Believe me, I very much don’t desire to write about a bunch of Tweets every day. I Don’t. I’ve even been reading books under the largely mistaken impression that I’ll be able to produce some thoughtful long-form content. But then I glance up from the analog page and see that Matt has filled our marital chat with a heap of frightfulness. It’s not that he is bad. It’s that we have an agreement that I won’t have to doom scroll, because it stresses me out, and I’d rather do almost anything else. So, out of affection and love, along with de-icing the floor of the freezer every night, he curates the internet for me, hoping that there will be something that catches my fancy for a post or two.
That’s great, of course, but yesterday I received a long thread of screenshots about how we’re all Christian Nationalists now, the news that a major whistle-blower for Boeing has “committed suicide,” the latest ghastly cover of The New York Magazine about how all children should be invited to trans themselves, this embarrassingly biblically illiterate cartoon, all the Kate Middleton news, and, the 7th anniversary of this wonderful moment. Oh, and a new installment from The Holy Nope, an account that deserves a follow if anyone does.
If you haven’t come across The Holy Nope, here are a couple of my favorite TikToks:
And this one, wow wow wow:
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Which brings us to the peace of resistance. * Oh My Word (Josh Butler Cringe Level Alert):
Just to recap, in this short clip, we have two people who claim to be Christian but who “searched the scriptures for years” and decided God’s “plans” for them included polygamy. The man—or one might say “man”—says that polygamy is a “reflection of Christ and his church.” I can’t go on and type anymore because, as The Holy Nope says, NOPE. My very favorite line, though, along with the prescient and sane facial expressions of the lady who has to sit there listening to this utter nonsense, is when the husband, or rather Midwit, says: “I think we just thought it was wrong and evil—at first—because that’s how we were raised.” Oh dear heart, it is wrong and evil. Everything you said is so terrible and untrue, I almost wish we didn’t have to have “free speech and stuff.” **
I’ve been trying really hard to ignore the rising tide of polyamory or polygamy, or whatever you want to call it. There are a lot of interesting people writing on the subject, but I find it so repulsive and reprehensible, I was sort of hoping that if I ignored it, it would go away. Unfortunately, now even self-identifying “Christians” are coming up with reasons to justify it.
I’ve just got through the book of Judges again in my daily Bible reading—sorry, listening. There are three portions of the Bible that I dread. Jephthah through the Levite’s Concubine in Judges, the Rape of Tamar through Solomon taking his hundreds of wives and concubines, and the Crucifixion.
Just to interrupt myself, one of the sorriest things about our current world, I think, is that so few people have read through the whole Bible even once, let alone multiple times. Bible reading is for people who understand themselves to be sinful and wrong. Increasingly, as the moral categories that make life comfortable are left abandoned by the side of the road, reading the Bible is a hard slog. I would say, in fact, that reading the Bible isn’t an activity suitable for lazy or proud people, who think they already know everything. Arriving suddenly and unawares upon difficult passages describing the violence and degradation wrought by wicked people, those who imagine they have all the tools for understanding already at their disposal will conclude awful things, or give up immediately.
The whole world, from the most ancient of times, has known about polygamy and polyamory, or rather, to call it its rightful name, sexual immorality. Being with more than one person, being with someone who isn’t your wife, having more than one wife—all of these are bad. And they’re not just bad because they’re bad for women, which they are, they’re bad because they lie about the nature of God. It is true, however dimly the guy in the TikTok video is able to apprehend it, that sex is a spiritual business. But not because the man’s DNA literally colonizes the brain of the woman, hashtag science. Rather, it is the property of God always to be faithful and full of loving-kindness and mercy towards his people. Jesus does not offer up his Church as another option to wicked people who want to vent their lusts (the Old Man and the Levite). Jesus is not passive, unwilling to exact justice against those who injure the Church (King David doing nothing about his wicked children). Jesus is not promiscuous and self-serving (Samson and Solomon). Most importantly, Jesus isn’t helpless. His death, unlike ours, accomplishes something.
It’s a long road from the death of the Levite’s Concubine to the death of Jesus. The woman, if you read through the whole account, isn’t innocent. She had been unfaithful to the Levite and then run away back home, something that women all around the world do for good reasons and bad. But then he went and got her back, and, in haunting literary foreshadowing, the two find themselves in a recapitulation of Sodom. Only there are no angels to rescue them, only wicked men who abdicate all responsibility, let alone affection and love. By the end of the narrative, we face an anti-communion, the woman’s body cut up and sent around to all the tribes of Israel, not to bind the people together into one, but to precipitate a war. By the time you get to Jesus, the true innocent victim, the only hope for anyone, it’s perfectly reasonable to feel worn out and disoriented.
As I said, I always feel dread about having to read through the crucifixion, not one time, but four. On the surface, it seems like it will be yet one more ugly and useless death, one more act of selfishness, of pride, of laziness, of sin. And yet, it isn’t at all the same thing as all. Through the usual violence and degradation of Israel’s disobedience, God turned over our evil. Finally, someone stepped up to do the only thing that could be done—absorb all the sin and madness and do it to death, thereby raising the dead to life.
Honestly, don’t be polyamorous. It’s the stupidest and wickedest thing. There were good reasons the Western world abandoned it so long ago.
Have a nice day!
*that’s just a little joke
**”free speech and stuff” is from a different TikTok account—probably the one where a person melted down over having a received a Bible in the mail from Target instead of the desired “queer” books.
In case folks missed it here is ELCA “bishop” the Rev. Leila Ortiz of Metro DC on these types of relationships: “How do you judge and how do you point fingers and condemn people that don’t know any other way of being? People have been in polygamous relationships for decades, they have just been private about it. So now we are in a place where it is public. This isn’t just a fad. This is a reality that has always been.”
A word about how to deal with the Rt Rev Ortiz: do not greet her. Have nothing to do with false teachers like her so often found in the ELCA and other BS “mainline” denominations.
I’m sorry this sounds angry but I’m exhausted by these people. For years I bought the “we must have dialogue” shit. No more. What Matt and Anne have taught me is how to deal with these people and what to expect from them.
Both Polyamory and Polygamy just sound completely exhausting and expensive. It seems as if our culture has reached a new level of boredom and so folks have to generate drama wherever they can, or maybe it’s just a sort of base materialism in which there is no I and Thou that continues to inform folks over anything else. Whether it’s folks combing the scriptures to condone Polygamy or people pitting The Gospels against Paul, it’s clear that folks continue to read the Scriptures as if it’s a reference book used to support their already formed thesis, which has got to be one of the most boring ways to read anything. Ironically, even when I had repudiated Christianity, I couldn’t keep away from the Bible. The Book of Judges actually snagged me, and then I read through all of the Early Prophets (Judges-Kings). There’s some pretty messy human drama going on there, and one doesn’t have to be a Reformed theologian to grasp the dire state of the human condition. It’s not easy reading, I guess, but it is fascinating and compelling.