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.
