Erskine Childers
New Member
Hi, everybody.
I am a self-employed attorney. I'm 53 years old and in good health.
I'm married with one adult child and another teenager.
My wife and I live mostly apart for a number of reasons. She's very unreceptive to the idea of plural marriage - to put in mildly.
I have been interested in Christian polygyny for a few years now.
I feel that it might be something God wants for me. I don't know for sure but I'm open to the idea. I feel that I could take good care of, for example, a single mom and her children, and she could take care of me.
I was raised in a devout Roman Catholic home and so I grew up with believing that polygyny was about the biggest sin anybody could commit.
While I still have the greatest of respect for the Church and Holy Tradition, I really have been forced to confront the fact that monogamy isn't biblical but is in fact a cultural artifact that stems from Roman law. St. Augustine, perhaps the most influential theologian ever in the Western Church, wrote in the 4th century on polygyny:
In this passage St. Augustine states forthrightly that polygyny is biblical but that it's not in keeping with Roman custom and so it would be a sin to break the peace of Roman law and custom when it is not necessary to do so. Elsewhere St. Augustine states that polygyny was necessary in biblical times but it's not necessary in the late Roman empire so Christians shouldn't give scandal unnecessarily. [He was also something of a prude - as if Jacob didn't enjoy all that sex with his wives! But I can easily forgive him for that.]
This seems like a good argument to me - St. Paul instructed us to keep the law as much as we can without compromising the core of our Faith.
But it seems to me that his central argument fails now. We have so many single mothers nowadays and so few good men. Political correctness waged a horrible war on traditional marriage and the casualties are young women and their children, not to mention the millions of young men who can't seem to become men psychologically and to take on the responsibilities of taking care of a woman and some kids.
I would say now that St. Augustine's justification for keeping Roman customary law when it wasn't necessary to break it - maybe this made sense when the Pagans still ran things in Rome - falls apart. It is necessary now to protect vulnerable single mothers and their fatherless children. We also don't have nearly enough children as the contraceptive mentality rules our souls and "go forth and be fruitful and multiply" has been forgotten. We are literally committing national suicide. We won't have enough highly educated young people to keep our country great, and this will happen in the next ten years.
I mean, our culture is saying to me "Erskine, go out and have all the uncommitted sex you want. You can dump your wife anytime although it will cost you. She can leave you anytime and take the kids to another State and you'll never see them again. That's all great. But what you can't do is actually take another women and live a life committed to taking care of her and the resulting children. Fornication is cool. Serial marriage is just fine. But a committed polygynous relations? That's blasphemy!"
It seems like a no-brainer to me.
Anyway, I'm just looking for folks to talk to about these issues.
I am a self-employed attorney. I'm 53 years old and in good health.
I'm married with one adult child and another teenager.
My wife and I live mostly apart for a number of reasons. She's very unreceptive to the idea of plural marriage - to put in mildly.
I have been interested in Christian polygyny for a few years now.
I feel that it might be something God wants for me. I don't know for sure but I'm open to the idea. I feel that I could take good care of, for example, a single mom and her children, and she could take care of me.
I was raised in a devout Roman Catholic home and so I grew up with believing that polygyny was about the biggest sin anybody could commit.
While I still have the greatest of respect for the Church and Holy Tradition, I really have been forced to confront the fact that monogamy isn't biblical but is in fact a cultural artifact that stems from Roman law. St. Augustine, perhaps the most influential theologian ever in the Western Church, wrote in the 4th century on polygyny:
In this passage St. Augustine states forthrightly that polygyny is biblical but that it's not in keeping with Roman custom and so it would be a sin to break the peace of Roman law and custom when it is not necessary to do so. Elsewhere St. Augustine states that polygyny was necessary in biblical times but it's not necessary in the late Roman empire so Christians shouldn't give scandal unnecessarily. [He was also something of a prude - as if Jacob didn't enjoy all that sex with his wives! But I can easily forgive him for that.]
This seems like a good argument to me - St. Paul instructed us to keep the law as much as we can without compromising the core of our Faith.
But it seems to me that his central argument fails now. We have so many single mothers nowadays and so few good men. Political correctness waged a horrible war on traditional marriage and the casualties are young women and their children, not to mention the millions of young men who can't seem to become men psychologically and to take on the responsibilities of taking care of a woman and some kids.
I would say now that St. Augustine's justification for keeping Roman customary law when it wasn't necessary to break it - maybe this made sense when the Pagans still ran things in Rome - falls apart. It is necessary now to protect vulnerable single mothers and their fatherless children. We also don't have nearly enough children as the contraceptive mentality rules our souls and "go forth and be fruitful and multiply" has been forgotten. We are literally committing national suicide. We won't have enough highly educated young people to keep our country great, and this will happen in the next ten years.
I mean, our culture is saying to me "Erskine, go out and have all the uncommitted sex you want. You can dump your wife anytime although it will cost you. She can leave you anytime and take the kids to another State and you'll never see them again. That's all great. But what you can't do is actually take another women and live a life committed to taking care of her and the resulting children. Fornication is cool. Serial marriage is just fine. But a committed polygynous relations? That's blasphemy!"
It seems like a no-brainer to me.
Anyway, I'm just looking for folks to talk to about these issues.
)