Channel: Christian Century
Author: Philip Jenkins

Christian attitudes toward polygamy are more controversial today than they have been for many years. As Euro-American churches debate the issue of same-sex unions, African Christians attack Westerners for their moral laxity and for caving in to secular hedonism. In response, some Western liberals retort that Africans themselves need to put their own house in order. Do African churches define marriage as a sacrosanct union between one man and one woman? If so, then why do their leaders tolerate polygamous unions?

Such an argument seems to convict the most visible Christian conservatives of hypocrisy, of failing to pluck the beam from their own collective eye. Yet far from convincing Africans, such an argument illustrates a continuing global gulf on issues of sexual morality.

For many societies across Africa, polygamy is far more than a historic vestige. South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma has at least four wives, raising etiquette concerns over which one should formally take the role of first lady. So entrenched is plural marriage that Christian churches have long had to make compromises. The ancient Ethiopian church tolerated polygamy in some circumstances, despite periodic reform campaigns. After long encounters with Zulu peoples in southern Africa, the 19th-century Anglican bishop J. W. Colenso concluded that polygamy could not be eliminated in the short term. He decided that polygamy reduced promiscuity and that an official clampdown would only drive plural wives and their children from stable home settings.

Few leaders in Africa’s European-dominated churches were as sensitive as Colenso was. Most demanded that Christians end their plural marriages. This policy initially limited the impact of the so-called mission churches, while pushing believers toward the new independent congregations, the African-Initiated Churches or AICs.
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In a conversation 30 years ago with an Anglican in Kenya, I heard stories - not confirmed - of men who used conversion to conservative Christianity as a reason to abandon unwanted wives, only to “backslide” later and acquire new wives. I don’t have any way to know how widespread this practice might be - or even if the stories were at accurate. While I do not approve of polygamy, I think the Churches need to make sure that new converts in polygamous families do not abdicate their responsibilities to their wives.

I am late is responding to this piece that Jody Howard posted, but this has certainly been an issue that the church in many parts of Africa has addressed. I recall many years ago that the retired Archbishop of Kenya, David Gitari, was a leader in finding an appropriate way in which the church could transition from a culture of polygamy to one of monogamy in a manner that cared for all involved. Also, there were guidelines put in place in terms of polygamy and leadership in the church, bearing in mind the biblical injunction that the presbyter by the husband of one wife.

This was an issue at the 1988 Lambeth Conference where the following Resolution was passed:

Resolutions from 1988
Resolution 26

Church and Polygamy

This Conference upholds monogamy as God’s plan, and as the ideal relationship of love between husband and wife; nevertheless recommends that a polygamist who responds to the Gospel and wishes to join the Anglican Church may be baptized and confirmed with his believing wives and children on the following conditions:

(1) that the polygamist shall promise not to marry again as long as any of his wives at the time of his conversion are alive;

(2) that the receiving of such a polygamist has the consent of the local Anglican community;

(3) that such a polygamist shall not be compelled to put away any of his wives, on account of the social deprivation they would suffer;

(4) and recommends that provinces where the Churches face problems of polygamy are encouraged to share information of their pastoral approach to Christians who become polygamists so that the most appropriate way of disciplining and pastoring them can be found, and that the ACC be requested to facilitate the sharing of that information.

To try to parallel same-sex relationships to polygamous relationships is akin to comparing apples and oranges, and is not a sign of hypocrisy at all, as the original article suggests. I suggest that a far stronger case can be made for polygamy than same-sex partnerships from both Scripture and tradition, although fundamental to our understanding of male-female relationships is the fact in Genesis 1-2 that a man and a woman were made complementary to one another.