This episode of the Savage Lovecast is brought to you by Soaking Wet by VB Health, the world's first probiotic specifically designed for vaginal and vulva health and wellness. Visit soakingwet.com and use code SAVAGE for 10% off or click the link in this episode's show notes. You're listening to Sex and Politics at savage.love. Sex and Politics. Hey there, Micro Savage Lovecast listeners. We wanted to share a little taste of sex and politics with you. Sex and Politics is a bonus podcast we produce every once in a while for our Magnum subs. Sex and Politics is just one of the perks for subs, along with more calls and guests on the Lovecast, more questions and Savage Love, the column, and invites to Savage Love Live Zoom hangouts. In this installment of Sex and Politics, I speak with author, activist, speaker, Matthew Vines. Vines was a student at Harvard in 2012 when he took a leave of absence to study the Bible and homosexuality. He was an evangelical Christian kid going to Harvard. He went home to the church in Wichita, Kansas, where he had been raised, and gave a speech to the congregation where he'd been raised about why the church should accept gay people and accept gay relationships. That went on to become a book called God and the Gay Christian, the biblical case in support of same-sex relationships. And Matthew went on to found the Reformation Project, which works with evangelical Christian communities to help them get the fuck over their hatred and fear of gay men and lesbians and bisexual people and our relationships. When you look at trend lines among evangelical Christians, what you see over the last decade and change is growing support for same-sex marriage, Matthew Vines can take a great share of the credit for that growing support. I invited Matthew to come on the show and talk. Again, he was a guest a long time ago, but we haven't spoken in at least 10 years. And I invited Matthew back on the show to talk about a speech he recently gave at a Reformation Project conference called Why Monogamy Matters, making the case for monogamous relationships and specifically making the case for why gay people, gay men in particular, gay men like the gay man whose voice you can hear right now, should embrace monogamy and leave non-monogamy behind. Sex and Politics is usually only available for our Magnum subs. Here's a 20-minute selection for you, a micro listener, from my hour-long conversation with Matthew. The Magnum version goes on a lot longer. If you want to hear that, you can subscribe at savage.love. Whether you subscribe or not, we appreciate your support. We appreciate that you listen. And we hope you enjoy this selection from my conversation with Matthew Vines. Matthew, welcome to Sex and Politics. It's good to see you again. It's been a while. It is great to see you. It's been since 2015, I think. So the first thing I noticed when I watched your video was you have a ring on your finger now that you very pointedly referenced during it. So you got married since we talked last a decade ago. Congratulations. Thank you so much. I got married in 2022. If I move my camera here, you can see that's my husband, Zach, and me at a different wedding, not our wedding. So yeah, life is great. And I am super grateful to live in a country that has same-sex marriage, and we're going to keep it. So for the single gays out there listening who would like to be married, which ain't all of them, there are people who don't want to be married, people who are partners who don't want to be married, but there are single guys out there here from all the time who'd like a husband. I found mine drunk and high in a gay bar. How'd you find yours? Not, that was not my. I was guessing it was probably not your origin story. We met on OKCupid. So, which is a shame that it feels like that one has kind of died. Yeah, it has kind of. That platform, because I liked it a lot because of how many questions you could ask or questions you could answer to get compatibility scores and just a much more detailed kind of biography that you could upload if you wanted to. But so it worked. It worked for me. And I'm going to assume based on the title of your video and having now watched Why Monogamy Matters two or three times that you guys are in a monogamous relationship. No. So I believe monogamy is important for other people, but not for me. OK, well, I guess we can wrap this interview up now. Do as I say, not as I do. No, yes, yes. It is a monogamous relationship, yes. Okay, so let's talk about the video. You opened the video by talking about right-wing conservative critiques of same-sex marriage before we won same-sex marriage, the slippery slope arguments that they made. And all of them seem to end with somebody fucking a dog. Like everybody, you quote Bill O'Reilly, prominent right-wing Christian conservative thought leaders, their thoughts always led up to somebody's going to fuck a dog or try to marry a dog. And that prediction, that concern has not come to pass. Nobody's marrying their dogs right now. No one is. And it doesn't seem to be on the horizon. And that's good. So we can claim victory on that one. You do throw them a bone in that there's one concern religious conservatives raised that you think one item that they cited that might be encountered on the slippery slope down to hell if we legalize same-sex marriage. And what is that? What is that that they may have been right about? Well, I think partially right. So the frequent prediction was, oh, polygamy is going to be legalized. And that's not happened. And that's not likely to happen anytime soon. I don't think that will ever happen in our society, although you can never predict too much thousands of years in the future. But more it's attitudes about monogamy. So I think attitude, it's the acceptance of non-monogamy, polyamorous relationships even polygamy in theory when it asked in polls has risen significantly So you seen support for polygamy has gone from 7 to 21 And especially among younger generations about half of the youngest cohort are now say that non is acceptable And so that's been a huge generational shift that has also coincided with an increasing war of the sexes that we could get into later as well. But yeah, so I think that on that issue, part of the argument was, so does gay marriage inevitably lead to the acceptance of non-monogamy? And I think it depends entirely on what your argument for gay marriage is. If the argument for gay marriage is love is love and people should be able to do whatever they want, then yeah, there's really no reason not to be okay with non-monogamy. But if you have a more conservative Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Rauch style argument for same-sex marriage, which is the one that persuaded me in the first place, which is about trying to integrate gay people into these domesticating institutions of society, the one that I guess the queer theorists find so appalling. But if that's what persuaded you to support same-sex marriage, then you're not going to be excited about challenging the norm of monogamy. So there were three kind of arguments for same-sex marriage that you unpack, or three camps in the pro side. And there was a conservative argument for same-sex marriage, a liberal argument, and a liberationist argument. Can you quickly characterize all three of those arguments for us? Yes. So the conservative argument is basically the Andrew Sullivan argument, the virtually normal argument. that being gay, gay people exist. And because gay people exist, gay people should have the same opportunity to pursue relationships. People who come from a family should be able to form a family of their own. That marriage is good because it is about promoting stability, is about promoting exclusive commitment, fidelity, monogamy, family formation, child welfare, all of these things. And that if that's good for straight people, it's also good for gay people. I find this a highly persuasive argument. It's really Andrew's arguments that more than anyone else persuaded me as a young evangelical Christian to change my mind about same-sex marriage before I could ever even question whether or not I might be gay. Then there's the more liberal argument, which I also agree with, which is just equal rights, that everybody deserves equality under the law, equal protection under the law. Gay people exist, therefore they deserve equal protection under the law. It's less about the common good aspect of marriage and more about the individual rights aspect, but I agree with both of them. The third argument is the liberationist argument, and that is what's often called sex positivity. There's the idea that all consenting acts between adults should be accepted. Maybe not necessarily celebrated, but there shouldn't be a stigma against any consensual sex between adults. Basically, anybody who has a problem with that is an oppressor, a dinosaur, and we just need to move into the polyamorous utopia of the future, at least as an option. Whether everybody wants to do it or not, it should be something everybody's cool with. I don't know if everybody who opposes that that if two consenting adults want to do it, it should be up to them and they shouldn't face judgment or stigma. I don't think they're necessarily oppressors. I just think they're irrelevant. You can think that it's not a good idea for two people to have sex because one of them happens to be married to somebody else or they're not married to each other or all either of them might be interested in is casual sex. You can think that that's wrong and bad, but you can't slap the dick out anybody else's mouth with your thoughts. So how is a liberationist argument in any way coercive of people who disapprove? Like everyone's still allowed to disapprove. Just like I remember arguing with Christians, with conservative straight Christians who would say they don't accept homosexuality. And I would look at them and say, it's not a package on your porch you need to sign for. Like it doesn't matter whether you accept my homosexuality or not. And I feel the same reaction here that, okay, so some people disapprove of the kind of casual sex that my husband and I had in the bar the night we met before we went home that led to marriage and family. But I don't give a flying fuck. And how does their disapproval matter? Well, at one level, it doesn't. You shouldn't have to care in the sense that you should have the freedom to make those choices for yourself as an adult in a free country. So the government should not be imposing restrictions on whether or not people can have hookups. It's more about a question of what norms are most beneficial for society as a whole and for most people to be promoting as the expectation or the norm for what is helpful and healthy for most people. And the promotion of hookup culture essentially is a net negative for the average person, Not for everyone. Some people will decide that that was definitely something that they enjoyed and was beneficial to them. But for the average person, I think that hookup culture does not serve them well. And that's especially true even more for women than it is for men. So it's not about trying to say people shouldn't be allowed to do it. It's more a question of what should we be nudging people toward because we're always nudging people toward or away from something just at the level of cultural norms. So I don't mean it in a coercive sense of state power. I don't favor that at all. But more just what are healthy cultural norms to have. And I don't think that the cultural – and it's also this idea that I don't think that private sexual behavior has no impact outside of the people who engage in it. because it's just a reality that if you are a young woman on a college campus in a liberal city today and you want a boyfriend, you're going to feel much more pressure to have sex earlier on than a young woman on a college campus 50 years ago would have because norms around premarital sex have changed significantly, in large part due to the advent of the pill. There's a lot of changes that have affected that, but it does mean that there's a lot of – Consent is a little bit of a squishy concept because what we are willing to consent to is shaped by our context, by our incentive structures around us. So I don't think it's completely irrelevant if everybody around you is, you know, wanting to have regular orgies. That not going to have zero impact on Europe in terms of that will shape the context that you are in when it comes to dating possibilities However that doesn mean you should get to coerce other people in terms of forcibly preventing them from doing that But it does mean I think it worth being able to have a conversation around what is beneficial for most people You're the first person who's talked about nudging in an honest kind of way in these conversations. I've read Louise Perry. I've had other people who have critiqued the sexual revolution, hookup culture on the show to talk about it. And they'll say things like nobody should be doing kink, that bondage in S&M, to take one example, is wrong. And my follow-up question is always, and then what? Like what is the enforcement mechanism to prevent people who are interested in kink from exploring it with other consenting adults? You can think it's wrong, and now what? And there's never an answer to that because you would just tiptoe right into or you have to step right into a kind of fascistic is too strong a word here, but coercive cultural, not just nudging, but control to prevent people in the post-sexual revolution, post-internet pornography, post-hookup culture space for making their own choices and the choices that are right for them and their partners, whether their partners are life partners or tonight partners. and so to hear you talk about nudging we'll get we'll get more into that but i want i want to first like jump back into the the video uh why monogamy matters your lecture okay spend a lot of time on the fact that polygamy or polygyny different pronunciations we're going to hit the g we're not going to hit the g soft g hard g is the most predominant form of most cultures were polygamists Most cultures, men would have multiple wives. Certainly in the Old Testament, men have multiple wives. And the argument you make, you make a detailed argument about why these sorts of patriarchal cultures where women are hoarded by high status men are bad for women, bad for most men, except for high status men. And there's a reason we moved away from them. And in the New Testament, you say, Jesus is moving us away from those sorts of relationships, even though they're not specifically condemned. in the Old Testament or the New Testament, just like slavery isn't specifically condemned in the Old Testament or the New Testament. How is that relevant to people who are not religious, not part of church communities, that monogamy should be a norm because Jesus or because it would be bad for a church community? It does feel like the argument you make, except when you get onto gay people at the end, the argument you make is not accepting, although you argued very persuasively, God and the gay Christian and all political activism and public speaking, that the church should accept people in same-sex relationships. What you're arguing in this lecture is the church should not accept people in open or non-monogamous relationships. Make the case. Yes. Well, so I'm kind of doing two things in the talk. The talk was to a Christian audience, but there's two different arguments. So there's a Christian argument and a secular argument. I don't expect people who aren't Christians to care about a Christian argument. So that argument doesn't really apply to people who aren't Christians. You can jump from like minute 22 to minute 58. Or you can look at it as just a historical understanding of how our societies got to this point. I do think it's absolutely true that normative monogamy was only possible with the advent of Christianity because it took a tremendous amount of social pressure to tell people, specifically high-status men, that they can't have multiple wives. And it took centuries of Christian influence. Even Charlemagne still had I think a dozen wives. So it took many centuries of Christian influence to end polygamy among high-status men. And there's no way that that ever would have happened if it hadn't been for the power of the Catholic Church in particular. But it didn't make high status men monogamous. Like men were not monogamous. No, but it made them maritally monogamous. One wife, but men had access to concubines, sex workers, slaves. Yes, but Christianity stigmatized this heavily in a way that it was not stigmatized at all in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman era. So pre-Christian Greco-Roman society, women still had to be monogamous. That was always – they always had the short end of the stick. Men had to be monogamously married in ancient Greece and Rome, but they could have sex with basically whoever they wanted as long as that person wasn't the property of another free adult Roman male citizen. And that included their own slaves. It included all kinds of abuses that people didn't really turn their heads up at and that we would find horrifying. And a lot of the reason we find it horrifying is because of the Christian influence in saying that, no, men need to be sexually monogamous as well as maritally monogamous. That does not mean that all men practice that, but certainly not. But it does mean that the norms shifted substantially away from tolerating that and created a stigma around extramarital sex for men in a way that then actually helped tremendously to reduce the gender double standard that was quite overwhelming in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. So what were the benefits culturally, broadly, when monogamy became a norm and polygamy was shown? Yes, okay. So this would be the secular argument, right? So the Christian argument, I had to make the argument, but if people aren't Christian, I don't know. It's not going to be of much concern to them. I think that normative monogamy, and again, most marriages throughout history have been monogamous in terms of, I don't mean socially. I mean socially, not sexually. Okay, so there's a distinction here in anthropology between social monogamy as in you only have one legal spouse or one recognized spouse. That does not mean that the people are not – specifically the men. It's generally the men who are able to then sleep around with other people as well. But most marriages have been meritally monogamous throughout history. But 85% of society still permitted polygamy, polygamous marriage, marrying multiple partners. But that's only going to be – it's often not more than 10%, 15% of the men in society who are doing that. It's a numbers game. there's a limit to how many men can actually be married to multiple wives. And what you mean is 85% of all cultures that historically existed, not concurrently. On the anthropological record, yes. It's not like 85% of marriages now are polygamists. It's just when you look at all recorded human history. Exactly, yes. But 85 of cultures and societies allowed for polygamous marriage And overwhelmingly that is polygynous marriage right One man multiple wives It only 0 of marriages of societies on the anthropological record that allowed polyandry where a woman had multiple husbands. And typically, that's because the husbands were poor. They didn't want to separate the land of their family. The women were not having a ball, right? It wasn't like a fun status thing like it was for the men. So from a completely secular standpoint, my argument draws heavily on the work of Joseph Henrik. Are you familiar with this book? No. Okay, Joseph Hendrick is the chair of, I think, anthropology at Harvard. He wrote this book called The Weirdest People in the World, which is absolutely fantastic. And he comes from a completely non-religious secular standpoint. But his core argument is that the Roman Catholic Church, specifically its prohibition of polygamy and its prohibition of cousin marriage, is what created modern Western liberalism, enlightenment values, capitalism, democracy, and all of these things, because it is the only thing that was able to break up the intensive clan-based structures of pre-economy. medieval European societies that militated against being able to have large scale impersonal trust across society that allows for the scaling up of society in a stable way. So normative monogamy, according to Henrik, and he has very detailed research on this, significantly reduces violent crime because unmarried, the basic problem with polygamy is the math problem, that you have the most high-status men at the top of the social ladder who end up marrying multiple wives, and then you have a high number of men at the bottom of the social ladder who have no one to marry. Men who are unmarried are twice as likely to engage in all kinds of violent crimes, including rape, kidnapping, murder, and this destabilizes societies. But it's in the personal interests of the high-status men, even though it's not in the interest of society as a whole. So this is part of the theory for why Greece and Rome, even though they allowed men to have sex with many people outside of their wives, they limited marriage to one partner, right? Men could only marry one wife. And this is part of the thinking behind why Greece and Rome were unusually successful and unusually powerful, because it allows the societies to scale up much more than is possible when you have the kind of monopoly hoarding that happens in other societies that are highly polygynous societies. But Christianity then came along, and in my opinion, basically refined and sought to perfect this norm by saying, no, no, no, we don't just want marital monogamy, we also want sexual monogamy within marriage. I think this was a very good thing if you were a woman, a slave, or another low status person in the first century, because for the first time, now you had an external authority telling your husband or the head of the household that he either could not cheat on you or that he could not rape or abuse you. So I think that fundamentally, monogamy, although yes, it's seen as a very conservative thing, and in many ways, it is a conservative thing, in its original historical context, the Christian sexual revolution that mandated, socially mandated monogamy, both marriage and sexually, was a profoundly progressive reform for women and for other social groups who were not elite high status men. And it also laid the groundwork, as Henrik describes in tremendous detail, I'm so grateful for his work because he has so much more expertise than I could. It laid the groundwork for the development of impersonal institutions, universities, democracy, and all these things because it required people eventually, people used to all marry their cousins. This used to be incredibly common. Like most societies, people married their cousins because it's a power game. You don't want to break up your family's wealth and inheritance and land by marrying outside of the clan. And so everybody marries within the clan. Once you're no longer allowed to do that, once the Catholic church says, they didn't just ban cousin marriage, they banded up to the sixth degree by about 1000 AD. And so at that point, it forced people to go outside of their towns, outside of their clans to meet new people and to build affiliations and associations based on shared skills. This is where you see the rise of not only things like monasteries, but also the rise of voluntary associations, right? Traders, you know, guilds for this then leads to universities, all these things. Anyway, Hendrik makes a brilliant argument, I think, for why liberal democracy itself is a product of normative monogamy that was only possible through the influence of the Catholic Church in particular. Okay. You've said so much, I don't even know where to begin. I want to go all the way back to like how great it was for women on college campuses a few years ago before they could sign leases around property. I'm not saying no, no, no, no, no. And they were 5% of the student population. There are trade-offs. I'm just saying there are trade-offs. Okay. Also, I just want to say quickly here that there were successful societies that weren't Western Christian European descendants of Greco-Roman societies. Not that had constitutional governance. China has a successful society in history stretching back centuries. India, Persian Empire. Find me a non-authoritarian one. You can't have a democratic society. Were there successful societies that were complex and... Well, I also mean, it's not just, I mean, I'm talking about basic progressive values that are only possible through normative monogamy. Those progressive values include liberal democracy, and they include women's rights, and they include gay rights. There are no societies with polygamy where those things have ever existed. My conversation with Matthew Bynes went on for much longer, and Matthew gives a little sex advice with me at the end. That's on the Magnum version of the show, which you can subscribe to at savage.love. And hey, Matthew and I, we disagree vehemently about this subject, but we managed to maintain a polite vibe and a friendly vibe and make each other laugh throughout our conversation, which I think is a good model for all of us. If you would like to hear the whole thing, you can subscribe to the Magnum for a year for $49, or for one month for just $8. You can also gift the show to someone who you think would benefit from hearing it. Be sure to check out Matthew's book, God and the Gay Christian, The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships. It's a good gift if you are from an evangelical family that has not yet come around. And get on YouTube and check out Matthew's speech, Why Monogamy Matters, soon to be a book. Thank you for listening.
