The Secret History of Christian Polygamy

A religion says it’s against multiple spouses. So why do church leaders keep having them?

If you ask Christians if the religion allows polygamy and polyamorous relationships, they’d be quick to say ‘no’. Of course the Bible itself has many such stories, but the religion knows better.

To look around Christianity, however, is to see many leaders with multiple spouses. I’m trying to understand a confusing situation. The religion seems to have a long and secret history of polygamy.

Consider Karl Barth, called the “father of Evangelical Protestantism.”

A Swiss theologian who lived from 1886 to 1968 married a wife, Nelly, in 1913. She was the mother of his five children. Then Barth took another wife, Lollo. She was the one he actually loved, travelled with, as they worked together on his theology.

When Barth travelled to speak at Christian seminaries, Lollo was there. They roomed together. Everyone knew—and kept it quiet.

Barth’s polygamy remains concealed to this day.

There was a break in the messaging in 2016 when a scholar (who was planning a biography) disclosed the relationship with Lollo, with the heavy framing that it was a “deep, intense, overwhelming love”—and not polygamy.

The word is never used, even as Barth is quoted referring to Nelly and Lollo as ‘‘the two who are ordained to me.”

Christians, especially Evangelicals, are very given to critiquing Mormons and other religious communities for their histories of polygamy. The religion likes to keep quiet about its own.

Many Christians have been polygamous.

There are studies of this history, like After Polygamy was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy.

But I’m seeing much more, if sometimes in hazy contexts that aren’t openly named as polygamy. Try Franklin D. Roosevelt. The American president was a serious Episcopal. He was widely read as a Christian leader.

He is never identified as a polygamist, but the reality is that Roosevelt had a wife, Eleanor, for social importance, and another wife he actually liked.

America has the “First Lady” — and often a Second Lady who is kept in the shadows.

When John F. Kennedy ran for president, his Catholicism was troubling to many Protestants.

What did not cause any trouble was his mistresses. In a Christian world this is easily hidden. He had many relationships, but Judith Campbell Exner could be seen as a wife.

When she disclosed their relationship in 1976, Kennedy’s Christian image was threatened. She had to to be classified as barely human.

“I was called a prostitute, a hooker and a tramp,” she recalls in 1988. She adds: “I loved him, but no one wanted to believe that he loved me.”

I assess the situation. America has a long history of polygamy in Christian presidents. It is both documented and denied.

Christianity has sometimes allowed polygamy.

If this seems a surprise it’s only because of the different mental categories in which the same behaviors can be filed. In the Old South of pre-Civil War America, typically thought Christian, and indeed, Southern Baptist, many white men had “slave wives.”

It’s not generally called polygamy. But note the white wife of a Confederate general, writing in her diary in 1861, explaining what she sees in terms of biblical heroes with multiple wives:

“Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines…”

Many Christian leaders have been womanizers.

There’ve been many posthumous “revelations” that point to secret sex lives that, in their day, would never even be suspected by the public.

Watchman Nee died in 1972. A 2005 biography has a brief admission: “There were rumors of adultery.” In 2006, the biographer added a note online: “Nee had affairs with two girls…in the church.”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s womanizing is well-known. But that’s only because of his work as a controversial civil rights leader, and being surveilled by the FBI. Typically, such matters are kept quiet.

I developed a theory. Maybe Christian leaders, when they prove effective in growing the religion, are rewarded with women and silence.

Christian seminaries have basically been brothels for elite theologians.

That’s a history typically kept quiet, but occasionally revealed. Paul Tillich was the theologian who did much to keep up liberal Protestantism after World War II. That he was an epic womanizer would never have been known about except that his non-Christian wife, Hannah, wrote a memoir about him after he died.

Then Christianity set to work insulting her. It was meant to be quiet.

Addison Leitch was a prominent professor, theologian and editor of “Christianity Today.”

Little would be remembered of him, except that he was second husband of conservative Evangelical star Elisabeth Elliot. So a biographer of hers briefly mentions an apparently long record of Leitch going “too far with relationships with female students…”

No details—including whether Elisabeth Elliot had known she was marrying a womanizer. But it would be so Christian to conceal it.

Helmut Koester was a Bible scholar long at Harvard Divinity School.

He was posthumously accused of sexual assault by many female students, including the famous Elaine Pagels. You’d not otherwise know this Christian man had a very busy sex life. Koester’s obituary and a tribute to him don’t mention it.

Pagels says in 2018: “This was part of the story about being a woman graduate student almost anywhere in that time.”

Ravi Zacharias was a famous “evangelist” in the Evangelical tradition.

After his death he was discovered to have been an epic womanizer who kept girlfriends, or one might say, wives.

In putting the moves on new women, he was recalled to have “referenced the ‘godly men’ in the Bible with more than one wife.”

He would have denied it publicly. He had a wife. A first wife.

I think of bisexual Christian leaders who keep up same-sex shadow partners.

Here we’d mention another Christian president of the United States: Richard Nixon, so oddly close with Bebe Rebozo.

Many other church leaders have had curious same-sex connections. We might even think about the horror history of Paul Pressler, the key Southern Baptist activist. Though a spouse might seem an inapt framing for his longtime relationship with a man he met at age 14.

But Pressler did seem to have invested as much of himself or more in the younger man as he did in his wife.

Even in the recent scandal of pastor Aaron Ivey having a longtime text messaging relationship with an adult male, we might see the traces of a religion whose leaders typically have multiple spousal relationships,.

The theater of church often calls for the “man of God” to have his wife beside him.

No pastor was more publicly in love with his wife than Mike Bickle, the prominent Kansas pastor, who’d go on and on about Diane.

In ongoing waves of scandal playing out in the last months, he’s revealed to have a long series of “secret” relationships. One young woman was kept her up in an apartment. They travelled together, and may have been sexual after, as she recalls repeatly passing out as if drugged.

He assured each of his ‘girlfriends’ that they would be marrying after Diane died, an event he kept “prophesying” would be happening soon.

When dealing with a religion that refuses to admit basic facts, it’s difficult to say what’s going on.

On the surface, then, Christians preach against polygamy, adultery, and other sexual “sins.” The religion benefits from claims they’re more godly for the sexual refusal they claim.

But the reality seems to be that people are mostly the same.

The Christians are just hiding it. 🔶