Polyamory, Monogamy, and the Christian's Conscience

[DISCLAIMER: This is a fucking long post.  It is however about sex, so that’s alright.]

A good friend of mine has been busted, or outed, or something.

He and his wife, both good looking, talented, young, intelligent people, have enjoyed a polyamorous relationship with another couple for some time, and a picture of the four of them, all looking glowingly happy, surfaced on the Internet.  His family, conservative Christians all, rather wanted an explanation, and my poor friend (these things are hard) has had to arrange his defense.

[A brief and unfortunately necessary clarification: polyamory is not to be confused with “swinging,” or an “open marriage.”  Polyamory would refer to a relationship with a couple with whom he and his wife have an intimate relationship that happens to include unspecified sexual dimensions.]

In my friend’s talks with his family, the relevant question came from (I think) his brother, who asked why he doesn’t just leave the Christian faith in order to do what he wants.   I think that question troubles my friend most, and I’d like to save my comments on that for the end of this post.  All of us who fall short of perfect love (and I’ll confess I’m worse than my friend in this regard) will have some anxiety about where that leaves us vis-a-vis our higher ideals.

First, though, let’s do the sexy stuff. 

My friend’s defense of his relationships finds its root in the work of Marshall Rosenberg, whose ideas are worth studying.  Briefly, Rosenberg tells the story of civilization as a movement away from empathetic interrelationship towards one of control, violence, coercion, and power.   The forms of our lives, Rosenberg argues, took on certain absolute dichotomies about “right” and “wrong” or “legal” and “illegal” as artificial ways of codifying a very simple law of empathetic love: Love your neighbor as yourself. 

Such dichotomies tend to serve powerful elites, of course: if I get to tell you what’s right and wrong and can enforce it, I control you.

It’s possible for people to live in intimate, empathetic relationships with each other, and Christianity has to agree with this so far.  Indeed, I think that my friend’s family is bound to understand that Christianity in a lot of ways sets the tone for his polyamorous relationship here by insisting that the community of the Holy Spirit is one of deep intimacy, agape-love (which, contrary to some misconceptions, is not intrinsically free of sensuality or self-satisfaction).   Early Christianity had, some competent historians have speculated, a quality of the erotic in the background that was later rubbed out.

Nor is this a minor point: it’s deeply troubling to me that Christians do (and will in my friend’s case) pronounce judgment out of precisely the sort of power-interest that Rosenberg deplores.  To those who do judge his relationship(s), I would ask, “Whom do you think he’s hurting?  What do you even know about it?”

So to sum up, my friend minimizes the should / shouldn’t that so much of our ethics about marriage and sex depend upon; those “shoulds and shouldn’ts” are supposed to defend people against un-love, and in this relationship apparently the four participants are capable of doing that without the assistance of people telling them what they should and shouldn’t do.  For all I (or you) know, these people are committed to wiping each others’ bottoms when their health gives out, and committed to loving when they lose their good looks.  It’s always hard to tell in romantic relationships.  But you and I can’t know that.

And to the degree that all the participants in his relationships are really loving, empathetic, kind, good people, I have no complaints to make: I could wish such qualities existed in more monogamous relationships, and I suspect that a great deal of judgment will come from those who are secretly jealous that such intimacy might be possible.  A few people will howl about how it affects others, but I confess I’m at a loss to see how it affects anybody that much, except those who are anxious to tell others how to live.

But there is, I think, a slight but significant gap in my friend’s appropriation of Rosenberg’s ideas.  It has to do with the nature of sexual love and desire in Christianity. 

My friend’s ethical foundation is love, which is awesome, and of course resonates with the Christian idea that there is one law, and that to love.  But unfortunately, one can only get away with that if one has an adequate definition of love; and it’s no more than superficially “Christian” if one frankly and unapologetically decides to appropriate Christianity without respect to its textual and historical demands…. in other words, one has to define “love” more or less as Christianity does.  If one cannot, that does place one in the world of homemade religious faith and outside of anything that could be called “Christianity” with any historical roots.

Christian conceptions of monogamy are usually rooted in a very interesting heremeneutical idea that’s sometimes called the “Edenic vision.”  Briefly, the idea is that Jesus’ pronouncements on divorce (Mark 10:1-9; Matthew 19:1-12) justify a particularly narrow reading of Genesis 1-3.  In that reading, monogamous heterosexual fidelity is judged to be the intention of God for humanity.   (“Male and female he created them” runs the insistent phrase.)   So while just about every other verse in the New Testament can be placed in some sort of cultural context, the unshakable idea of the Edenic ideal is that every man has his mate, and she’s a female, and that circle is closed.

Note the advantages of this system for modern Christians: they can defend monogamy and heterosexuality as normative on theological grounds while leaving just about every other New Testament principle and rule (ironically including divorce and remarriage, the real target of Jesus’ pronouncements, as well as Christianity’s conspicuous commitment to non-violence) to be negotiable.  (One of my close relatives even insists that Paul’s prohibition against women having authority over men, which is conspicuously drawn from the Eden story (1 Corinthians 11:3-5), is culturally conditioned and therefore negotiable.

In spite of the irritating advantages that the Edenic ideal offers to self-interested Christians, I think that those who study Jesus’ life and teachings will be hard-pressed to evade the strange role it plays in the canon.  In Jesus’ rabbinic method (his handling of scripture would appal a good hermeneutics professor), his teachings on marriage and divorce are strangely firm.  Where everywhere else Jesus slackens the iron grip of the Torah (while simultaneously proclaiming that not a stroke will pass away from it), here he outfundamentalizes the fundamentalist Pharisees, regarding Genesis 1-3 as the spike in the ground to which he tethers his authoritative but wildly revisionist readings of the Law.  Thus Mark 10:1-12:

¹ And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them.

 ² And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” ³ He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” ⁴ They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” ⁵ And Jesus said to them,“Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. ⁶ But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,⁸ and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. ⁹ What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

 ¹⁰ And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. ¹¹ And he said to them,“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, ¹² and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

It’s difficult to imagine this Jesus recognizing any form of polyamory or free love or swinging or anything.

But the Edenic vision presents both “sides” in my friend’s debate with a victory.  On the one hand, it establishes monogamous heterosexual marriage as Jesus’ ideal, the norm for his kingdom.  But on the other, Jesus strives to collapse and crush the complacent belief that marriage serves a purpose intrinsically related to the Kingdom.  He sees tremendous eschatological pressure on marriage (that is, the important thing about the Kingdom of God is not the everyday pressures of desire and economics and reproduction that drive people into marriage).  As every committed lecher knows, there are no really good reasons to commit to lifelong monogamous fidelity that won’t change with the weather.

Thus Mark 12:24-25 and Matthew 19:10-12:

²⁴ Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? ²⁵ For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. 

¹⁰ The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” ¹¹ But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. ¹² For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

Paul follows up with this zinger taken from the startling chapter, 1 Corinthians 7:1-39:

^{8 To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. 9But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.32} I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. ³³ But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, ³⁴ and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband. ³⁵ I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord.

He adds that this is because “the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31).

Paul and Jesus then are suspicious of marriage because it is not an institution that reflects the enormity of the Kingdom as they see it.  Indeed, if one wants to read Paul by the letter, here, the only real reason to marry is because one cannot control one’s sexual urges.  Marriage is a sign of weakness, intended by God to supplement human weaknesses that I think Jesus and Paul saw as obsolete under the arrival of the Kingdom.

My friend’s defense of his lifestyle focuses on the power-dynamics involved in establishing normative monogamy, and I think there’s a valid point there.  But when it comes to Christian understandings about marriage, both polyamory and a romantic view of monogamy rather miss the point of scripture.

To return to the sexy stuff, therefore: in a weird way, if my friend wants to hold to a very basic Christian vision, the revolutionary (?) urge towards polyamory identifies the practitioner as having extraordinary needs: Christian scripture holds (and licentious experience tends to bear out) that marriage is a concession to weakness in the first place, and meeting the needs of that weakness even in marriage tends to produce complications that actually distract one from the real business of the Kingdom of God; consequently, the failure of marriage to meet that need by itself indicates a rather extraordinary depth of need.  

“Ah,” a polyamorous apologist will say, “quite true.  So we have ways of more deeply meeting those needs.”

But what should trouble one is that “meeting one’s needs” in marriage is, as Paul argues, a complicating thing.  If one marriage distracts, then several commitments distract proportionally.  It’s as if one dying of thirst were handed a pitcher of water and drank a mouthful of it in order to better drink a pitcher of rum.

“Well and good,” my friend might say.  “Rum is good,” and I’d agree so far as it goes.  But that answer identifies polyamory with power, with privilege, and, I’m tempted to add, with indolence.  Indeed, as tender and loving as such relationships might be, in the end that’s just the sentiment of romantic love, which as we all know (or should know) is a way of covering up the fact that we’re happy to have our needs met.

Polyamory is the privilege of power, money, beauty, youth.  Not everybody can afford it.  But for those who can, it exercises its will to pleasure defiantly, archly, much as American Christianity smugly tucks its desire for comfort and personal affluence under a veneer of well-sounding theological nonsense: what it really means, when you strip away the rhetoric, is “I can do what I want.”  And anybody who thinks that they have the strength to do what they want and still be good for other people hasn’t seen much of life.

I’m emphatically not saying that polyamorous relationships are not comforting, good, and even strong in love in a lot of cases.  Nor am I arguing for monogamy, which I think has its roots in some complicated biological and economic realities that shouldn’t always have the final word.

I’m saying that polyamory can never be consonant with a fully Christian vision of the world, and that this is not because Christianity reveres monogamy but because it reveres God, who is jealous and who (if Jesus and Paul are right) in the end will have nobody sharing your soul.

That’s the bad news for my friend.

And I feel bad for him: he’s smart enough to know that the desire to love people with his whole heart and whole body is pretty demanding.  There are rewards to it; but there’s a trade-off deep down, because relationships are tumultuous, changing things.   I think therefore that he has confused loving a person or people with love itself, contrary to Christian hopes, which are in this regard far higher than he has shot for.  It’s no accident that so many of the great saints of Christianity were celibate, yet capable of great intimacy: they meant to serve love itself, not merely the (it must be said) relatively easy, romantic, form of love that renders its pleasures, comforts, and supports to us.  His relationships might mature in that direction.  They might not.  I reckon though that Paul and Jesus are right, and that the more complex the love-negotiation, the less chance there is of deepening it towards love itself and not towards those whose love resembles our own.

But the good news, I think, is that his Christianity is the result of experiences that he’s had with both love and grace.  I doubt seriously that polyamory is the worst of offenses against it, as it demands a high level of trust and love and other virtues that Christianity holds up.  I hope his family will remember that.  I hope he’ll remember that some “rights” and “wrongs” are descriptions of what really doesn’t accord well with love.

Most of all I hope we all figure out what he is clearly questing bravely for: the shape of love in a damned difficult world.  I reckon he stands as good a chance as many, and probably more than me.

Update on Monday, February 6, 2012 at 3:50PM by Otter

Part II: Polyamory and the Christian Community.

Comments

[Victoria]

The Christian in me isn't quite sure what to make of this post just yet.

The anthropologist in me is firing off a thousand questions about how this would or would not work in a mostly monogamous society.

[Otter]

I like that reply, Victoria...

My friend is a pretty astute anthropologist himself. I'd love to see the two of you debate the implications.