Southern Seminary recently put out a brief video by Peter Gentry on polygamy in the Bible. He makes some good points, and his argument is somewhat reminiscent of an article Matthew Schultz wrote on polygamy several years ago. You can also read my thread here that addresses polygamy in the Old and New Testaments and in patristic Christianity.
For a discussion of some of the reasons why it's important to be informed about polygamy in our culture, see this article by Andrew Dugan of Gallup. He not only notes that polygamy has become significantly more accepted by Americans in recent years, but also explains that their change in opinion seems to have been influenced by television (and surely other sources of a similar nature). He notes that acceptance of polygamy is especially high among the non-religious, being accepted by almost a third of those who don't affiliate themselves with any religion.
That article by Dugan was written in 2017. Here's a listing of Gallup's results on moral issues year-by-year. Polygamy went up to 19% acceptance in 2018 and is at 18% this year.
Polygamy won't be a progressive issue soon because it is a patriarchal system. If you follow the people leaving Mormonism for liberal politics, they champion the litany of LBGTQ stuff but denounce polygamy for its demeaning of women. I think pederasty will be the next frontier.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't have to be a progressive issue in order to be an issue. Polygamy has been getting significantly more popular in recent years, as the Gallup material I linked discusses. It's especially popular among non-religious people, who tend to be more liberal than conservative. For one thing, liberals tend to be more emotional than conservatives (which partly explains their prominence in the media, art, and other such fields), and sex is one of the areas where they're more emotional and subjective. Polyamory is appealing to many of them. And it's closely connected to bisexuality (the B in LGBTQ), a point I've been making for years. If a bisexual wants to be romantically involved with an individual of each gender, or if a heterosexual or homosexual claims that his orientation is to be romantically involved with more than one person at a time, on what basis is a liberal going to oppose it? I agree that they're interested in furthering pederasty, and I don't know what the order of popularizing these things will be. The patriarchal associations of polygamy will make popularizing it somewhat harder than it would be otherwise, but the popularizing process is already underway. And we're already seeing some advocates of polygamy using arguments and language similar to what was used to popularize homosexuality and same-sex marriage.
DeleteWe shouldn't forget that there are also polygamous marriages where it's one woman and multiple men. Then there are marriages where it's multiple men and multiple women. I'm not sure if that's also a form of polygamy.
DeleteThen there are people who marry themselves, or their pets, or inanimate objects. In some cultures there's the marriage to the dead. Which can lead to infestation of evil spirits because it's a form of necromancy. See Posthumous marriage which is practiced in France for example, and Chinese ghost marriages.
I'd be interested in knowing if Steve thinks polygamy was/is sin under the Old Covenant and [or only] the New Covenant. Or whether it wasn't/isn't sin in either Covenants.