Morality: The Case for Polygamy

Should Christianity permit polygamy? Under certain conditions, yes, argues a Roman Catholic missionary in Africa. In the latest issue of Concilium, an international theological review, Massachusetts-born Father Eugene Hillman contends that Christianity’s rejection of polygamy in countries where the practice is traditional is socially disruptive and morally questionable.

A missionary for 16 years in Tanzania, Father Hillman points out that in much of the underdeveloped world there is a shortage of men willing and able to take on families. Polygamy thus provides the only hope of marriage for many women. “In such a socioeconomic context,” writes Hillman, “the Christian insistence on an immediate change from [polygamy] to monogamy might very well cause much more harm than good. It is not at all certain that the average Christian missionary has either the mandate or the competence to change social structures that are not in them selves evil but are in fact serving constructive purposes.”

Father Hillman finds no difficulty in the Biblical injunction (Genesis 2:24): “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh.” Polygamy was common among the ancient Jews, he points out, and in the marriage laws of Moses, the word wife “is used regularly with reference to marriage cases which may be either polygamous or monogamous.” Nor does polygamy violate the concept of “one flesh.” Just as “the several children of one mother may be regarded as ‘one flesh’ with her by reason of their unity in generation and maternal love,” he writes, “in a socially valid polygamous marriage a man may be conjugally united with each of his wives respectively, since each does become with him ‘one flesh.’ ”

In practice, a growing number of African missionaries are willing to accept converts who they suspect are secretly practicing polygamy. Hillman concedes that the church should not encourage polygamy. But he also argues that the church should accept as converts tribesmen who have already contracted valid polygamous marriages. To do otherwise, says Hillman, means telling a man, “in the name of the Christian ideal of marriage and family life, that he must divorce the mother of his own children.”

His recommendation: “If polygamy is the established custom of a place, take the lot into the church—kids and all.”