Editor’s Note: The genesis of this piece is an article over at our conservative fellow traveler, Red State. Matthew Holloway wrote: The Next Marriage Frontier: Biblical Polygyny, Gen Z Polyamory- America’s Future Legal Battleground. This is Citizen Writer, Patrick Baker’s response.
Ed
Let me start off by saying that a minister who cherry‑picks a few Old Testament narratives to justify taking multiple wives while ignoring Christ’s clear teaching that marriage is one man and one woman in “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4–6) is not being biblical, he is being self‑serving. By discarding passages that call leaders to be “the husband of one wife” and commanding believers to submit to lawful civil authority (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6; Romans 13:1–2), he twists Scripture to bless what remains both sinful and illegal, turning the gospel into a cover for his own appetites rather than a call to holiness and obedience.
Further, Marriage, in Christian ethics and in natural law, is not infinitely elastic; it has a God‑given form: one man and one woman, covenanted for life. Any other “configuration” – whether same‑sex unions, polyamory, or so‑called “biblical polygyny” – steps outside that form and is both morally disordered and, in our system, rightly unlawful.
Genesis presents the pattern not as one option among many, but as the creational norm: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
Jesus does not broaden that; He doubles down on it. When asked about marriage, He goes back to Eden: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female… and the two shall become one flesh… What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
One man. One woman. “The two… one flesh” – not three, not a rotating cast, not a harem. Paul applies the same logic pastorally: “Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.” The grammar is as tight as the ethics: each man, his own wife (singular); each woman, her own husband (singular).
Polygamy, in Scripture, is recorded, regulated, and relentlessly shown to be spiritually and socially destructive. Lamech is the first polygamist and is paired with violence and arrogance. Abraham’s union with Hagar produces jealousy and division rather than a new sacrament. Jacob’s household is a running case study in misery, rivalry, and pain. Solomon’s multiplied wives turn his heart away from the Lord. When God lays down rules for kings, He explicitly forbids “multiplying wives” lest their hearts be led astray.
To rip a handful of descriptive Old Testament episodes out of that context and sell them as a prescriptive model for Christians is not “rediscovering biblical marriage”; it is the very thing Scripture warns about when it speaks of people who “twist” the writings to their own destruction. Jesus calls such religious manipulators a “brood of vipers,” outwardly pious but inwardly predatory. Paul warns of “fierce wolves” who will arise “from among your own selves” to draw disciples after themselves, and of those who “by smooth talk and flattery” deceive the hearts of the naïve. A minister who uses the pulpit to sacralize his desire for multiple sexual partners is not bravely reforming the church; he is dressing lust up in Bible verses and leading the flock into a ditch.
Nor can “biblical polygyny” be rescued by pretending that the state has no say. Christian marriage has always had a public, legal face as well as a private, covenantal heart. Paul commands, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God… Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed.” Peter echoes him: “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution… for this is the will of God.” When the civil law defines marriage as the union of two spouses and criminalizes bigamy and polygamy, the default Christian posture is obedience unless the state orders us to sin. Refusing lawful marriage regulations, or constructing shadow “marriages” to skirt bigamy statutes, is not a higher spirituality; it is rebellion dressed in religious rhetoric.
The GOP’s 19th‑century opposition to both slavery and Mormon polygamy was not accidental; both practices treated human beings – especially women – as property to be owned, traded, or accumulated, and the party’s founding moral vision rightly saw that as incompatible with ordered liberty and Christian‑inflected republicanism.
Once the definition of marriage is detached from male–female complementarity and the “two in one flesh” structure, the slide into any consenting configuration is not a scare tactic; it is a matter of simple logic, as even critics of polygamy admit. That is precisely why Christians cannot affirm same‑sex “marriage,” polyamorous “domestic partnerships,” or “plural covenants” of any kind: they all reject the creational givens Christ Himself ratified. The call in this moment is not to improvise new sexual arrangements in the name of strategy or demographics, but to hold the line where Scripture and sound law already drew it: one man, one woman, one flesh, under God and under just civil authority. Anything else is, in the end, a counterfeit sacrament – and faithful Christians are obligated to say so.
Patrick S. Baker is a U.S. Army veteran and retired federal civil servant who holds degrees in history, political science, philosophy, and education. Since 2013, he has written professionally with his work appearing in Strategy and Tactics, Military History Magazine, Sci Phi Journal, and others. In his downtime he plays golf, works out, travels, and enjoys life with his wife and their pets in Florida.
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