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Welcome to a new era of baseball's great spectacle. The T Mobile Home Run Derby, live on Netflix. The biggest sluggers in baseball put their talents to the test on All Star Weekend. Raw power meets star power, big swagger meets bigger slams. And you don't swing to make contact. You swing to make history. Watch the T Mobile Home Run Derby live on Netflix this Monday, July 13th at 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific. One God had 16,000 wives. One prophet had 90. And some of them were even just 12 years old. But these are not the outliers. According to one of the most cited data sets in anthropology, roughly 85% of human societies across all of history have permitted a man to take more than one wife. Meaning the thing you probably assume is just the default is historically the outlier. Why was this practice seemingly God ordained for so many centuries? And who was actually benefiting from this? Well, today we're tracing polygamy across different religions and different cultures and looking at the reasons someone decided that one wife wasn't enough. But there's a second story hiding underneath all of this. Because for most of human history, a woman without a husband had no way to survive at all. And for the first time ever, that's no longer true. So why did so many religions and cultures use polygamy? Was it about power or wealth or status or just sexual gratification in the bedroom? Or was it ordained by God, required for family units and for salvation? Well, today we're going to deep dive on how different religions interact with polygamy and being married to multiple women, why they do it, where it comes from, and why some religions forbid it completely. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week, we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from every religion from all time, forever. Yes, that is what I do in the tent. I want to know what everyone believes. And I do it for a few reasons. One, I think it is the best way to connect with my fellow human beings. Like, I. I meet people, especially before I started doing the show, I would meet someone and I would be like, what? Where are you from? And they'd be like, oh, I'm from this place, and I'm Hindu, Muslim, sick or Mormon or, you know, whatever. And I'd be like, I don't even know the basis of what you actually believe and how you orient the most important thing in your life. And it made me feel dumb and I wanted to not do that anymore. So I was like, you know what? I'm gonna be on the hunt to figure out what everyone believes. And I think it's a really great way, even if someone's not practicing that religion, to connect and understand them. Because by understanding how they orient themselves around the divine, what sort of rule structure or religious, you know, like kind of moral structure, they're handed over. It really dictates so much of how they view the world. And so if you want to be a better human being or even just understand the world around you by understanding religion, I think it is fundamental to that practice. Furthermore, I also just think it's like super interesting and I take all the good stuff that I hear and apply it to my own life. So it's like, oh, this little fasting practice is very nice. Oh, the way these people see oneness is very interesting. Oh, the gospel is the most interesting piece of, like, literary text ever produced. That is great. And I just, just apply them all into my own life and it's wonderful. Now, I grew up Catholic. That's kind of my religious tradition. So today we're going to talk about a bunch of different religions. So if there's anything I get wrong, I just want to give a big shout out. Up top. My bad. All right. I really go through a lot of time to research these scripts as well as a bunch of other researchers. Sophia helped me with this one today. And if there's anything that's missed, please don't hesitate to drop a comment and let me know. I am not a religious scholar. I'm just a stand up comedian with a WI Fi connection. Now, with that out of the way, we are talking about one of the most interesting practices in all of religious history and of course, cultural history, and that's polygamy. And the guy to my right here knows a ton about that. That's Christos Papadopoulos. How are you, Christos? I'm actually reverting now. Wait, hold on. You're reverting to what? To whatever polygamy religion there is. You're getting in on it. Yeah. Well, by the end of this episode, you will know which religions permit polygamy, and you can choose from the buffet of divinity yourself. It's a good thing I'm here. Yeah. Now, I think the best place to start in trying to tackle this topic is we're going back to one of the oldest religions and that's Judaism. And basically what the Old Testament, AKA the Torah or the Torah and other ancient Jewish texts have all basically said about what it is to have multiple wives. Now, the thing is, the Bible never actually condemns polygamy. It's very interesting. And the, the Torah kind of by extension of that, it, it all starts with a guy. You probably heard of this guy Abraham, okay? He's the founder of the Abrahamic faith that is Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Now, Abraham had a wife named Sarah. And if you belong to any of these religions, you'll probably know that Sarah couldn't conceive a child. So at Sarah's own suggestion, Abraham took her maid servant Hagar as a second wife. But Sarah did end up having a son, and they named him Isaac. And then Isaac and his wife Rebecca had a son and they name Jacob. Now, Jacob ended up marrying two sisters, Leah and Rachel, plus he fathered children with both of their handmaids as well, Winding up basically with four women and 12 sons and the entire foundation of the 12 tribes of Israel. Start from there. And then there is King Solomon. He had like 700 wives, 300 concubines. Now, in the story of Solomon, the Bible frames his problem as him becoming spiritually corrupted as a result of polygamy. Like a lot of his wives, wives came from a bunch of other places where they worshiped other gods. So the Hebrew God, Solomon's God, Yahweh, it wasn't cool with that. So again, it's not that polygamy itself was ever explicitly deemed as the sin. It was idolatry and the worship of all these other gods that were brought in by these concubines and other wives that brought their sort of practices into Solomon's temple. Now, there were explicit limits to polygamy in the Old Testament, just not the things that you would expect. So the book of Deuteronomy bars the king specifically from multiplying wives. Now this is more of a check on, like royal excess, not a rule for ordinary men. In the Talmud, in a tractate called Yevamot, later debates a practical cap of four wives based on what a husband could reasonably support. So for roughly 2,000 years, plural marriage was simply legal in Judaism. But then around the year 1000, one rabbi changed that, but only for some Jews, not all of them. So this guy, Rabbeinu Gershom, the leading rabbinic authority of Ashkenazi Jews in Germany, in France, convened a synod that issued two decrees at once. The first one says, no more new wives. It's kind of, kind of a bar, you know, like, yo, no new wives. Like, this is it. This, this is your click right Here. And then two, no more divorcing a wife without her consent, which I mean pretty, pretty progressive for the time. Like you can't just get rid of your wife because you disagree with her. She has to also consent. And I believe in Jewish law they call it the get. And that's what they call it, you have to get the get. Kind of ironic in English, but in traditional like Hebrew or Yiddish, it's sounds better. Anyway, those two rules were designed to work together. You couldn't discard an old wife by divorce and you couldn't displace her by marrying a new one. So if you broke either rule, the penalty was some type of excommunication. Now why did Rebeinu Gershom actually do this? Well, the reason scholars usually theorize about is basically keeping domestic peace and of course protecting women from abandonment and then preventing financial hardships for the women that, you know, get divorced. But Ashkenazi Jews at that time were a minority living under a Christian rule where the church had basically banned any type of, you know, like plural marriage or polygamy outright. So historians argue that a lot of the social pressure to assimilate and to kind of sweep away polygamy was also doing a lot of the work as much as theology for, you know, doing the right thing by, you know, women and, you know, upholding what marriage means. But again, this is one plausible reading amongst many. And the real reason is actually unresolved to this day. But then that makes me wonder what happened to the women who were already married to a man with more than one wife when this ban comes into play. Well, the truth is no source survives telling us the answer to that question. We don't know where these women went or whether the community supported them or if they just their marriages were dissolved. And that's an entire population of women that just kind of like goes away from history. It's difficult to know. And the ban only ever applied to Ashkenazi Jews in the first place. So for example, like Sephardic Jews and Mizrahi communities were never bound by it. Their authoritative legal code kept on permitting additional wives as long as a husband could support them. And as a result, polygamy persisted in those communities from pre expulsion Iberia to Yemen well into the 20th century. Yemen was actually the last major holdout and the practice largely ended only when those communities started immigrating to Israel in 1949. Now modern Israel has actually banned polygamy outright in 1977, but enforcement has never really been even like it's still widely tolerated amongst many Bedouin Jewish communities in the Negev. And in some rare cases, some Orthodox rabbis still issue what they call a heter mea rabbanim. And it literally is just a permission from 100 rabbis across three countries. And, you know, it's a century old mechanism that Loki kind of sidesteps the law. So that's sort of the Jewish perspective. And there are two completely different outcomes depending on which side of the ban you happen to be born on in, you know, medieval Judaism. So real quick, before we get to Islam, because there is a gap that we should address. What did the religion between all of them say about having more than one wife? Right, Like Christianity, what is Christianity's position? Because Christianity inherits the same exact Old Testament as Judaism, you know, the same Abraham, the same Jacob Solomon and his 700 wives. That's very important to the Christian tradition. So logically, shouldn't Christians have just kind of kept the same thing that the Jews did? Well, the answer is that they didn't. The New Testament weirdly never actually comes out and bans polygamy outright either. But what it does say is that church leaders, bishops, deacons, all those people need to be in the original Greek. And Christos, I'm going to need your help with this pronunciation. Basically they give what they call a miasgune conundra. What do you got? Christos mias ynekos andra. That's so nice when you say it. Now, do you know what it means? Literally? It means one woman man. And that's pretty significant because that phrase shows up twice in first Timothy and in the book of Titus. And scholars have argued about what that actually means for literally 2,000 years. Does it mean you can't have a person with multiple wives that are in leadership? Does it mean like you can't be divorced? Meaning like you can't have a wife, divorce her, and then marry another woman because that's now you're a two woman man and not a one woman man. Does it mean something about transgenders? Who knows? Okay. There's still no consensus officially on what that means, but there is some helpful context. At the time when Paul was actually writing this, polygamy was already pretty rare, even amongst Jews. And the wider Roman world had actually made monogamy the only legal form of marriage. So it's possible Paul wasn't even weighing in on like a live debate happening at the time. He might just be describing what was already assumed. So the guy who tackled it head on was actually Augustine, a church father from a Few centuries later. And his answer is actually pretty clever. We actually did a whole episode on St. Augustine of Hippo, so you should check that out. Now, he argued that the patriarch's polygamy was fine for the specific moment, because early humanity needed to grow and it needed to grow really quickly. And multiple wives meant more children, which meant populating the earth faster. So Solomon and his 700 wives, that's fine because it was so way back in the day. We needed the people and that was the best way to do it. But that moment is gone. So what was permitted then isn't permitted now because the circumstances change, not because it was ever actually wrong, because the environment that they were living in, the context is now different, which for over a thousand years basically settled it. But then the Reformation cracked it all back open. So by 1539, this German prince, this guy Philip of Hesse, miserable in his marriage, pissed, and according to Martin Luther himself, constantly in a state of adultery. He wrote to Martin Luther and asked, hey, can I just take a second wife instead of divorcing if you don't know anything? Obviously divorce within the Catholic Church is extremely difficult. And really within any Christian tradition, divorce is like pretty frowned upon specifically in this time. And so this guy's looking for a little loophole. Hey, let me just take another wife and I don't have to divorce anyone. Bada bang, we're good. I'll just be Solomon. And what's crazy is that Luther actually said yes, privately, mind you, in a letter. And he argued scripture never explicitly forbade polygamy, and even pointed straight to the patriarchs and said bigamy was actually the lesser evil compared to divorce. And he said it had to be done on one condition. Keep it a secret. Now, surprise didn't stay a secret. Philip's own sister leaked it out. And the scandal exploded across Protestant Europe. And then when Luther got cornered, he told Philip, hey, just deny it. Say it never happened. Now, around that exact same moment, a much darker version of the same idea was playing out 200 miles away. So in 1534, radical Anabaptists took over the German city of Munster and they declared it a new Jerusalem. Their self proclaimed leader, a former tailor named Jan von Leyden, instituted polygamy, partly because women in the besieged city outnumbered men three to one. So he himself personally took 16 wives as his obligation to helping the Anabaptist community of Munster. And basically any man who argued against the policy was kicked out or executed. Now, the whole thing ended in a brutal siege and van Leyden was tortured to death. In the town square. His body was then hung in an iron cage from the church tower for decades. It's a whole story. Maybe we do an episode on that, but it's safe to say Christianity's actual relationship with polygamy isn't like the clean no that you might think it is. It's centuries of theologians kind of circling the same question and occasionally getting maybe tripped up by the answer. Now, today, the Catholic Church's official teaching is pretty unambiguous. The catechism calls polygamy a grave offense against the dignity of marriage. Although it's worth mentioning that in parts of East Africa, some Catholics, including actual like. Like catechists, keep more than one wife anyway, and the church mostly just doesn't really talk about it. But we'll get more to the churches and religions in Africa a little bit later. Now, here's the question that's haunted a lot of Christians with more than one spouse throughout Christian history, and it comes straight from Jesus himself. So, in the book of Matthew, a group asked Jesus about a woman who was married to seven brothers, one after the other, each of whom died. And their question is basically like in the Resurrection, basically like, when we go to heaven, whose wife does she. Who. Who is she married to? And Jesus answer is so interesting. He says none of them. He says, and I quote, in the Resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage. Basically saying marriage is just an earthly institution, doesn't carry over into the afterlife, which sounds like it would also settle some things, right? But of course it doesn't. A version of Christianity that develops later would deal with it, but we'll get to that in just a second. For now, let's talk about Judaism's neighbor to the east that is Islam. Fellows, this episode is sponsored by Blue Chew. Look, life is about prepar. 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He has to be able to treat them all fairly and justly and care for each of them. Now, most scholars read this as, like, regulated permission tied to an actual welfare crisis that was happening at the time, not just like a blanket endorsement to go get as many wives as you can, up until 4. Now, the equal treatment thing, what exactly does that mean? That means equal time, equal housing, equal financial provision, and it is mandatory in Islamic law across basically every major school of Islamic theology, Sunni and Shia both. Now, again, something so interesting that's found in the Quran is a lot of the honesty. So one thing that the text actually admits is that you can't equalize your heart. You can't legislate who a man loves more. But then there's a later passage in the same chapter that basically says men will never actually pull off perfect equality between all of their wives if they have four wives, no matter how hard they try. So when you put these two versions side by side, you kind of get an interesting kind of argument. If justice is the condition for permission to have multiple wives, and the Quran itself admits true justice between these wives is sort of difficult to balance, then is it possible that condition can ever be met by anyone? Well, what's interesting is that a reformist Egyptian scholar named Muhammad Abdu actually made this case back in the early 1900s. And that argument became the legal foundation for Tunisia actually banning polygamy outright. It's actually really interesting. In 1956, under President Habib Bourguiba, they became the first Muslim majority nation to ban the practice of marrying multiple women. And get this, they didn't even lean on any type of secularism to get there or any type of, like, you know, women's rights or anything like that. They use the Quran's own logic to, you know, basically make the case. And it's really interesting. And who actually enforces equal treatment in the meantime? Right, like, for men who do have multiple wives? Well, in most of the Muslim world is that no one officially can. There's no government office out there that's checking if wife number one is, you know, spending as much money as wife number two or anything like that. But actually, a handful of countries do require court approval for multiple wives, like, at the very least, a paper review of a husband's finances before he can marry again. So, for example, Morocco's 2004 Mudawana reform is probably the clearest example of this, alongside Indonesia, another, you know, massive Muslim nation. But most countries don't require anything at all. And the legal map of what that looks like today is a bit patchworked. So Islamic countries where polygamy is completely banned as a criminal offense are as follows. You have Turkey, Tunisia, Albania, Kosovo, and of course, the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. So countries where it's heavily restricted, like, you know, requires, like, court approval and a notice to the existing wife. That's going to be Morocco, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan. And then there are, of course, places where it's effectively unrestricted, and that would be Saudi Arabia, uae, Qatar, Kuwait, and the northern states of Nigeria, where there are Sharia, Muslim frameworks. Now, Turkey had a ban in 1926, but that one was purely secular. It was actually Ataturk, just importing Swiss civil law with no religious argument involved at all. But Tunisia and Morocco's reforms were driven by that sort of genuine mix of, like, women's rights advocacy and some type of national, you know, secular modernization. So, all told, it's not one clean story. I think a lot of people will look at, you know, Islam be like, yeah, you can have up to four wives, but it's actually a lot more nuanced and detailed and even changes from one Muslim nation to another. You know, it's a bunch of different countries arriving at different levels of restriction from completely different directions. And, I mean, for what it's worth, I have many Muslim friends and I don't know Any of them that have multiple wives or even want multiple wives for. I, like, I, I, I don't know for a fact. Again, I'm not Muslim, but my understanding is that even though it's technically permitted, I don't know even like anyone's parents that were like, yeah, like, I think it's kind of like in the way that, like, I don't know, like the lds, like Mormons kind of do it. It's like, yeah, technically, but, like, no one really does. I think it's kind of like that. That's my assumption. But if you're Muslim, I would love to know. I mean, write a comment. Do you know anyone with multiple wives? Anyway, that's my understanding of Islam. And so we got kind of two slash, three religions down with very different relationships of how many wives is too many wives. And the next one actually doesn't need a federal law or court paperwork or anything like that to make a case. It all actually points back to its own gods. And we're talking about Hinduism. Now, right away, this religion has a totally different relationship with this topic. And the whole thing has just a completely different structure. So in Hindu scripture, Krishna has eight principal wives, and they're called the Ashtabarya collectively. And each one has her own story. And we get them from a text called the Bhagavata Purana. Now, it's not actually the number that is the most interesting part of this. Krishna reportedly marries 16,100 additional women. And the story behind that is isn't what you would guess either. These were women who had been held captive by a demon king. Yes, this demon king named Nara Kasura. And now Krishna kills him, frees all the women, and then they ask to stay with him rather than go home. So what does Krishna do? He says, I'll take you all. And he marries him. And then the next text will frame it as an act of protection. And why is this? Well, you can probably assume because in the social context, a freed captive would have faced a complete rejection from their community, specifically a woman, and they would just be ruined. And so by marrying them according to the traditional reading of the text, he's restoring their standing in the society. And it's not out of desire or some type of, like, perverse sexual attachment, but out of a respect for the captives that he freed. And then, of course, you have these Hindu story of King Dashurata, and he has three queens. And their rivalry, as is told in the Ramayana, basically drives the entire plot of the story and sits as one of the most infamous stories around Hindu polygamy. Now, the classical Hindu legal texts like the Dharma Shastra actually basically codify who got to have multiple wives and how, like in real life, not like in like a Hindu epic, but like very practically. So, for example, Brahmin men who were at the basically the top of the Hindu sort of Hindu Indian caste system, were permitted to have up to four wives. And then the Kushatriya royalty could take multiple wives as well, specifically for building dynastic alliances. There was even a clear legal distinction between the first ritually primary wife and everyone that came after that. And this was more or less law. It was structured and strategic and organized by caste. And all of that ended on paper, at least. In 1955, the Hindu marriage act in India banned polygamy outright, basically for everyone. Hindus, Buddhist, Jains, 6. And a polygamous marriage became void from the moment that it was formed. And that offense could even land you in prison for up to seven years. But marriage reform in India was not going to be that easy. You see, Muslim men in India are still governed by a separate law from 1937 that still permits up to four wives. So Nevru's government pushed through this sweeping reform of Hindu marriage specifically back in the 1950s, but deliberately left out Muslim personal law. And he basically did this just to avoid any type of sectarian or religious tension. Now, critics call that an unequal legal framework and said that it's not fair and it's just basically the law itself is biased. But defenders call it a respect for religious autonomy. Now, India's Supreme Court has actually called for a uniform civil code, basically laws that apply to everyone regardless of your religion, more than once trying to close this gap, because the inequality of the law has created a different problem. Hindu men have actually started converting to Islam so that they could take a second wife and then they would convert back to Hinduism. An Indian court documents this exact pattern for decades. And then in 1995, the Supreme Court shut it down in a case called Sarla Mudgal. They ruled that a conversion made solely to enable polygamy doesn't make the second marriage valid at all, and that it's actually a crime under the Indian penal system. And this is an ancient history. I mean, this is going on up until now. Like February 2024, Uttarakhand became the first Indian state to pass a complete uniform civil code, basically banning polygamy for every single person regardless of your religion. Muslim, Christian, Hindu, whatever. And then in November 2025, Assam passed its own prohibition of Polygamy. And it enforces up to seven years in prison, 10 if you conceal a prior marriage and a bar from public office and even a compensation fund for women that were affected. And this is actually a massive undertaking. I mean, the cultural, the political implications of this change are massive. And it only happened within, I mean, like, the last couple years of, you know, us talking right now. And literally last month, like, not even, like, 40 days ago. Maharashtra, one of India's largest states, has a retired judge drafting its own version of this law. The state government is calling itself 100% positive on passing it. So the question that this section opened with is like, who gets to keep their religious exemption? And that's not really settled at this time. It's still being actively renegotiated on a state by state basis throughout all of India. And this actually takes us from the courtrooms of Mumbai to village councils across an entire continent. In Africa, where the calculus around multiple wives was never really about love at all. So last religion. Okay. And this one is kind of different because it's not really faith so much as it is the collision between faith and culture. In many traditional African communities, there's a practice that they call lobola. This is their word for bride, wealth. And it is a payment made from a husband's family to a wife's family as a part of the marriage itself. And the more wives that a man took over his lifetime, the more lobolas that he had to pay out, which meant something very significant. It showed the entire community that he had the means to support a large household. More wives elevated a family status. More wives also meant more children, which meant more hands for agricultural labor. It meant a real, tangible, long term investment and wealth in a subsistence economy. And it wasn't just about, like, showing off the wealth of the husband either. It was actually built in a way that would support and protect the women in the arrangement. So get this. It's very interesting. In a world where an unmarried woman had basically no legal standing at all, plural marriage gave them a protection, So a place in the household. And if the first wife can't conceive, the second one can step up and provide an heir without the first one actually, like, losing a position or her home or dying like, you know, King Henry VIII style widows, women whose parents died, women who hadn't found a husband. The they found a basically a system that could help them through plural marriage. So for chiefs and kings, marriage was a little different. Obviously, it's about diplomacy. Multiple wives from multiple clans meant multiple different alliances sealed not with like a treaty or a document, but literally with blood, with a family. Basically, it was closer to a Social Security system and a diplomatic instrument than anything that you would think about when considering modern romance at all. So the practice remains legal in roughly 31 African countries to this day. And the highest rates run from Senegal to Tanzania. In fact, over a third of married adults in Burkina Faso and Mali are actually a part of pluralistic marriages. And Then in the 18th and 19th century, European Christian missionaries showed up. Now, of course, in the Christian worldview, they required total monogamy. In practice, that meant telling men in existing plural marriages to put away every wife except the first one. So the wives that got put away lost everything. They lost legal status and economic support and shared marital property, often even custody of their own children, kids who were now considered illegitimate or bastard under both colonial law and the emerging ecclesiastical church law. So the women overwhelmingly bore the consequences of this change in the culture. It didn't fall on the men because they got to keep their wives. By now, all these women were left with children and unmarried. And a lot of these Western missionaries didn't foresee this as a problem. They just wanted to stop what they saw was the main offense. And they didn't really offer an alternative infrastructure to support the women who were being cast out. The women didn't even really have a say in this. So researcher Isabelle Pirie later documented cases in Malawi where you have wives basically discarded under this new Dutch Reformed mission policy, who are now reduced to prostitution or even just begging on the street to survive. And the global Anglican Leadership at the 1888 Lambeth Conference formally resolved that polygamists couldn't be baptized but should be kept under instruction, which was really just a sanctioned second class status within the church. But not everybody has continued to go along with this. In fact, entire denominations have split away from the church specifically to preserve what the Western missionaries tried to stamp out. So for example, African independent churches like the Celestial Church of Christ, the Shembe Nazareth Baptist Church, the Harris Church and a bunch of others now explicitly permit polygamous membership and polygamous leadership. And even, you know, today they represent tens of millions of African Christians and they're actually among the fastest growing Christian movement on the whole continent. Now, of course, this fight over this is not over, not even at the Vatican. So In March of 2026, a group called SECAM, the continental body of Catholic bishops across Africa, they released the first ever continent level pastoral report addressing polygamy. Then this happened just in 2026. They weighed options like letting polygamous men into the community indefinitely without full baptism? Or do we baptize only a man's first wife while he himself stays outside the sacraments? Like, how does it work? And the report didn't actually resolve anything. They just laid out potential options and called for more discernment. And then, just weeks later, Pope Leo visited Africa and reignited the entire debate publicly. So African monarchs and tribal leaders were calling for the church to fully integrate all of these polygamous families across the continent, while African clergy continued to hold the traditional Christian doctrine. I mean, it's still ongoing as we speak, and it's still unsettled, but the numbers are shifting. So, like Cameroon, for example, polygamy has dropped rapidly from 38% in 1991 to 22% in 2018. Nigeria went from 41% down to 30% over kind of the same time span. And why is that? I mean, many people credit, you know, urbanization, Western education, Western media, economic changes, doing what the missionaries tried but couldn't do. So five religions down, five totally different timelines, and five different reasons why polygamy is or isn't allowed. Judaism in the Middle East, Islam stretching from North Africa to Southeast Asia, Hinduism across the Indian subcontinent, and now Africa itself. Every single one of these religions somewhere else on the globe. Which brings us to the one place that we haven't even really addressed properly, and that is the religion that was created right here and America. Let's dig into the lore of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or as you might know them, the Mormons. Now, Joseph Smith's first documented plural marriage was to a young woman named Fanny Alger. And this was dated around 1835, 1836. And this marriage was technically a secret. It went completely undocumented in any public way. And at the time, he was still legally and exclusively married to his first wife, Emma. But by the summer of 1843, he had contracted plural marriages with somewhere between 30 and 40 different women. Now, here's a detail that the LDS's own historical essays now openly acknowledge. A number of these were what they would call polyandra ceilings, meaning he was married to women who were already married to other men. Now, what does this mean? That was a whole new layer to polygamy and marriage, really, that other major religions hadn't really dealt with before. And then finally, In July of 1843, Joseph Smith dictated Doctrine and Covenants. It's an LDS document that is really central in describing all of their theology. And in section 132, a document presented plural marriage as a divine, new, and everlasting covenant, citing Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon, all the great church, you know, patriarchs and ancestors of Christianity as a precedent. And it wasn't actually canonized into their scripture until decades later. And this part is very interesting. Even despite what the dictate in section 132 in Doctrines and Covenants actually says, Smith publicly denied practicing polygamy for his entire life. The doctrine wasn't even announced to the public until 1852, eight years after he died. So what was this whole polyandrous sealing thing even about? Was it meant to support female agency, to help women by letting women have multiple husbands so, you know, they could be with, you know, Joseph Smith? Like, how did it work? Was it coercion? Was it that he was greedy? Like, what is it? And historians don't really agree on what the answer is. Some women entered these marriages for economic security and some for a real spiritual conviction. But many women were told point blank that this was a commandment from God, which makes, you know, how you deal with consent and all of this completely really complicated in this. And some woman remained opposed to the practice entirely. Now, Emma Smith, for example, Joseph Smith's own first wife, opposed it for her entire life. Now, the federal government was not interested in whatever religious nuance the LDS Church were trying to work out on this topic. So in 1862, the US officially made polygamy a federal crime. The Supreme Court upheld that law in 1879, ruling that religious belief is constitutionally protected, but religious practice isn't necessarily. And that was the caveat. And then a law passed in 1882 which basically stripped any polygamists of the right to vote, to sit in juries, or to hold any type of office. And then in 1887, Congress went even further. They legally dissolved the LDS Church as a corporation. They seized its assets, and almost as an afterthought, stripped the vote from every woman in Utah. I mean, yeah, women who had actually been able to vote in Utah since 1870. And the idea here was that the multiple women in a marriage would just vote in favor of whatever their husband wanted, which the government was effectively trying to overrule. So women in Utah, whether they were LDs or not, they actually lost the ability to vote as collateral damage in all of this in a war against their husband's marriages, which is pretty crazy. And then in 1890, the LDS Church President, Wilford Woodruff, issued the manifesto formally ending new plural marriages. A second Sterner manifesto following in 1904, because the first one didn't really do anything. The church's own history calls the end gradual. So at the end of the day, Section 132, allowing polygamy in Mormonism is still technically scripture. Like, you know, today, the LDS Church doesn't promote polygamy anymore, but it's never actually removed the revelation, commanding it from its own canon. So the ending of polygamy for LDS was gradual. Well, the truth is, the manifesto didn't end the story for everyone. A small breakaway group argued the LDS Church had basically become heretical, and they went against canon by complying with the government and that they had abandoned the word of God that was supposed to never be revoked. That was revealed by Joseph Smith. And their claim to authority rests on something called Lauren Woolley, the Loren Woolley claim. And the Lauren Woolley claim is basically this. Loren Woolley was a Mormon in the early 20th century, and he promoted this story of an alleged private revelation that was made to church president John Taylor from God himself in 1886. And this private revelation supposedly authorized plural marriage to continue underground, regardless of who was in charge of the government. So whatever government you were in, whatever they basically said, you can go underground. And the claim and the details of the revelation do not appear in any contemporary record. But the mainstream LDS Church continues to reject it entirely. But it is to this day, the entire theological foundation that this breakaway group stands on Now. Woolley organized his followers into what he called the Council of friends through the 1920s and 30s, straddling the Arizona Utah border in a town called Short Creek, now known as Colorado City and Hilldale. The LDS Church formally excommunicated all these residents in 1935. And this fundamentalist movement, the. The FLDS Church, was officially incorporated in 1986 under a man named Rulon Jeffs. Now, there were some other differences between LDS and FLDS. Like mainstream LDS leadership was always collective. There was a first presidency, a quorum of 12, checks and balances built into the system. But FLDS implemented something completely different. One man rule, absolute authority concentrated on a single prophet, and no dissent was allowed. Systems like this, I mean, historically, tend to end pretty badly. So when Rulon Jeffs died in 2002, his son Warren Jeffs became the next single prophet. And I just want to be very careful here because these are vague accusations, and this is a legitimate matter of public criminal record. But he reportedly took between 78 and 90 wives. Some of them were girls as young as 12 and 13. He also expelled hundreds of teenage boys from the community. And these are so called Lost boys that are literally cast out to reduce competition for the youngest women of the community. And he controlled the community through surveillance, through shunning, and through reassigning wives and children between men at will. Allegedly. That's the story again. This is all alleged. Now, he fled law enforcement in 2005 and landed on the FBI's top 10 most wanted list in 2006. He finally was arrested outside Las Vegas later that August. And then in 2011, a Texas jury convicted him. Two accounts of child sexual assault. And now he's serving life plus 20 years. Now, as far as his followers are concerned, to them, he's still the prophet. And he still, to this day, sends them recorded messages from prison, which actually leads to something that happened years later back in Utah, because in 2020, the state found a loophole and kind of rewrote all the rules. So Senate Bill 102 took bigamy amongst consenting adults down from a felony carrying up to five years in prison to a class C misdemeanor, which had a fine of $750 and no jail time. Now, that is not legalization, of course. I mean, plural marriage still has zero legal recognition in the state of Utah, and the state constitution still bans polygamy outright. And fraud, coercion, abuse, or marrying a minor is still obviously a serious felony. But this bigamy bill passed at the Utah Senate, pretty fair. I mean, 29 to nothing. And its sponsor actually argued that the old felony law had been weaponized by abusers by men like Warren Jeffs to keep women too afraid of prosecution to ever call the police. The idea is that, oh, if we make the penalty so high, then the woman will feel guilty coming forward. But if it's just a fine, then they'll be able to, you know, have more autonomy. Now, today, roughly 30,000 people currently live in Utah's polygamous communities. So that's where the religious side of the story actually lands, all the way from a Persian merchant scripture to a misdemeanor fine in Salt Lake City. But there's a whole separate legal conversation happening in America right now that has almost nothing to do with religion at all. And it's a really interesting ripple in this whole story when looking at polygamy. So in America, polygamy is illegal in all 50 states. No state has legalized polygamy, and none of them currently have any type of active legislation to do it. But here's the. The thing. The legal conversation that's happening right now isn't about polygamy at all. You See, over the last two years, a handful of American cities like Portland, West Hollywood and Olympia have passed ordinances recognizing what they call polyamorous relationships. And that just basically means multiple partners gaining things like hospital visitation rights and insurance benefits and things that were formerly exclusively to just one marital partner. Now, this is not, you know, polygamy decriminalization. And it would be a mistake to conflate them because they're actually different. It is, you know, about secular consensual non monogamy, which is just a big way to say, like having multiple partners, but it's not religiously mandated polygamy. And it's very interesting. I mean, what is the actual case for this? Well, it turns out it's pretty simple. Supporters argue that relationships shouldn't be legally penalized just because there's more than two consenting adults involved, whether it's, you know, three men that are all in a relationship or one guy and two women, or one woman and two guys. As long as everyone is informed and everyone's over 18 and no one's being coerced. The argument that they would say is that the law shouldn't really have an opinion on how many partners someone has or how they choose to structure a family. So to a lot of people, this just reads as the next logical step in the same expansion of relationship rights that we've seen before, right? The same kind of conversations that are around same sex marriage. But the pushback is the same. Critics argue that these arrangements are basically impossible to make legally equal, that someone always ends up being more prioritized than someone else. Which, if you think about it, is the same exact equal treatment problem that we ran back to thousands of years ago all the way about Islam. And some family law experts worry that formalizing multiple multi partner households will open up a genuine, complicated legal can of worms around, like child custody and inheritance and medical decision making and things that the American legal system was never built to handle. I mean, you could imagine, right, like one man has a polyamorous relationship with two women and he goes into a coma and he's on life support. And they say, all right, what do we do? Do we take him off life support or do we keep him on? And one says take him off, one says keep them on. What do you do? But when you put the two tracks side by side, you kind of see the picture here. The religious version of multiple partner households has been decriminalized into basically a misdemeanor over decades of kind of slow legal retreat. Meanwhile, the secular version is being Actively publicly written into city ordinances. So for example, if a Muslim woman is married to a man with more than one wife under deep religious conviction inside a structured, centuries old tradition, legally that's a crime in America. But three secular partners with no religious framework at all signed up for a city registry. In many cities in America, that's considered totally fine. Which is just kind of a paradox, right? Which is it? Is America drawing this line based on how many people are in the relationship, or is it drawing the line based on who and what kind of religion wants to be in a relationship? Now, is America quietly relaxing its oldest kind of taboo, or is it rewriting these rules completely? Well, I don't know if it's as easy as framing it that way. People still hold centuries of conviction and belief around this practice, while many are also just wanting to do away with it completely, which have often been in high control religious circles and have historically not treated women very well. So all of this is not just something that can be untangled so easily. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief review about every religion's relationship with polygamy. Now, it's very interesting. I just want to point out one thing that stood out to me. Every single tradition that we covered has a different reason for the exact same arrangement. So in Judaism it's called a covenant, and later a communal law. In Islam, it's, you know, kind of a wartime mercy. You care for the widows of a battle that were left behind. Hinduism calls it a restoration of honor or securing of a bloodline. In Africa, it's maybe a bit more economic or diplomatic and is a working social contract between different families. And the LDS church calls it the highest thing that a person could possibly do. You know, this eternal salvation, be united with your family in heaven and having all these children that you're still with in heaven and you know, this act of co creation with God is seen as being very powerful. And you have all these different vocabularies and totally different worlds. And they all kind of arrive at polygamy for basically two reasons, right? The first is like divine will ordained by God, ancestral duty, it's a part of salvation. And then the second one is, you know, societal. A woman just simply couldn't survive on her own for most of human history. So she needed a household, an economic structure to be built around her. And being someone's second or third, or for some people, 16,000th wife is often better than being alone. But now for the first time, like in 5,000 years, people aren't really using God or society or anything, really, to justify having multiple people in a relationship. So maybe the issue around polygamy isn't dissolving, it's just changing, and it's becoming a more secular argument because the transformation from what was once a religious and social structure to a more humanistic philosophy based on love and companionship is now changing the texture of how we look at these things. So maybe the issue was never really about God at all. But there's an interesting thing about this specifically. I forget which book that I was reading this in, but it's so fascinating, but it was that in societies that allow polygamy and multiple wives and multiple marriages, they can actually in many cases become more violent societies. Now get this. So let's say you have 10 men and 10 women in a society. Let's say the top man gets four wives, like the most. Well, to do the strongest guy, whatever. Like the, you know, the bias of that society is he gets four wives. Now the second guy, let's say he gets three wives. Now let's say the third guy gets two. So now you have three, or you have four, three, two. That's like seven wives. Now the bottom four are not going to get any wives. Now what happens to a society where four of the guys get a bunch of wives and four of the guys get no wives? The guys that have no wives, all of a sudden their interaction, their relationship with the future of that society are completely different. Sounds like the creation of incels, basically, and the modern dating app culture. Now, it's kind of wild. And I forget which book this is. Oh, I need to find it. Maybe I'll put in the description. But basically, he makes the case that these types of societies become more violent. So you can imagine a society where, you know, there's he. He paints this picture. You're walking down the street and there's a guy passed out because he's drunk and he has his wallet sitting in his pocket. Now if you take his wallet and you go to prison or you get fined or whatever, if you have kids, you're less likely to do that. If you have children, if you have future, you're more. You're more likely to be invested in society. You're less likely to be doing risky criminal behavior. You're less likely to do things that could potentially get you locked up or potentially, you know, diminish your quality of life because you have children that depend on you. But if you need to feed those children, you're more likely to do it. Oh, I like that counterpoint. But you're not going to do something that's going to land you in jail. You know what I'm saying? You have more to lose. Way too risky. You got way more to lose. So as a result, these societies end up becoming a bit more violent because you have entire portions of society, up to a quarter, maybe a half, that don't have any marriage prospects. They don't have any children. So as a result, they're less invested in the future. And one of the best future investing activities is having children. Because now you're like, okay, what is this world going to be like when I'm gone? Really interesting conversation around polygamy, specifically in that it can potentially actually be a detriment to certain societies. Now, I don't know. I've never lived in a polygamous society, and I don't really know how it all works. To me, it's kind of like an antiquated thing that was built around a time where, you know, you needed to, like, if women outnumbered men in a significant way, then I completely see how it worked as a social technology. If you're living in a place where it's kind of equal or men are outnumbering women, polygamy seems like it would be a disaster. But again, I don't know. I'm only married to one woman and I'm having a great time. I'm good. I'm completely tapped out. I like to invest my energy and time into her, into my children, and that's my focus. But I'm curious, what do you guys think? Do you know anyone that was in a polygamous marriage? Do you have, you know, maybe like a grandparent or something that was doing this back in the day, back in the mother country? I would love to know your thoughts or your experience with this. Is there anything that I missed when talking about this topic? It's a big one, obviously, and the different religions have very, you know, sordid sort of experiences with the topic. So if there's anything that we overlooked, please drop a comment. Please inform me. I am not immune to the truth. I would love to know what the answer is, so please let me know. YouTube, Spotify, I read all of them. Even if I don't read it or if I don't respond to it right away, someone else will, and it'll be beneficial to one of the other campers here at the campsite. Now, I have great news. If you like crazy conspiracy stuff and deep dives and mysteries, well, we have Camp Gagnon on the main channel. We drop two episodes a week right there. You can check those out. And if you also like historical deep dives and going through all the craziest history of all time, well, great news. We have History Camp and we'll link both those in the description. And if you just like to rock with us over here, Religion Camp and talk about all the religions of the world. World. Well, great news. We drop these episodes every single Sunday. And I can't wait to see you guys in the next one. So God bless you all. Thank you so much. Be good to your families, hug your children. Life is beautiful. And enjoy your Sunday. Peace be with you.