as we talked about yesterday.
So what are we to make of polygamy from a Christian perspective?

Let’s cut to the chase. I don’t believe that the will of God today as revealed in the New Testament and, rightly read, the Old Testament is to give permission or promotion to polygamy. So that is the statement. Here are my six biblical reasons.

  1. In the beginning God created man male and female with the purpose that they would marry and the two would become one flesh. So the Lord made woman from the side of man and then Adam says in Genesis 2:23, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” And here’s this absolutely key verse that both Jesus and Paul quote: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). That verse is cited by Jesus and Paul as decisive in the meaning of marriage today. And the meaning focuses especially on this leaving parents and cleaving to one wife and becoming one flesh with her. That one flesh reality is profoundly compromised by polygamy.

  2. When Jesus dealt with divorce and showed how the Pharisees were getting divorces when they shouldn’t — even though it was permitted in the Old Testament — he showed us in his response a way to understand why polygamy was also permitted and yet is now forbidden. Here is what he said: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” And they said, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” And we could imagine them also saying, “Why then did he permit polygamy?” if that were the issue. Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:4–8).
    So the reason Jesus did not any longer permit what had been permitted is because he chalked it up in the Old Testament to tolerance of the expressions of the hardness of the heart. And he is raising the standard. The reason Jesus didn’t address polygamy the same way he addressed divorce was that in his day the Jewish culture had basically already given it up. It just wasn’t an issue. People weren’t coming to him with multiple wives and saying, “Is this okay?” That would have been nice for us today or for certain cultures if he had, but he didn’t. So the point there was there is a way to understand the tolerance of an act in the Old Testament which now is forbidden.

  3. You can see already in Genesis 4 that polygamy was, indeed, owing to the growing of the hardness of the heart after the fall of Adam and Eve. I think that is exactly what Moses wants us to see in the way he describes Lamech, the seventh generation from Adam. Here is what it says in Genesis 4:19: “Lamech took two wives,” — the first time it has ever happened — “Lamech said to his wives: ‘Ada and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-seven fold” (Genesis 4:23–24). You can’t imagine a more high-handed, ugly, mean-spirited, in-your-face, against God statement than that — and it comes right after saying he took two wives, unlike the others. So things are getting so bad, people are now multiplying wives.

  4. Paul’s description of marriage as a picture of Christ and the church is seriously compromised by polygamy. When Paul opens this truth, namely Genesis 2:24, he describes it as a mystery. Now a mystery in Paul’s language was something that was partly revealed in the Old Testament, but now has become clear. And he says, “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two should become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying it refers to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31–32). The most basic and significant meaning of marriage in the New Testament is that a husband and a wife represent one Lord and one church. Since this is now more clearly revealed than ever, it is more important than ever to renounce polygamy and hold fast to the original intention of marriage as one man, one woman — one Lord, one church — as long as they both shall live.

  5. It is required of elders that they be the husband of one wife (1 Timothy 3:2). Now probably that doesn’t refer to polygamy, because in 1 Timothy 5:9 the same phrase is used to describe the widows who need to qualify for the care of the church. They are supposed to be wives of one husband, and there is no evidence that polyandry, multiple husbands, was a problem. And, therefore, “wife of one husband” or “husband of one wife” is probably not directly addressed to the issue of polygamy, but rather, it probably was addressed to be faithful to your spouse and don’t be divorced from you spouse. But here is the point: Regarding polygamy, Paul never would have used those words without qualification if polygamy were being permitted in the church and among the leaders of the church. He just never would have been able to use that language without some qualification.

  6. The Bible does seem to show the likelihood that with more than one wife there is almost inevitable favoritism of the one over the other as in the case of Jacob’s preference for Rachel over Leah. In a sense this is the flip-side warning of saying that the husband and his wife are one flesh. A husband cannot be all that he should be in one-flesh union with his wife if he must divide his affections among several women. That is certainly not the way Christ treats the church. He does not divide his affections among several different wives.
    So for these six reasons and more, I am sure, I would say that polygamy was permitted because of the hardness of our hearts until the coming of Jesus and that, with Jesus, the standards are raised and the mystery of the meaning of marriage is clarified and we should be committed to making plain the beauties of Christ and his church through our covenant faithfulness between one husband, one wife.

5

Why can’t I have a biblically based family with multiple partners? Most of the great men of the Bible – Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon – had many wives. Given your ministry’s strong commitment to the Scriptures, I can’t see why you’re against things like polygamy and polyamory. I consider myself a polyamorous Christian. I love several different women, and there’s no reason we can’t build a strong family together on a foundation of consensual, ethical, and responsible non-monogamy. When did the “change” occur that established marriage as a covenant relationship between one woman and one man?

There never was any change. God intended that marriage should work this way from the very beginning: “Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. And Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:22-24). As these verses show very clearly, monogamy was inherent to God’s plan for humanity from the moment of creation.

You’re correct, of course, to point out that several of the Old Testament patriarchs and kings had a number of wives. What you have failed to notice is that the Bible never really condones this practice. It simply describes it as part of the lifestyle of a typical ancient Middle-eastern chieftain. The Israelites probably picked up the custom of polygamy from their pagan neighbors.
If you study these biblical instances of polygamy in detail, you’ll discover that none of them is portrayed in a positive light. In every case, the practice of keeping multiple wives results in problems for the king or patriarch in question. In some cases those problems are very serious indeed. If you doubt this, take a closer look at the lives of Abraham, Jacob, and David. Solomon is the best known and most extreme example of this principle. In the end, it was his many wives who led him into idolatry and destroyed his faith in the Lord.
Add to this the fact that polygamy had all but disappeared in Israel by the time of Christ. Paul’s instructions in Titus 1 and 1 Timothy 3, specifying that deacons and elders must be “the husband of one wife,” probably don’t have anything to do with polygamy per se. Instead, they grow out of a problem that is far more familiar to most of us as modern Americans: divorce and what has sometimes been called “serial polygamy.” The Romans were notorious for this kind of thing. It seems that their customs and habits had rubbed off on many of the occupied peoples of the Empire. This is part of the background for the question about the resurrection that the Sadducees brought to Jesus in Mark 12:18-27.
But enough of the historical perspective. Let’s get back to the heart of your question. The real issue here is your claim to be a Christian who “loves several different women” and who wants to build a “family” on the basis of “responsible non-monogamy.” That’s an extremely risky proposition as far as we’re concerned. Do you really believe you can make it work? Along with the biblical and theological difficulties, your plan has some serious practical, legal, and logistical flaws. What’s more, it raises big questions about your understanding of the exclusivity of sexual love (which the biblical writers often use as a symbol for the exclusivity of our relationship with God).
In short, we think it might be a good idea for you to sit down and have a serious discussion with someone about the personal motives behind your “polyamorous” designs. With that in mind, we invite you to call and speak with one of our pastoral counselors.

6

Scripture’s teaching about polygamy is a little more complex. God clearly created one man and one woman in the beginning—it was Adam and Eve, not Adam, Eve, Cynthia, Shelley, and May. So the marriage which serves as the prototype for God’s design of human relationships is one man and one woman, for life. Jesus reaffirmed this principle when he said, “In the beginning he created them male and female”. But weren’t godly men like Abraham, Jacob, and David polygamous? Well, yes. But Abraham’s relationship with Hagar was Sarah’s idea, and resulted in a lot of conflict. And God clearly stated the child of promise would come through Sarah. Jacob only wanted to be married to Rachel, but was tricked into marrying Leah, and then they each gave a servant to him as well. So he ended up with four wives, but really only wanted one. David’s polygamy caused a lot of family turmoil, including Amnon’s rape of Tamar, Absalom’s murder of Amnon, and more. And Solomon’s out-of-control polygamy caused him to engage in the worship of his wives’ idols.

In the New Testament era, one requirement for elders is that they be “the husband of one wife”—excluding polygamists. Why? It’s likely that because the church is the bride of Christ, having an elder with more than one wife is not suitable because his polygamy is not a suitable imitation of Christ’s ‘monogamous’ dedication to the Church.

The world is fallen, and sometimes a less than ideal solution is better than the alternative.

So why doesn’t the Bible outright say that polygamy is always sinful in every instance? Because the world is fallen, and sometimes a less than ideal solution is better than the alternative. In the ancient world, a lot of women would be widows, because many men would be killed in war, by sickness and by their hazardous work. Women had their own mortality risks like childbirth, but widows were in a very vulnerable situation. One way to provide for widows is to provide for them to be remarried. But what about when women outnumber men? Polygamy would be one way to mercifully provide for the ‘excess’ women. It’s not ideal, it’s not a reflection of God’s original design, and Christians are called to provide for widows in a way that would make polygamy unnecessary. But that’s how we can say that polygamy is wrong—in the sense that it falls short of God’s created design for human marriage—without a text in Scripture that says polygamy is always wrong and sinful.

7

http://i.imgur.com//pCGt2dx.jpg

8

Teleportation manenos?

9

[ATTACH=full]224522[/ATTACH]

10

Enyewe this is tuff.