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Why is this site here - How has it developed - What's possible in the future? |
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| A Brief History of polygamypage.info & plans for the future | ||
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The story of polygamypage.info started with my parents' respect for the Bible. I cannot remember a time when I wasn't aware of the various characters in the Bible, many of them clearly polygamous. Therefore it was never a shock to me that people in the Bible were polygamous. As I grew up and became a Christian I heard many missionaries tell about the places where they worked and the communities that they evangelised. It was during these meetings that I came to see how polygamy was an issue for the Church today, for it was then that I heard, time after time, the same story about a tribal chief who had two wives when he was converted. The man, on being told by the missionaries that, as he was now a Christian, his polygamy was unacceptable, is then said to have set all his riches at one side of the village and himself at the other, and instructed his wives to choose between him and his money. Fortunately for the missionaries, one woman chooses the man and the other chooses his money and the story closes.
There were a number of things that were unsettling about this tale. Firstly, none of the missionaries or preachers who told this story could claim that they personally had witnessed this event. It was, instead, something like an urban legend or myth - a popular tale told to reinforce a point but which no-one is sure ever really happened. Secondly, it was a story as to how a mission difficulty was resolved, which was very convenient but which didn't seek clear guidance from the Bible. Thirdly, there was no great soul-searching as to which of these women was really his wife, like there would have been in my church if divorce had been an issue. He was left with the wife who chose him, whether he had married her first or not. And then there was the whole issue of divorce. It appeared that he had been encouraged to divorce his wife, and my church would not have countenanced divorce for anything! And also it was not clear why splitting a family into an impoverished couple and a temporarily rich divorcee wife with no future means of support was seen as a good result.
But the strangest thing was that this was the only tale of its type. There were no tales of men with three wives in a similar circumstance, no tales which involved any of them having children, no tales where the man wasn't rich, and no tales where they all preferred his money or even where they all preferred him. Yet it didn't seem credible that in all of recorded history, and throughout all of the missionary efforts of countless churches this issue had only come up this once and was so easily resolved. It was clear that the full story was not being told.
This theme continued to develop. Again and again people would read the Bible publically as if they had an in-built editor in operation. They would suddenly skip a verse, or leave one unfinished, and being the sort of person who checks out what has been missed, it was obvious that they were skipping references to men who had numerous wives. Often no explanation was given, and never was there any comprehensive teaching on the subject. All that was said were a few brief comments which were supposed to cover the subject by raising an objection, they never appeared to have been fully thought through, and different speakers were clearly inconsistent with each other.
Over time I read, thought, prayed about and discussed these matters and gradually the so-called objections began to dissolve in front of my eyes. They simply didn't make sense. There is no need to repeat here what is included in the "objections" part of this site, but it was clear that none of them stood the test of simple logic. (For more information on the Christian use of logic, and on other interesting stuff like Christian homeschooling, consider going to the Trivium.)
In late 1995 I first accessed the internet and tried to find out what other Christians thought about a number of subjects, but while many subjects of interest were covered, there was absolutely nothing there on polygamy. Then, in April 1996, I decided to write down some of my conclusions and post them on a website just in case there were other people out there who, like me, had been looking for alternative views.
My first articles outlined my responses to the objections I had heard. I started getting email from people who had read them and I expanded them to deal with how the Bible was positive about polygamy, and ultimately as to how it viewed marriage. I purchased some books to review on the site, to make it more interesting, and was surprised to find out that the views I held had been held by many different Christians over many centuries, and that people like Martin Luther had come to similar conclusions simply from reading the Bible. In fact, it often appeared that the people had first been convinced by the scriptures and then later found people who shared their views - this experience was not unique to me.
Around September1998 I changed Internet Service Providers and for the first time was able to measure access to my site. I knew that I got a lot of email and that there had been a lot of people who had wanted to submit ads, and so that maybe there were a couple of hundred people a month looking at the site. On the first day that I had statistics I logged on in the evening to find 43 people had been there that day, and I was later to find out that this was, if anything, less than usual. Overall the site now has around 36,000 visitors per year who can be counted. They visit an average of 3 pages each on the site and at least 10% of them come back again, and again, and again. Some people clock over 100 visits in a year, so I'm glad you find it helpful, and I wish I had a penny for every page you visit!
In April 1999 I got married and we spread our honeymoon over a short break after the wedding and a trip to New York in the summer. When I got home from the latter trip the people who had taken my wedding service called me in front of them as they had had a complaint. I'll spare you the details of my mock trial before the "elders", but despite the fact that I had discussed it in detail with at least one of them many years earlier, had mentioned my views while teaching a church Bible study two years before, and had openly been talking about my views and my internet site for years, they claimed they didn't know about it, and demanded I remove it from the Internet, and that I give them a guarantee not to discuss my opinions on the subject with anyone. I refused and they decided not to even try to prove me wrong, as they based their case on what they felt the Spirit told them internally, accepting that there was no ban in the Bible. They decided they would excommunicate me, and I have not been able to return to my church of the previous 20-or-so years because they threatened to cause a disorderly scene if I did. Seven other people left the church in protest at the leadership's decision that they could excommunicate me without proof.
In September 1999 I finally got round to purchasing a domain name and "The Polygamy Page" became polygamypage.com. Shortly after my own church leadership had caused all this trouble for me refusing to remove the material from public view, a Bible college in Florida requested permission to reproduce the material as part of one of their courses. So one set of church leaders think excommunication is the only way of dealing with it - another set think it is compulsory reading for trainee Christian workers - and some people think I'm confused!
In October 2000 I submitted a dissertation to complete a Master of Laws degree in Human Rights and Criminal Justice. The dissertation was about plural marriage in English Law, and for my work on it I was awarded the degree with merit. I have since completed a larger work on the same subject which is now available and advertised on the front page.
In October 2001, with the launch of the .info domains and a reconfiguring of the site to make it more useful from the perspective of those doing research or study, the site became polygamypage.info
In case you are wondering, this is not the only thing I do. I also have two jobs, a wife and several other websites to look after, so the updates are rarely as often or as comprehensive as I would like them to be.
I have the following books available for review, but there does not seem to be as much demand for this as might justify the time needed to write the reviews - perhaps people just like buying the books themselves. Hence, I'll only review a book if I get lots of pressure to do so, or if I really want to!
Besides, my short advice is that if you are interested in the history of Chrisian polygamy then you should hunt down a copy of Cairncross's "After polygamy was made a sin", and also Leo Miller's "John Milton among the polygamophiles", as they are both very good books.
Beyond these proposals I am open to suggestions as to how to develop the site. It is now just one of many Christian-based polygamy sites - not just one of two - so there is less need for new material than there used to be. Remember that there is a "Readers comments" section if you have something you are burning to tell the world - and if it's any good, I just might steal it and claim it as my idea ;-)
The Books :-
An Assistant Professor of Anthropology from the University of Maine looks in detail at one Mormon fundamentalist community.
Family Therapist Audrey Chapman (no relation) explores the benefits of polygamy for modern American women.
An African man discusses polygamy in Africa today.
The Swedish Anthropolgist does a lot of hard sums for 186 historical polygamous societies.
A serious treatment of the inception and inspiration for Mormon Polygamy. Hey - if they had sent me the dust-jacket with the book, perhaps I could tell you more about the author, but he seems to be a clever guy.
A modern menage-a-trois look at similar relationships in history and literature.
The Bryn Mawr College Anthropologist looks at polygamy from a modern secular perspective.
A psychologist and an anthropologist join up in a study of some polygamous Mormon groups in 1990's Utah.
This one is more of a pamphlet than a book. The title is self-explanatory.
A well researched travel through Milton's poly-positive views:- with many interesting facts and figures.
Seized by an unfriendly government and locked away for over a century, till found by a civil servant, translated and published on the order of the then King of England - here they are, the reasons Milton, author of Paradise Lost, believed in polygamy.
This book, by 'Hark The Herald Angels Sing' author Martin Madan, first published in 1780 has become available, as have two of the critical responses generated at the time. The chapter on polygamy is over 200 pages long, so it may be some time, but at least it's out of copyright!