these days, most film studios outside the faith-based sector don't bother to tell them at all.

That is what makes the upcoming film Moses the Black such an interesting event, along with its unique narrative framing. Saint Moses of Ethiopia served as a monk and abbot in the fourth century, transforming his life by accepting Christ after a life of bloody criminal activity. Moses the Black, recognized as a saint in the Orthodox and Catholic churches, converted after fleeing to a monastery after a career of murder, terror, and mayhem. He struggled in faith, finding it difficult to leave his life of criminality on one hand and despairing at redemption for it on the other.

Rather than take that story on directly, however, rapper Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson teamed up with Simeon Faith, the Nick Mirkopoulos Cinematic Fund, and Fathom Entertainment to exec-produce a film that sets the redemption question in a modern, violent setting. It mainly follows the recently released gang member Malik (Omar Epps) and his return to Chicago, seeking revenge for the murder of his mentor and partner Sayeed. His crew wants revenge, but Malik's grandmother introduces him to the story of St. Moses the Black, whose life parallels Malik's and is shown in flashbacks throughout the film. Everything escalates in Malik's life – a gang war, potential betrayal, and Malik's growing sense that he yearns for redemption, even if it comes in the harsh terms of the life he's led. //

Moses the Black would get an R rating for very good reasons. It has graphic violence, bad language, and enough emotional turbulence that children and teens probably shouldn't see the film. For those too young to see this film, may I suggest this YouTube video on Saint Moses himself. His redemption story may be lesser known than that of other saints such as Augustine, but it is no less inspirational. https://youtu.be/jCmn1ENRVLM?si=yUUqqrHeFKFr5kHr

For decades, marriage debates centered on who could marry. The next debate centers on what marriage is.

“Whether people like it or not, marriage is going to be reexamined,” Tidwell told Holloway.

“This is happening,” Kowalski said. “The question is who frames it.”

Anderson emphasized institutional stability. “The relationship the state cares about is the one that makes new citizens,” he said. //

If marriage law continues shifting toward individual autonomy and equal protection, plural marriage challenges will follow — whether from TikTok polycules, biblical polygynists, or both.

If the state retreats from marriage regulation, the question becomes which institutions — churches, communities, or new cultural movements — will fill the vacuum.

Either way, the next marriage battle isn’t coming.

It may be in its earliest stages — but it’s here. //

Patrick
3 hours ago edited
Let me start off by saying that a minister who cherry‑picks a few Old Testament narratives to justify taking multiple wives while ignoring Christ’s clear teaching that marriage is one man and one woman in “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4–6) is not being biblical, he is being self‑serving. By discarding passages that call leaders to be “the husband of one wife” and commanding believers to submit to lawful civil authority (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6; Romans 13:1–2), he twists Scripture to bless what remains both sinful and illegal, turning the gospel into a cover for his own appetites rather than a call to holiness and obedience.

Further, Marriage, in Christian ethics and in natural law, is not infinitely elastic; it has a God‑given form: one man and one woman, covenanted for life. Any other “configuration” – whether same‑sex unions, polyamory, or so‑called “biblical polygyny” – steps outside that form and is both morally disordered and, in our system, rightly unlawful.

Genesis presents the pattern not as one option among many, but as the creational norm: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
Jesus does not broaden that; He doubles down on it. When asked about marriage, He goes back to Eden: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female… and the two shall become one flesh… What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
One man. One woman. “The two… one flesh” – not three, not a rotating cast, not a harem. Paul applies the same logic pastorally: “Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.” The grammar is as tight as the ethics: each man, his own wife (singular); each woman, her own husband (singular).

Polygamy, in Scripture, is recorded, regulated, and relentlessly shown to be spiritually and socially destructive. Lamech is the first polygamist and is paired with violence and arrogance. Abraham’s union with Hagar produces jealousy and division rather than a new sacrament. Jacob’s household is a running case study in misery, rivalry, and pain. Solomon’s multiplied wives turn his heart away from the Lord. When God lays down rules for kings, He explicitly forbids “multiplying wives” lest their hearts be led astray.

To rip a handful of descriptive Old Testament episodes out of that context and sell them as a prescriptive model for Christians is not “rediscovering biblical marriage”; it is the very thing Scripture warns about when it speaks of people who “twist” the writings to their own destruction. Jesus calls such religious manipulators a “brood of vipers,” outwardly pious but inwardly predatory. Paul warns of “fierce wolves” who will arise “from among your own selves” to draw disciples after themselves, and of those who “by smooth talk and flattery” deceive the hearts of the naïve. A minister who uses the pulpit to sacralize his desire for multiple sexual partners is not bravely reforming the church; he is dressing lust up in Bible verses and leading the flock into a ditch.
Nor can “biblical polygyny” be rescued by pretending that the state has no say. Christian marriage has always had a public, legal face as well as a private, covenantal heart. Paul commands, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God… Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed.” Peter echoes him: “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution… for this is the will of God.” When the civil law defines marriage as the union of two spouses and criminalizes bigamy and polygamy, the default Christian posture is obedience unless the state orders us to sin. Refusing lawful marriage regulations, or constructing shadow “marriages” to skirt bigamy statutes, is not a higher spirituality; it is rebellion dressed in religious rhetoric.
The GOP’s 19th‑century opposition to both slavery and Mormon polygamy was not accidental; both practices treated human beings – especially women – as property to be owned, traded, or accumulated, and the party’s founding moral vision rightly saw that as incompatible with ordered liberty and Christian‑inflected republicanism.

Once the definition of marriage is detached from male–female complementarity and the “two in one flesh” structure, the slide into any consenting configuration is not a scare tactic; it is a matter of simple logic, as even critics of polygamy admit. That is precisely why Christians cannot affirm same‑sex “marriage,” polyamorous “domestic partnerships,” or “plural covenants” of any kind: they all reject the creational givens Christ Himself ratified. The call in this moment is not to improvise new sexual arrangements in the name of strategy or demographics, but to hold the line where Scripture and sound law already drew it: one man, one woman, one flesh, under God and under just civil authority. Anything else is, in the end, a counterfeit sacrament – and faithful Christians are obligated to say so.

I love Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the newly-married Pitsenbargers so embody this quote from my favorite Emerson poem: "This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays." //

Avatar for Rogue Rose
Rogue Rose
11 hours ago
Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,
The last of life,
For which the first was made.
Our times are in his hand
Who saith: "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half, Trust God: see all, nor be afraid!
-- Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Political-Paige
2 hours ago
I'll jump in as the non-Christian in the room, having been raised Buddhist. Let's divorce (no pun intended) the theology from the legality here.

Frankly? It's none of the business of any government to define marriage. Marriage licenses were once handled by the churches marrying the couples, but they were usurped by state governments for the nefarious purpose of preventing miscegenation... interracial marriages. There were other excuses like blood tests for syphilis. Both rationales are long since abandoned.

There's nothing in the Constitution that lets governments decide whether you can marry, or whom. That's a religious and personal choice. We don't have to like it, but then again, we also don't have to like our in laws. It's not our choice, not our lives, not our circus and not our monkeys.

The only interest government could possibly have in that decision -- which should be between individuals and their church -- is in passing regulations that define tax and divorce rules in marriage and its dissolution. Protect those who lack the ability to consent, as we do in any situation. Then get out of it.

We have laws based on Judeo-Christian ethics, but there's a line between that moral base and codifying this or that rule from the Old Testament.

Patrick Political-Paige
33 minutes ago
It is understandable to want the state as far away as possible from intimate choices, but there are clear, non‑theological reasons why modern states both define and encourage marriage as a civil institution. That concern is not (at its best) about policing virtue; it is about managing predictable problems in property, care, and vulnerability that arise when adults form long‑term unions and have children.

First, children create obligations that someone must legally carry, and the state cannot ignore that. A liberal state does not care whether two people are in love or blessed by a church; it does care that any child has financially responsible adults, clear decision‑makers for medical and educational choices, and a default framework if those adults separate or die. Marriage as a legal status is basically a pre‑packaged set of rules: if you two take on a shared life, then you are presumptively each responsible for the children you bring into it, for their support, and for each other’s basic support. Without such a default scheme, every breakup or death becomes a bespoke legal nightmare, which is precisely when children are least able to protect themselves.

Second, long‑term coupledom generates property, debts, and dependencies that private agreements cannot reliably handle on their own. Most couples do not and cannot afford to draft detailed contracts about every asset, liability, medical contingency, and inheritance scenario. A civil marriage statute gives third parties—hospitals, courts, insurers, employers, pension administrators—a simple, publicly knowable answer to questions like: who can consent to surgery; who gets survivor benefits; who inherits without a will; who is liable for household debts. Without a state‑defined status, those questions would have to be litigated or contracted every time, which would be vastly more intrusive and expensive than a standardized legal framework.

Third, the state has an interest in reducing free‑riding and externalized costs. If two adults share a household and one becomes disabled, society prefers that the other adult has a clear, enforceable duty of support before the costs are shifted to public welfare. If someone dies, it is better that there is a predictable heir to manage assets and obligations than that the estate sits in limbo or the state must step in as guardian of last resort. Marriage law assigns these duties by default, thereby lowering the administrative and financial burden on everyone else.

Fourth, state involvement in defining civil marriage is precisely what makes equal treatment enforceable. If marriage were purely private or ecclesiastical, then access to the associated protections—hospital visitation, inheritance, tax treatment, immigration sponsorship—would depend entirely on private gatekeepers who are not bound by constitutional norms of equality. By defining a civil status that is independent of any church and open (in principle) on neutral terms, the state both creates and can police a sphere where citizens must be treated alike, regardless of religion or lack of it.

Finally, recognizing a legitimate civil interest in marriage does not mean sacralizing any particular religious ethic or banning all alternative arrangements. Adults remain free to structure their intimate lives as they see fit; the question is which arrangements the state will treat as the default template for allocating rights and duties when things go wrong. There, it is neither arbitrary nor theocratic to say: stable, two‑adult unions that take on mutual responsibility and child‑rearing are given a special legal form, because they reliably solve problems the state would otherwise have to solve awkwardly and expensively. In that sense, defining and encouraging civil marriage is less about virtue policing than about risk management and the orderly protection of children, dependents, and property across generations.

Patrick MarkusB
an hour ago
It is perfectly reasonable to be a non‑believer, (Judge not lest ye be judged) but making “hating religion” a core identity is usually foolish because it treats a vast, varied human phenomenon as one undifferentiated evil and blinds you to understanding why billions of people find meaning, solidarity, and ethical motivation there. It also risks turning into the same dogmatic, us‑versus‑them mindset you rightly criticize in religious and political institutions, just with different symbols and slogans.

But moving on. There are, however, entirely non‑biblical reasons to be skeptical of plural marriage, even in secular, consensual forms, and those reasons stand regardless of anyone’s view of God or scripture. A growing body of comparative research suggests that women in polygamous unions experience significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, and marital distress than women in monogamous marriages, and that children in such families show more emotional and behavioral problems on average, which points to structural stress in the arrangement itself rather than just “a few bad actors.”

At a structural level, most real‑world polygyny (one man, multiple wives) tends to entrench inequality rather than partnership. Wives usually marry younger, have less bargaining power, and are more exposed to jealousy, competition, and intra‑household conflict, which correlates with higher rates of abuse and lower life satisfaction. Critics working from secular moral and political theory argue that this turns spouses—especially women—into more replaceable, rank‑ordered positions, undermining the ideal of two partners as roughly equal and mutually irreplaceable.

Plural marriage also has population‑level effects that are hard to ignore if one cares about social stability. When high‑status men take multiple wives, lower‑status men are left single in larger numbers, and cross‑cultural work links large pools of “surplus men” with higher crime, violence, and political volatility. By spreading partnership opportunities more evenly, monogamy functions as a quiet stabilizer, something secular legal and economic arguments take seriously when considering what kinds of family forms the state should formally endorse.

Finally, the legal and administrative complications of recognizing plural marriage are enormous in modern states whose institutions assume a single spouse as default: one legal next‑of‑kin, one default heir, one primary beneficiary, one co‑parent for custody presumptions. With multiple spouses, everything from medical decision‑making to inheritance, pensions, immigration, and tax filing becomes a tangle: who has priority in an emergency, how survivor benefits are divided, which consents are needed to add a new spouse, and how exit and custody work if things go bad. Because real‑world polygamous systems also show recurring patterns of coercion, social pressure, and difficulty exiting, many secular legal theorists conclude that a liberal state can tolerate private multi‑partner relationships while still having good, non‑religious reasons not to recognize plural marriage as a legal status.

18" diameter, 2 tiers/24", 4 tiers/48" or 5 tiers/60" high models