I dropped out of the marriage discussion after a couple posts, but Lynn has gone on with a lot of interesting stuff, including a link to this roundup of pro-Christian-polygamy sites.
This reminds me that one question I've asked various people over the years, and have never gotten a good answer to, is when and why polygamy came to be banned in Christendom. I think one reason I don't get a good answer is that most people have never wondered that; they think of monogamy as the norm. But anthropologists say something like 80% of the societies known in history have allowed polygyny (multiple wives for one husband), so I think it's worth asking why our society became the biggest and most glaring exception. Especially since, apart from the Greeks and Romans, polygyny seems to have been widespread in Europe at one time.
In the link above, Al-Muhajabah says, "The famous Christian thinker Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) commented that polygyny had 'recently' been banned among Christians since it was not a Roman custom and Christianity was now to be the official religion of the Roman Empire." I have heard elsewhere, however, that the Church didn't get around to officially banning it until the eleventh century, when it got into the marriage business much more formally than it had been before.
It's also interesting how, once polygyny did go out of style in Europe, it never seriously threatened to come back. Al-Muhajabah says Martin Luther advocated its return, but this seems to have had few takers. When Henry VIII split from the Church he wanted to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, but he never hit on polygyny as perhaps the more obvious solution to his son problem. Although Jesus explicitly prohibited divorce but never said a word about polygyny, the latter has remained far more taboo among Christians than the former.
Al-Muhajabah's links have a bit of info on this, but they have an obvious agenda. I would be interested in hearing more from other sources. Anyone know?
Posted by Camassia at July 24, 2003 10:54 AM | TrackBackCamassia:
I think you've got your answer already: it's a Roman thing. Which is to say, it's a thing of laws: Roman, ergo totalitarian. Lex + Rex.
But, one must also consider the role of the development of romantic love in the Middle Ages...
--Rob
Posted by: Rob on July 24, 2003 05:15 PMFYI, here's what Fr. John Echert says concerning polygamy:
While polygamy was clearly practiced in ancient biblical times, it was not the ideal intended by God for the union of a man and woman. There are several OT texts which bear upon this matter and support the ideal of monogamy, beginning with Genesis:
2:21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; 2:22 and the rib which the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 2:23 Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." 2:24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.
It is this very text (vs. 24) which our Lord quotes in response to the question of divorce, to which text he adds a further teaching, “Therefore what God has joined, no one must divide.” While we traditionally associate this with the question of divorce, it would also apply by extension to a prohibition of polygamy. For our Lord did not teach that the three or four or five become one. Once a man and woman have given themselves to each other in this inseparable bond, it would act against the bond to attempt to give oneself to another partner simultaneously. So what the Church teaches in this regard is firmly rooted and supported in Sacred Scripture.
The first known instance of polygamy is ascribed to the abusive figure Lamech, descended in the wicked line of Cain, as we read in Genesis:
16: Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden. 17: Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. 18: To Enoch was born Irad; and Irad was the father of Me-hu'ja-el, and Me-hu'ja-el the father of Me-thu'sha-el, and Me-thu'sha-el the father of Lamech. 19: And Lamech took two wives; the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. 20: Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have cattle. 21: His brother's name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. 22: Zillah bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. The sister of Tubal-cain was Na'amah. 23: Lamech said to his wives: "Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, hearken to what I say: I have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. 24: If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold."
Though God tolerated polygamy through much of the early period of the Old Testament, it appears that following upon the exile period (6th CBC), the practice of polygamy had pretty much dissipated within Judaism. And beyond Genesis, the Wisdom writings such as the book of Proverbs suggest monogamy as the ideal:
18:22 He who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor from the LORD.
While polygamy fell short of the original order of creation, we should not regard it as something so intrinsically evil such that it could never be allowed. As with divorce and remarriage in Mosaic times, which was a concession allowed by God because of the people were “stiff-necked,” so it would seem with polygamy in more ancient times. And frankly, there were some practical advantages to polygamy in the ancient nomadic world. For larger family units allowed for a safer and more stable existence in a world without walls and gates, at least for nomadic types. But as civilization became more developed and cities were more common and most especially once Jerusalem was established, there was less need or allowance for multiple wives and concubines. The Patriarch Jacob had two wives and two concubines (handmaidens of his wives) and from these four were fathered the Twelve Tribes of Israel. So while not the ideal we must not be too quick to judge the ancient world by the standard of the modern world and the requirements of the New Covenant, which restores man and even elevates him above the original natural order of creation.
Posted by: TS on July 25, 2003 06:49 AMTertullian was one early Christian writer who advocated monogamy (http://www.catholicfirst.com/TheFaith/ChurchFathers/Volume04/Tertullian43.htm).
The one thing that I know about Luther is that he advocated that in cases where a husband was impotent, the wife should be allowed, with his consent, to privately take a second partner (http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/History/teaching/protref/women/WR0912.htm).
I recall when I was in Nairobi in the 1980s seeing, in a bookstore, books discussing whether Christianity could be reconciled with polygamy.
The prohibition of polygamy is Indo-European as old as and 2.000 years before Christ.
Neither Jesus nor the Apostles prohibtedit,but it became "Christian" when Christian became = Roman-Greek
Read this article, please:
The four pillars of Indo-European Social Order
The Indo-European Civilization, from which Romans and Greeks were a part, is also our civilization. We are very proud of it, and rightly so. Nevertheless, its social order is absolutely incompatible with Christianity and its message. It may seem a contradiction to praise the achievements of the Indo-European civilization and, at the same time, to denounce its social principles as incompatible with Christianity, but such phenomena are usual: for instance, western democracy is the consequence or reaction against western absolutism, and the welfare state is the consequence of the incredible human abuses of the industrial revolution, and so on. Marx would say (and, by the way, I am not a Marxist) that the world progresses because and by means of its contradictions.
That my assertion is true, was first seen in the reaction of the Roman world to Christianity: they tried to exterminate it. They were killing Christians for 300 years!, and “rightly” so, because the Christian doctrine meant the dissolution of the Roman (Indo-European) social order. The rapid expansion of Christianity was, in fact, due, to the very inhuman 4 pillars of this social order (because Christianity was contrary to them, so, subjugated people saw in Christianity their liberation), because they were directed at keeping an exclusive elite in power and at the subjugation of the vast majority of the population. The rapid expansion of Islam in the VIII century was due to the same phenomenon: on the one hand, the southern part of the (ex-)Roman Empire could not accept the conversion of Christianity to Romanism; on the other, the Indo-European kingdoms in Persia and India, based on these subjugation principles, dissolved as a lump sugar, when a religion came, which said, that all people had the same rights. In Spain, for instance, bishops had become feudal lords, with large states, cultivated by slaves. When Moslems came and said that they were all equal and free and that land had to be distributed among them, the whole Visigothic kingdom crumbled in less than a year. Towns were opening their gates to welcome the “invaders” (by the way: I am also not a Moslem).
The first tragedy of Christianity is that, after 300 years massacre, especially after the persecution of Dioclecian, where almost all original texts of Christianity were burnt, Christians capitulated. Constantine “converted”, what meant, that he accepted the principles of Christianity at an “angelic level”: all men were equal, but only for God in heaven. Here, on earth, the Roman order continued. Of course, this meant a gigantic step forward, because slaves continued to be slaves, but since they had a soul, they had stopped to be animals, although only in theory and during the church mass. It was the same mockery that took place in America 130 years ago: slaves were hunted in Africa as animals, put on chains and forced to work, but they were baptized, because those good white Christians cared very much about the salvation of their souls. On the one hand a true mockery, but, on the other, the seeds were sown, till somebody would come and realize that the whole thing was absolutely contrary to the very principles of Christianity.
How did it begin?: some people say that the same way that Stalin perverted the Russian (socialist) Revolution and Napoleon the French (juridical) revolution, St. Paul perverted Christianity. I do not agree, and not only, out of respect for St. Paul.
If you remember that famous confrontation between St. Paul and St. Peter, in Antiochia, when the latter said that for a pagan to become Christian, he had first to take up the Jewish religion (by which, he was the first Moslem in history, although he rectified and accepted St. Paul’s point) and St. Paul retorted that this was not necessary, you will see that St. Peter wanted to make Christianity identical to the Semitic Civilization (this is Islam) and St. Paul said that Christianity was independent of ALL civilizations, by which he opened the door to the Roman (Indo-European) world becoming Christian. The problem and the disgrace is that ON THE THEORETICAL LEVEL, Romans converted to Christianity, BUT, IN PRACTICE, Christianity was the one which converted to Indo-Europeism, closing, this way, the door to all the other civilizations.
The bitter irony is that St. Peter would have made out of all Christians, Moslems (that is, Semites), and, 300 years after St. Paul, with Constantine, the Christians “abjured” from Christianity, to become Indo-Europeans.
Indo-Europeans were conquerors. Their civilization was based on war, subjugation of conquered people and the erection of an order, which would guarantee that these conquests would not dissolve in a few generations. Conquered people had to remain down for ever and victorious people up for ever. Don’t forget that Indo-Europeans were the ones who invented casts in India. In today’s vocabulary they were, what we call now FASCISTS, and with this word everything gets clearer. No wonder that Hitler was so fascinated by Aryans (synonym of Indo-Europeans) and that he considered them “the superior race”. The first -of course, only the first- problem with his conception was that “Aryans” are not a race, but a culture and a group of languages. Even less means “Aryan” a skin color: the Aryans in northern India, for instance, are quite dark, but they come from the same group, they have the same culture and they speak the same language(group) than the most pale Europeans.
In fact, fascism is nothing but the exacerbated attempt of the European middle classes to revert the consequences of the French Revolution, which was the one, which destroyed absolutism, the first of the 4 pillars. Nietsche, the German philosopher who inspired Hitler, was very right, when he condemned Christianity as the great enemy of what they considered the “Western and European Civilization”. Dioclecian and the other Roman Emperors would have agreed.
What are these four pillars? We have to understand, first, that the four of them are all mutually necessary for a social order based on war and conquest: once you remove one, the other three begin to crumble and this whole war-submission order falls down in a cloud of dust. It may take years and even generations, but the end is then inevitable.
On the contrary: if you keep the four of them, you can enjoy being a privileged upper class member for hundreds and even thousands of years, as the Indo-Europeans did: they started their war campaigns 2.000 years before Christ and managed to overrun Europe and Southern Asia till the North of India. Later, with their fainted Christianity, they conquered America (exterminating a good part of their inhabitants), Africa and Oceania. Folks, with our immoral methods, we have subjugated almost the Earth! A good record for ruthless conquerors, although for Christianity, judged with Evangelical principles, a little bit shameful.
And something obvious –once we see their description-: these four pillars need violence to be erected and more violence to be maintained. State violence and Church violence. It is a kind of vicious circle: they have been erected to build a system of privileged, dominating people. And they need more violence to prevent people to bring them down and/or desert from this system. No wonder that Indo-Europeans had always a taste for armies and war and, also, for the most horrendous weapons. When the Church converted to Greek-Romanism, it had to move the stress of Christianity, from love to threatening with the hell. Hell for those, who did not obey the absolute ruler, for those slaves, who wanted to be free, for those who contested an unjust system of property, for those who wanted human love. Where do you think the Protestant assert come from, that “you get salvation from faith and not from good deeds”? People were horrified at the perspective of going to hell, when they simply could not bear those inhuman commandments.
The four pillars are the following ones:
i. Absolutism or non-democracy.
I can hear the screams produced by this assertion: “How dare you to say that non-democracy is a pillar of the Indo-European Civilization, when they were just the Greeks who invented democracy”. Yes, but it did not mean what we understand as democracy. Literally, democracy means the power of the people, but the catch is that “people” did not mean for Greeks (and Romans) what we now call people, but the privileged ones and this, in Greece (and in Rome at the beginning), in very small towns. What we now call people, includes the lower classes and what at that time were the slaves. These last ones, as well as the foreigners, were not even “persons”, and this, up to the point, that the word “person” did not even exist: it is just the great conquest of Christianity, to consider all human beings equal, and thus, the Greek word “prosopo”, which means “theater mask” was given another meaning: the meaning of “person”. For instance, in Greek towns, in Ulysses times, the noble occupation was piracy: foreign ships were assaulted, robbed and their occupants killed or made slaves, because those people were not “persons”. “Senatus populusque romanus” cannot be translated as “The Senate and the people of Rome”, but “The Senate and the upper classes of Rome”. What we now call people, in Rome were the “plebs” plus the slaves.
Consequences:
a. When Rome grew too big and more and more people started to become “people”, this kind of “democracy” did not serve its purpose anymore, so that the Republic had to be transformed into Empire and the Emperor became absolute, by which, the upper classes preserved their monopoly of power.
b. The first pillar need pillars 2, 3 and 4 to prevent, what we now call “people”, from getting the power.
2. Slavery.
The unqualified working class had to be kept in slavery: otherwise they would have overrun the citadel of power and destroyed the whole system of privileges, incorporating ex-foreigners, who had been made slaves. Remember that it has taken a century in USA to remove all discriminations against all (black) ex-slaves. Slaves were not persons and even less “people”. So, see what a kind of democracy was the one invented by the Greeks.
What happens if you try to keep pillar 1 without pillar 2, that is, if you try to keep the privilege of ruling the country inside a social class, excluding the other social classes from political rights, without keeping them as slaves? People who are not slaves will not tolerate for a long time being second class citizens, nor the economic consequences of it, nor the economic inefficiency entailed by the fact that the upper class rules for its benefit. All revolutions have started this way (and this is also the way communism crumbled, once the people got a little bit of freedom): a small class rules the country and the majority gets fed up. To prevent this from happening, the lower classes have to be kept down as ignorant, poor and powerless as possible, that is, as slaves.
3. Absolute private property.
This absolute property right (preserved even by the French Revolution) and only abolished by the Russian Revolution (an extreme reaction) and by social-democracy in Europe, with the invention of the Welfare State, was stronger than all humanity considerations. Property was the right of “using and abusing” and was the next barrier to prevent free citizens, who had already become “people” and, even, citizens, from getting into the privileged circle of rulers. Remember that till the XX century, western democracies even restricted the right of vote to those who had a certain annual income.
4. Monogamy for 100% of people and prohibition of polygamy.
This is the very last barrier, designed to keep privileges and to prevent slaves and poor people from being assimilated along the generations, as well as to keep big fortunes and prevent their redistribution.
How does it work and why is it necessary?
The defense of this fourth pillar has been so strong, that we have been “hypnotized” and brought to believe that the question of polygamy is one of sexual nature, but, it only needs a little bit of reflection to see that what really matters about polygamy is the social part of it.
To start with, IF IT WERE SO, polygamy would not have been so banned in all western countries, nor polygamists so persecuted. EVEN MORE SO, if we open a book of history and learn that the prohibition of polygamy was introduced in the West by Romans and Greeks (and originated 2.000 years before Christ in the Indo-European civilization), who accepted every form of sexual perversion; then, it starts to be SUSPICIOUS that was polygamy was about was sex.
Why was then prostitution in big numbers admitted, fostered and pampered? Why did these “feminist-minded” (Ha, ha!!) Romans and Greeks prohibited polygamy and, at the same time, considered prostitution as something, more or less, holy?
There is also a kind of naïve truism in refusing to see the social component of polygamy and considering only the sexual part of it: sex is precisely the device invented by nature to bring people together and to overcome personal selfishness: everybody is selfish, till the moment he feels attracted sexually by somebody and feels compelled by sex to care about this other person. Every mechanism that fosters sex across races social classes and nations will be the best way to bring down these barriers; and, conversely: every barrier to sex between social classes, races and nations, will be the best way to keep a certain race, social class and nation isolated on the top. This applies in a much higher degree, logically, if it is not simply sex, but marriage, building families and having children.
To see how polygamy brings down barriers among races, social classes and nations, one only needs to realize that polygamy does not clone women and that we have a given number of women in excess of men. In fact, there are so few women in excess of men that, if polygamy is admitted, most rich men, who are the most likely ones who are able to maintain a big family, cannot get more than one wife, and they have to “import” them from:
a. Lower social classes
b. Foreign countries
c. Other races, producing, this way, interracial marriages, fostering the melting of social classes, nations and races; so, it ERODES PRIVILEGES, destroys little by little, along generations, the differences between rich and poor, nationals and foreigners, victorious and defeated people, masters and slaves, Indians, yellows, whites and….(what a blasphemy for racists!) even blacks.
Horror, folks!: polygamy will foster that masters get married to slave women. In a few generations you will assimilate all your slaves and lose, this way, that cheap labor.
If you remember that Thomas Jefferson had a black (slave) woman as a lover and got children with her, you can easily realize that, if polygamy had been admitted in his time, this woman and these children would have become Jefferson’s family and shared his heritage.
What happens when colonizers admit or prohibit polygamy?
Moslems, who admit polygamy, mixed with the blacks in Africa. Spaniards, who did not admit it officially, but practiced it, mixed with Indians and blacks in America, but destroyed their culture and sent blacks and Indians down to the inferior classes. In South America you have, as a consequence of it, millions of fatherless children on the streets. English, who were absolutely monogamous, where the most cruel colonizers and exterminated Indians in a systematic way. Dutch, in Indonesia, got the record on inhumanity. And in South Africa, English and Dutch wrote one of the most shameful pages of human history with Apartheid (they knew very well that even illegal polygamy was the true way to erode their absolute power, and made even sexual intercourse with blacks a criminal offense).
What happens to social classes when polygamy is admitted or prohibited?
The admission of polygamy is THE RECYCLING VALVE of rich and poor: rich men get married to poor women (they do not find enough women in the upper class, to be polygamous), so that income gets redistributed, plus there are not single women or widows, who end up in poverty, plus their (fatherless) children. Poor people do not hate rich people, since rich people are the salvation for many women of their class (a poor father hates the rich man, who uses his daughter as a prostitute, but loves the rich man, who gets married to his daughter). By the way: it also produces another result: no social hate, no proletarians, no chance for communism: communism dies out for lack of social hate, which is the fuel of communism. Proof: Moslem countries, even the poorest ones, were immune to communism.
So: Polygamy is not mainly about sex, but about power, classism, racism, the sharp and immovable division between poor and rich, keeping privileges and having cheap labor. Excess women should not get polygamously married, because their children would inherit and be equal to our children, but become lovers or prostitutes, because their children are inferior and do not inherit…..or stay single and not to have children, so that the whole heritage will remain among us, the white and rich ones.
Another proof that polygamy is not prohibited to protect women (which women, those who in absence of polygamy remain spinsters, single mothers or, even prostitutes?), is the invention of “illegitimate children”, made, both to prevent their access into fortune and the upper classes, as well as to “punish” their mothers. If women need to be punished for accepting polygamy, it simply means that it is not so bad for them.
TILL NOW, we have seen how pillar 2, 3 and 4 are needed to keep pillar 1, that is, why slavery, absolute property rights and 100% monogamy are needed to keep the absolute political power of the upper classes.
NOW, we can see it the other way round: if the political power is given to the people (true democracy and not Greek “democracy”), the other 3 pillars will also crumble.
If you admit that the political power does not belong to any given class or absolute king and admit freedom of assembly, press and speech, honest people will start protesting against slavery and colonization. It has taken 2 centuries since the French Revolution, but it has come as an inevitable consequence. Liberty of speech and press will annul and overrun the churches’ support to slavery. So, the second pillar will also crumble.
If slaves are liberated, they will be very poor. If they can vote, they will vote for socialist and, even, communists parties, so that to stop it, all political parties will have to limit property and to establish a welfare state. That is the end of the third pillar.
Once democracy is established, there are jobs for all and everybody gets an education, people will, first, realize that this distinction of “illegitimate” children as second-class citizens is inhuman and discriminatory: it will be abolished, as well as all kinds of repression against single mothers.
Once everybody has political rights and is educated, there is freedom of speech and press, all women will say that they have right to have sex, a family and children. If they do not get discriminated for it anymore, CALL IT THE WAY YOU WANT, but in the moment every woman has sex and children, since there are more women than men, this is polygamy.
Example: there is a rich northern country in Europe (higher per capita income than USA), where more than 40% of children are out of wedlock, whereas all women (single or married) and all children (“legitimate” or “illegitimate”, because this distinction does not exist anymore) have absolutely the same rights. Tell me: what is the difference between this and polygamy? If there is still any juridical difference in acquiring any rights because of the nature of the union between any man and any woman, the tendency is to suppress them, one by one, because, in a free country, why should anybody accept somebody’s “religious” preconceptions for acquiring any right in freely established human relations? Freedom of speech and of ideology is doing away with all this remnants.
For a time, as long as you want, there will be the fiction that “all marriages” are monogamous and that those relations, which are polygamous “are outside wedlock”.
In a certain moment, some people might want to live together in polygamous units. What can be done? Prohibiting it? How? Are you going to send to prison those people who live together the way they want and leave their children fatherless and motherless? Why? It is the most ridiculous “victimless crime”.
In a certain moment, people will invoke their civil liberties to do it, and freedom of speech and press will make it unbearable for any government.
The last defense will then be, not to “recognize officially” polygamous marriages. This will only deepen the discredit of “recognizing” marriages, which is today already serious enough.
In a certain moment, the churches will realize that, by prohibiting polygamy, they have just introduced another obstacle to family life, helped to promote divorce and promiscuity and just another push towards increasing the number of children without a stable family. In other words, that the churches, which were supposed to promote stable families and stable sexual life, were just working in the opposite direction, WITHOUT COMING CLOSER TO THEIR OBJECTIVE.
One day, the churches will learn elementary arithmetic and realize that if you have in a society more women than men, once they have lost the power to keep excess women single by force and to punish single mothers, prohibiting polygamy is an ARITHMETICAL IMPOSSIBILITY, because, if people are prevented from doing it officially, they will do it unofficially.
The churches will realize that, by supporting the four pillars of Indo-European Civilization, they just fell in the third temptation of Jesus. Constantine, brought them to the top of the Roman Capitol and, showing them the whole Roman empire, told them: “All this Roman Empire will I give to you, if you kneel down before me and worship these four things, I need to keep my privileged classes at the top: Proclaim that the power of the Emperor is absolute, maintain slavery, proclaim that the property rights are absolute and prohibit polygamy”.
As a reward, they got the Roman Empire “Christianized”, but, of course, it was in reality the other way round: the churches got romanized, all other civilizations became incompatible with this weird "Christianity" and, along the centuries, as these pillars crumbled one after the other, the churches got discredited and people brought to think that Christianity was an inhuman religion, enemy of well-being and happiness of humanity.
The proverb says it: “this is the way the Devil pays, those who serve him”.
Churches have already started to realize that they committed some mistakes since Constantine till now. Even the present catholic Pope has apologized for “some mistakes” of the past and attributed them to “the mentality of those times”. Well, this is precisely what I am saying, but one has to be more precise. What does it mean “the mentality of those times”? Let us call this “mentality” and these “times” by its name: THE MENTALITY WAS THE INDO-EUROPEAN MENTALITY AND THE TIMES WERE THE TIMES, SINCE YEAR 300, WHEN THE CHURCH SURRENDERED TO CONSTANTINE.
By the way, why do you think that Jesus said to Satan, refusing to fall into this third temptation: “Get away, Satan, because it is written, thou shallt only worship God, thy Lord and only serve Him”?
Because God is a jealous person and does not like competition?
God is a person, but not in this sense. He is, before all, a metaphysical force (the one which brings evil to its self-destruction and good to its completion) and when He prohibits something it is, because He knows, the apple or the Kingdom, Satan is offering to us, is a poisoned one, which has in itself, the seed of its destruction.
Jesus knew that if He had accepted Satan’s offer, He would have got, of course, the whole world and could have baptized all humanity without any pain and effort, BUT, submitted to the condition that He would add SOME CORRECTIONS to His Gospel. This corrections -for instance, admitting slavery- would have worked for a time (along with a lot of sufferance for the slaves), but would have, eventually, discredited Him and His Gospel.
Well, this is just what has happened to the churches and to our notorious European “Christianity”, which, for instance, went to America to evangelize” Indians, with the result of exterminating them in a good part and went to Africa to “evangelize” the Africans, transforming them into slaves and killing them by millions.
These have been just two examples, but I could add all the others, including the sea of tears, sufferance and poverty caused by the awful sexual repression, needed to keep alive the fiction that 100% of the families are monogamous.