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    FAQ 57

    Is Polygamy a Form of Compulsive Hoarding?

    Q. It seems to me all that polygamists can think about is finding more and more wives. Wouldn't you say that the urge to get more wives is a kind of compulsive coarding? Since there are only enough women to go round monogamously, polygamy is a kind of theft from society.

    As time goes on, and as the anti-polygamy camp's case gets thinner and thinner, so some of the arguments in its imagined favour get more and more ridiculous. That polygamy is a kind of compulsive hoarding, though, really takes the biscuit.

    I am sure that somewhere you will find a polygamist who might fit the category of 'compulsice hoarder' just as I'm sure that somewhere there are anti-polygamists who fit the same category ... those who feel a compulsive urge to steal all reason and logic away from intelligent human discourse.

    To begin with, since polygamy is such a minority practice, and always will be, and since there is, at any one time, always a small surplass of women in populations generally, polygamy would not create gender imballances in society or leave thousands of weeping monogamist men without a spouse. There are more than enough to go round for everyone.

    Secondly, the Christian/Messianic polygamists I know are not sitting in corners brooding and plotting how to get more wives, restless until their fiendish urges are satisfieed. But I know a good many monogamists who are looking for new partners and are all to ready to to dump the ones they already have like furniture gone out of fashion. That doesn't mean that monogamy is a compulsive urge to replace existing spouses or partners with the latest model man or woman, does it? I don't know how many internet chat room profiles I have read where men and women declare themslves as 'Married, but looking', who see marriage as no more than a kind of musical chairs (or should I say 'musical beds'?).

    Those who enter Christian/Messianic polygamy do so, in almost all cases, because they are seriously committed to stable family life, not because they want to play games with their libido. That there are exceptions - even deviants - is inevitable, and no doubt you will be able to find at least one example to fit every psychological abberation in the DSM. But then that will be true of every lifestyle, since the raw elements are human beings with all their problems. Exceptions do not prove rules, though.

    The baneful ignorance of most anti-polygamists of the polygamist lifestyle ... and especially those claiming to be Christians/Messianics ... should serve as a warning to people not to prejudge. The tripe that we hear in chat rooms, for example, actually irritates my wives more than it does me, because time and time again their intelligence is insulted. The people who enter polygamy are not, for the most part, weak sinful women storing up wrath for themselves (a favourite quote of the monogamy-only muck-rakers), but women deeply committed to a godly walk in Christ who have found nothing but grace and peace in patriarchal marriage. They are not chained away in some compulsive hoarding polygamyst's Ali Baba's cave but walk in the freedom of love.

    Abysmal ignorance seems to stalk the backstreets of traditional Christendom like a Moor on the Throne of David. Worse, this ignorance is deliberately cultivated to the point of being unmistakably cultic. The impulse that drives the anti-polygamy crusade is not a love of the truth but a naked hatred of it, it's spirit little different from that of the pogrom-mentality of the crusaders or the inquisition.

    If anything, the willfully blind and malevolently-intentioned serve only to convince the doubters to cross the line of indecision and plant their feet on the side of truth. More and more honest believers are saying that whilst they have enormous emotional problems with the concept, that they cannot refute it biblically and can by no means accept what they formerly believed to be true, viz. that polygamy is a sin.

    No doubt other wild and marginal theories of psychological abberation will be hurled at us as the quivver of the enemy's darts get fewer and weaker. We have had Greek scholars retreat before polygamy laymen who have done a little scriptural homework. Polygamy is not something you have to "twist" out of the Scriptures (as our detractors reflexly accuse us of doing) because it is plainly to be seen everywhere. It is a part of the biblical mosaic, so deeply engrained, that any attempt to forcibly remove it results in a complete mutilation of the Gospel.

    Author: SBSK

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    First created on 18 July 2001
    Updated on 30 April 2016

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