The Monogamy Miracle

Marriage & the Founding of Democratic Self-Governance

A study just released out of Australia claims to find that polyamorous and monogamous relationships are equally satisfying. The study is actually a literature review examining 35 research papers. “Across a number of populations, consistent evidence was found to indicate that monogamous and non-monogamous individuals experience equal levels of relationship and sexual satisfaction,” the authors report. They speculate that greater openness and communication, as well as the ability “to have a wide variety of needs met” by various partners, might be factors in the participants’ relationship satisfaction.

I remain skeptical, in part due to research design. Data was self-reported, and the researchers admit, “the majority of participants included in this review were recruited via social networks and online snowball sampling and were therefore not representative of the population in which they were drawn.” They continue, “it has been hypothesized that non-­monogamous participants who self-select into studies are open to sharing their experiences and may therefore be less likely to have had negative experiences.” In other words, the data comes from those likely already highly satisfied with their relationships.

The second source of my skepticism is history. Literally all of human history bears evidence that polyandry, polygyny, and other forms of partner sharing are associated with abuse, subjugation, and violence on a truly massive scale. (And to be clear, polyandry—a woman having multiple husbands—is extremely rare. One study of pre-industrial societies found that only 0.5 percent permitted polyandry.¹ So much for female sexual empowerment.)

Polygamy, Slavery & Violence

The violence characterizing such polygamous societies is part of the argument of Sex and the Citizen, by Conn Carroll. Carroll, currently the commentary editor for the Washington Examiner, was formerly the communications director for Utah Senator Mike Lee. While Carroll was serving in that role, Senator Lee created the Social Capital Project. The Project’s goal was to “investigate the evolving nature, quality, and importance of our associational life—namely our families, communities, workplaces, and religious congregations.”² Carroll had always had a vague awareness that marriage was better for everyone involved, he writes, but he never appreciated the overwhelming depth and conclusiveness of the research until this new assignment.

Furthermore, he reports, the “monogamy isn’t natural” argument is pure bunk. Carroll, writing from a purely secular perspective, traces the development of monogamy all the way back to apes and then observes as it is carried into early hunter-gatherer societies. For early peoples, who literally carried all their worldly possessions from one spot to the next, having more than one spouse simply wasn’t feasible. Only the development of agriculture allowed a man to amass enough wealth to support more than one woman. The real change came with war and slavery. When one people defeated another and then transported the conquered people back home as slaves, they could also kill all the men and keep the women for themselves. And they did.

Carroll then traces the practice of polygamy over several millennia and continents, including early Mesopotamian peoples, the Romans, Asian peoples, the Vikings and other barbarian tribes, and finally to the Americas with the Aztecs and Mayans. The similarity in these stories is startling. Each of these civilizations was ruled by a powerful few, who brutally enslaved other peoples, taking thousands of concubines as a means to solidify their power and grow personal wealth. As a stunning illustration, consider Genghis Khan, who produced so many children with thousands of women that roughly eight percent of modern Central Asian men can trace their lineage directly back to him.³

Math tells us that if there are roughly as many men as women in the world, and if the richest and most powerful men were taking several wives, then at the bottom you’re going to find a lot of young men unable to get a wife. Notably, skeletal evidence from Viking longships shows that most of these marauding Norsemen were between the ages of 18 and 25. A recent DNA analysis of modern Icelanders shows that while 80 percent of the men who founded Iceland were Scandinavian, over half the women were Celtic. In other words, hordes of those Vikings had stolen wives from other lands and then sailed on to Iceland.⁴

Sexual servitude, rape, murder, and other forms of torture and bloodshed were all parts of these stories.

The Christian Difference

So what changed? How did we transition from powerful and bloody oligarchies founded on nonconsensual relationships, including slavery, to the modern standard of monogamous households and representative government?

One word: Christianity.

Carroll finds what many others have found before him—including perhaps most famously Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity. The Church was truly radical in its protection of women, the poor, the sick, and others less fortunate. And these profound individual protections, he argues, laid the foundation for democratically governed societies. For the first time in human history, a man was expected to marry one wife, remain faithful to her, love her even, and take care of her and her children. He was to be fair to his household, including slaves (and eventually, Christianity’s emphasis on true human equality led to the abolition of slavery). He was to treat others as he himself wanted to be treated, lay down his life for a friend, and sacrifice his own desires for the good of his family, his church, and his community.

The modern (Marxist) line goes something like this: “Marriage is an institution created by men and the church to subjugate woman and take her earning potential for himself.” But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Before Christianity, polygamy was the norm, and it held no protections for women. There was almost no concept of a man’s faithfulness to his wife; unless he slept with another man’s wife, he would face no consequences for adultery. Sleeping with slaves, concubines, prostitutes—all were licit. For a woman, however, unfaithfulness to her husband in any form was mostly punishable by death. Her children, likewise, lived or died by her husband’s decree.

But the church ended all of that, and in so doing, created a world in which “the least of these” were protected. This was the foundation upon which stable, monogamous households began to blossom and bear fruit (i.e., children), while wealthy polygamous households failed to thrive in spite of all of the sex that seemed to be happening. This was the foundation for the guilds, and then some types of limited government, and finally, full-fledged representative government. You cannot have democracy without monogamy, Carroll argues.

So what do we make of research which seems to find “polyamorous” households are doing just fine? We can recognize, first, that the self-selected and self-reported nature of this research leaves much wanting. We can also recognize that, human sexuality and human jealousy being what they are, these arrangements are unlikely to represent more than a small blip in modern history. And we can appreciate the record of history. Far from being oppressive, chauvinist, or elitist, the biblical laws are the best tools we have for channeling the power of human sexuality into proper, fruitful, harmonious ends.

Notes
1. Rosemary L. Hopcroft, “The Problem With Polyamory: A Social Scientific View,” Institute for Family Studies (Feb. 7, 2024).
2. Conn Carroll, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy (2024).
3. Ibid., 61.
4. Ibid., 59.