I have no issue with polygamy as a practice in Christianity. I know most Christian men won’t practise it, but they would rather pursue other arrangements like concubinage, Cohabitation, Consensual union, Common-law marriage (in certain social or informal contexts), Mistresshood, Paramourship, Concubinism / Concubininity.

You see, the term “side chick” or “Mistress” or “The Other Woman” has been in practice in Christian cycles all over the world since forever. Growing up, my next-door neighbour was a kept woman with four children for different men, and in the next compound, there was another kept woman with children for another married man.

Martin Luther King Jnr had a mistress, so did Bill Clinton, and so did so many other Christian men all over the world from the beginning. I could pretend it is not true, but it is, and it goes all the way back to the dark ages when even the pope had formal concubines.

Most people like to live in denial; we see things and pretend they don’t exist or lie to ourselves that only the ideal is acceptable and the aberration is to be ignored.

The question has always been, “What do Christians do with the excess women?” who cannot participate in a marriage because we have always had more women than men in the church all over the world. This is statistically true, and even though it varies from continent to continent, it is as bad as a ratio of 40 to 1 in some Christian circles.

Most of the earliest converts of the church were Jews who already practised polygamy before they encountered Jesus on the day of Pentecost. None of them was told to leave their other wives, but when the church was choosing its leaders, the instruction on “Husband of One Wife” was very clear.

A muslim convert who was already married to multiple wives does not need to break up his home after conversion to Christianity. Apostle Paul gave clear instructions in 1 Corinthians 7, that everyone should remain as they were before they converted to Christianity.

It is true that globally, the number of Christian ladies is almost double the number of Christian men.

I remember attending a church growth conference many years ago, back when I was fully immersed in evangelical church culture. One of the speakers was a particularly sharp guy who’d spent a considerable amount of time studying cultural trends, demographics and what all of this meant for the future of the church.

At one point, he began talking about the imbalance between men and women in Australian churches. According to the figures he was presenting, women outnumbered men by roughly 65 to 35 per cent. He then pointed out something that probably hadn’t occurred to many of us in the room. If those numbers were accurate, around a third of the women in our churches would never have the opportunity to marry a Christian man, simply because there weren’t enough to go around.

He paused and let that sink in before asking what the church was supposed to do about it. It was a serious question, and you could almost see the wheels turning as people considered the implications.

Then, with impeccable timing, he announced, “Polygamy, I say!”

Everyone had a good laugh, and I doubt anyone took his suggestion seriously. It was definitely intended as a joke. But I still remember it all these years later. He’d raised a genuine problem facing churches, one that nobody seemed to have a particularly good answer for, and then offered possibly the most ridiculous solution imaginable.

But apparently, not every pastor thinks polygamy is a laughing matter.

In Ohio, a pastor named Israel Ford has caused quite a stir after publicly introducing his congregation to his second wife. And rather than quietly acknowledging that his marital arrangements might be somewhat unconventional by Christian standards, he’s defending the whole thing from the Bible. In fact, he argues that the traditional Christian insistence on monogamy isn’t nearly as biblical as most believers assume.

Now, I suspect quite a few Christians will be reaching for their Bibles at this point, eager to explain exactly why this man has got it wrong. And perhaps he has. But before we dismiss him as another pastor who’s found a convenient theological justification for something he wanted to do anyway, there’s a rather awkward problem we need to address.

The Bible contains an awful lot of polygamy. And some of its most celebrated characters were enthusiastic participants.

Hang On, Is Polygamy Even Legal?

I have to confess, when I first read about Pastor Ford and his two wives, one of my immediate questions was whether any of this was actually legal. I know polygamy exists in various parts of the world, but I realised I didn’t know much about how the law treats it in countries like Australia and the United States. So I went looking.

In Australia, the law is pretty straightforward. Under Section 94 of the Marriage Act 1961, marrying another person while you’re already married is a criminal offence known as bigamy, carrying a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Australian law also doesn’t recognise marriages involving multiple spouses as valid domestic marriages. So if our church growth speaker had been serious about his proposed solution to the shortage of eligible Christian bachelors, we might have had a few legal difficulties to work through.

Across the United States, the situation is broadly similar. You cannot legally have multiple spouses in any of the 50 states, although the laws governing polygamous relationships vary. And in Ohio, where Pastor Ford leads LifeWorks Church, the law explicitly prohibits a married person from marrying someone else or continuing to cohabit with that other person. Bigamy is classified as a first-degree misdemeanour.

But there’s an interesting distinction here. Having more than one legally recognised spouse isn’t the same thing as having a relationship with more than one consenting adult. Nor does introducing somebody as your second wife necessarily mean you’ve entered into a second legal marriage.

And that’s where things get a little murky with Pastor Ford. He and his first wife, Lydia, have publicly introduced Shakayla as his second wife, and he says the arrangement has existed for almost three years. But I couldn’t find any reliable evidence establishing whether he actually went through a second marriage ceremony or what the legal status of that relationship might be. There’s also no indication in the reporting I’ve seen that he’s been charged with an offence.

Of course, whether something is legal and whether it’s biblical are two entirely different questions. And Pastor Ford seems considerably more interested in the second one.

Does Pastor Ford Have a Point?

Here’s where things get interesting, because as much as some Christians might dislike what Pastor Ford is doing, he’s not entirely making this stuff up.

In defending his decision to take a second wife, Ford pointed to Exodus 21:10, which discusses what should happen if a man takes another wife. The passage requires him to continue providing his first wife with food, clothing and marital rights. Now, that’s a rather strange instruction to find in a book that supposedly prohibits men from having more than one wife.

And it gets more awkward.

Abraham, the great father of faith, had Sarah and Hagar, although Hagar’s status as an enslaved woman makes that arrangement considerably more troubling than the Sunday school version might suggest. Jacob had Leah and Rachel, along with Bilhah and Zilpah. David had multiple wives, and Solomon famously accumulated 700 wives and 300 concubines, which makes you wonder when he found the time to govern anything.

Even Deuteronomy 21:15–17 contains instructions for a man who has two wives, explaining how inheritance should work if he loves one more than the other. Once again, the text addresses the complications of polygamy rather than simply forbidding the practice.

So Ford has a legitimate point when he observes that the Bible contains polygamous marriages and even laws regulating them. Whatever else we might think about his domestic arrangements, we can’t pretend those passages aren’t there.

But there’s a significant problem with taking that observation and turning it into an argument that God endorses polygamy. The Bible also contains laws regulating slavery, warfare and the treatment of women in circumstances that most Christians today would find deeply disturbing. We generally recognise that a practice being regulated in an ancient society doesn’t necessarily mean it represents an ideal for all societies.

And the New Testament does complicate Ford’s argument. When Jesus discusses marriage in Matthew 19, he refers back to Genesis and the union of two becoming one flesh. Paul describes church overseers as being the husband of one wife in 1 Timothy 3:2, although scholars debate whether that expression was intended to prohibit polygamy, remarriage or marital unfaithfulness. Neither passage gives us quite the simple, universal statement about marriage that people sometimes claim, but together they help explain why monogamy became the dominant Christian understanding.

For most of Christian history, the church has understood marriage as a union between two people. That position has developed through centuries of biblical interpretation, theology and cultural influence, rather than emerging from a single verse that explicitly prohibits every form of polygamy.

And I think that’s what makes this story so fascinating.

Pastor Ford is doing something that conservative Christians routinely encourage people to do. He’s opening his Bible, finding passages that support his position and arguing that the church has allowed tradition to obscure what Scripture actually says. He’s even presenting himself as someone brave enough to speak an unpopular biblical truth, regardless of what other Christians think.

Of course, plenty of Christians will argue that he’s misunderstood the Bible, and they have reasonable grounds for doing so. But deciding that he’s misunderstood it requires interpretation, context and some judgement about which biblical passages should carry the greatest weight.

And perhaps that’s the uncomfortable lesson here. Everybody interprets the Bible, including the people who insist they’re simply following what it says.

You Can’t Have It Both Ways

I’ve spent enough years in evangelical churches to know how this conversation usually goes. When confronted with an uncomfortable Old Testament law, someone will eventually explain that Christians are no longer bound by the Law of Moses because Jesus fulfilled it. And there’s a perfectly respectable theological argument to be made for that position.

But here’s my problem. If you’re going to use that reasoning to dispense with one Old Testament law, you need to be prepared to explain why you’re still insisting that others are binding.

Take Leviticus, for example. In chapter 18, we find the prohibition against a man having sexual relations with another man, a passage frequently quoted by Christians who oppose same-sex relationships. But a few chapters later, in Leviticus 19, we find prohibitions against wearing clothing made from two kinds of material, alongside instructions about harvesting crops, trimming beards and treating foreigners.

I’ve heard plenty of sermons condemning homosexuality on the basis of Leviticus 18:22. I can’t recall hearing too many sermons condemning polyester blends.

Now, I know the standard response. Christians sometimes divide the Old Testament laws into moral, ceremonial and civil categories. The ceremonial and civil laws, we’re told, no longer apply, but the moral laws remain binding.

The trouble is that the Old Testament itself doesn’t neatly organise its commandments into those three categories. That’s a theological framework developed to help Christians make sense of the Law, and there’s a long history of serious scholarship behind it. But it’s still an interpretation. And somebody has to decide which laws belong in which category.

You might have very good reasons for believing that a particular Old Testament commandment continues to express something important about how human beings ought to live. But you can’t simply quote the commandment and assume that settles the argument, especially when you’ve already decided that hundreds of other commandments no longer apply.

The same principle works in reverse. Pastor Ford can’t point to laws regulating polygamy and conclude that Christians are therefore free to practise it today. He has to explain why those ancient provisions should carry authority for modern Christians, particularly if he doesn’t believe Christians are required to observe the rest of the Mosaic Law.

And this is where I think the conversation needs to move beyond finding Bible verses that support whatever position we’ve already settled on.

I’m not suggesting Christians must either obey every Old Testament law or throw the entire thing in the bin. There are thoughtful ways of understanding how ancient Jewish law relates to Christian faith, including reading it through the teachings and example of Jesus. What I am suggesting is that we need to apply our interpretive principles consistently, even when doing so produces conclusions we’d rather avoid.

If we believe Jesus has changed our relationship to the Law, then that has implications for all of it. We don’t get to invoke the freedom of the new covenant when discussing dietary restrictions and then quietly return to the authority of Moses when discussing somebody else’s sex life.

And if we’re going to insist that a particular ancient commandment remains binding, we ought to be able to explain why, without pretending that quoting a verse is the same thing as making an argument.

Because whether the subject is polygamy, homosexuality, divorce or something else entirely, the question isn’t simply what the Bible says.

It’s how we decide which parts of it we’re going to obey, and why.

So, Should Christians Embrace Polygamy?

Well, I’m certainly not advocating that we start encouraging pastors to collect wives like Solomon. And I have some serious questions about the power dynamics involved in arrangements like Pastor Ford’s, particularly when a religious leader claims biblical authority for a relationship that seems to benefit him considerably more than anyone else.

For what it’s worth, I think Pastor Ford is wrong, and I have no desire to see polygamy make a comeback in Christian circles. I’m especially uncomfortable with pastors claiming God’s approval for arrangements that give them access to multiple women. But my disagreement with Pastor Ford doesn’t mean I can simply pretend the passages he’s quoting don’t exist. If I’m going to challenge his interpretation of Scripture, I need to do so with the same intellectual honesty and consistency that I’d expect from someone challenging mine.

What interests me most about this controversy is how quickly Christians who insist the Bible is perfectly clear suddenly discover the importance of context, historical background and careful interpretation when somebody uses Scripture to defend something they find objectionable.

And perhaps that’s a good thing. I’d love to see more of it.

I think we’d have much healthier conversations about faith if we could admit that reading the Bible involves making judgements about ancient cultures, competing passages, historical circumstances and what we believe God might actually be asking of us today. We might even discover that people who arrive at different conclusions aren’t necessarily ignoring Scripture or deliberately disobeying God.

As for Pastor Ford, I remain thoroughly unconvinced by his defence of polygamy. But his argument has exposed something worth paying attention to, particularly among Christians who pride themselves on taking the Bible literally.

It’s remarkably easy to find a Bible verse that supports your position. The harder task is explaining why that verse should carry authority while another one, perhaps only a chapter away, no longer applies.

And if we’re going to demand that kind of consistency from Pastor Ford, we ought to be prepared to demonstrate it ourselves.