Really insightful. This paragraph is a powerful and succinct summary: "It’s only religious communities within secular societies that seem to be able to resist this tradeoff. Alloparenting makes it possible for religious moms to garner help not only from committed mates, but also from a wide-flung network of kin, grandparents, and co-believers, which increases their overall fitness while contributing in kind to fitness for other members of their communities."
Although I agree with and appreciate the above, t the pain, unfairness, and thrwarted lives caused by the sexual double standard remains. You mention this, but end up noting that Christianity broke new ground by at least overtly requiring men to be faithful also (and I agree with that, it was a cultural advance that helped women). But, it was lipservice; there were plenty of loopholes. Just pretend you aren't having extrapair sex (if you were a man). Religions gave men paternity certainty and handed them dominion over women; allowing high-status men to reap the benefits of their partners restricted sociosexuality while still having extra-pair mating (as long as they were pretended they weren't).
The need to control women's sexual agency (to give men paternity certainty and to reap those benefits of high-investment parenting by the culture at large) meant women's agency in general was painfully curtailed.
Thanks. I think the sexual double standard is a human-general problem, because cuckoldry is a bigger danger for men and men are larger and stronger and can often, unfortunately, force women to do what they want. Christianity, while not perfect, did a lot to push back against that double standard in a pretty unprecedented way. Even the Greco-Roman culture, which spurned polygamy, allowed men to go off and chase other women as much as they liked, especially if they were rich. Christian societies were the first large-scale societies to hold even high-status husbands to a monogamous standard. Certainly it didn't always work, but I don't think it was just lip service, either. To expect otherwise is to assume that norms have no influence on behavior, which is rarely true. And the culture of normative monogamy that developed in Europe seems to indicate that the norm was pretty strong: https://bigthink.com/series/devils-advocate/monogamy/
As for our present situation, I don't think the current post-1960s dispensation is any better than the Christian one in terms of women's experience of oppression. No, scratch that, I think it's far worse. Sure, you don't get stoned for being an adultress, but the relaxation of monogamous standards has mostly come at the expense of commitment, long-term provision, and stability, and it's benefited almost exclusively high-status males — who are taking the opportunity to move back toward the other, deeper attractor position in the human biocultural landscape, polygamy or serial monogamy (Exhibit A: Elon Musk). Polygamy is always bad for women: the intense competition for mates pushes men to look for younger and younger brides, so the age of first marriage is younger in polygamous societies, and the dangers that come with adolescent pregnancy, etc., are magnified, plus the competition between wives depresses total solidarity and reduces paternal investment by polygamous fathers. Also, lots of low-status, unmarried, loser men are a recipe for social chaos, as Joe Henrich argues. Social chaos always hits women hardest. So the sexual revolution has made the marriage/mating landscape far more precarious and reawakened the human default of sexual exploitation. And a *lot* of young women are not happy about living this way: https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/the-age-of-abandonment
HI, I really appreciate these points, and am still thinking about them:
Christian societies were the first large-scale societies to hold even high-status husbands to a monogamous standard.
and
Polygamy is always bad for women: the intense competition for mates pushes men to look for younger and younger brides, so the age of first marriage is younger in polygamous societies, and the dangers that come with adolescent pregnancy, etc., are magnified, plus the competition between wives depresses total solidarity and reduces paternal investment by polygamous fathers.
I agree that Christianity developed and spread innovative ideas that improved people's lives. One you didn't mention but it part of the parcel of innovations is: Christianity required that parties to marriage consent. What a huge boon this was for women because daughters couldn't be as easily outright sold.
And: I agree with this: but the relaxation of monogamous standards has mostly come at the expense of commitment, long-term provision, and stability, and it's benefited almost exclusively high-status males — who are taking the opportunity to move back toward the other, deeper attractor position in the human biocultural landscape, polygamy or serial monogamy (Exhibit A: Elon Musk)
But: vis-a-vis secular norms vs. religious norms; for women, this is more a situation of contrasting advantages and disadvantages.
Right, marriage consent was a big part of it. And like Joe Henrich points out, so were bans on cousin marriage (forced communities to spread out looking for marriageable partners, reduced the dominance of clans and elders over young women).
Sure, it's pluses and minuses for everyone. But for people who are looking for high-commitment, long-term mates, the religious norms tend to look more attractive.
Regarding the disadvantages of polygyny -- I wondered how widespread this is today and googled, How many wives do Muslims have on average? This answer, from Quora:
is eye-opening. Is it global secular norms that have created monogamy through-out the Muslim world? or the impracticality of it? This observation from the Quora post was new to me: "Pakistani courts have even jailed men for marrying without the first wife's permission, a sign of Muslim society's increasing liberalisation and hardened stance against men misusing religious laws to subjugate women."
My understanding is that the Muslim rules for polygamy place a pretty high burden on men who want more than one wife. Like the Quora piece says, polygamy is accepted in Islam, but (with exceptions, probably more so in the past) not exactly encouraged. The change toward monogamy in younger generations is interesting, and I hadn't heard about it before. Maybe a Western prestige thing?
Whenever I read about people saying "I believe in biblical sexual morality," I wish I could ask them, "Does that mean you ignore sexual abuse? Because the Bible ignores sexual abuse." More specifically, the Bible does not condemn the sexual abuse of children, nor does it condemn rape as a crime against a woman. Despite its lengthy prohibitions of incest, the Bible does not directly forbid father-daughter or father-son incest (although it does forbid sex with both a mother and her daughter). The Bible often fails to distinguish between sexual activity and sexual violence, and in some passages the Bible seems to condone sexual violence. The Bible was written in a culture that had a moral blind spot toward sexual abuse, and Western society has inherited that blind spot. Unfortunately, ignoring sexual abuse allows it to flourish.
So, Connor, even though this is an excellent essay on the science of religion and sex (and I would not be critiquing it if I were not a fan of your work), it suffers from our cultural blind spot by ignoring what science has to say about religion and sexual abuse. More than 100 reports in the scientific and professional literature, involving more than 35,000 subjects, indicate that rapists, child molesters, incestuous parents, and sexually motivated murderers are typically very conservative in their sexual and social values and sometimes more religious than average—suggesting that in many cases traditional sexual morality is a contributing factor in sexual abuse rather than a deterrent. At the First International Conference on the Treatment of Sex Offenders in 1989, there was broad agreement that Western societies with repressive sexual attitudes and traditional male/female roles are more likely to have high rates of all forms of sex crimes. So yes, the long-term sexual strategy has great benefits, but it also promotes a dark side of widespread sexual abuse.
I started writing a book on this subject thirty years ago, but the need to make a living prevented me from finishing it. But I have posted the draft online at hules.org, and I encourage anyone to read it and share your feedback, and I would love to discuss it with you. The research is decades old and needs to be updated, but I have no reason to think that new data would support a different conclusion.
Although your essay does not suggest that we just turn back the clock and go back to the way society used to be, I think it could easily be misread as suggesting it. If we want to create a society that actively values monogamy without the horrid side effects of abuse, we need to create a new ethical and spiritual synthesis based on the sanctity of bodily autonomy. It won't look like anything that has ever existed before in Western culture, and that's a good thing. I think the elaboration of the ethics of autonomy is where the Holy Spirit is working in contemporary society.
Hi John, I don't think what the Bible says or fails to say directly about sexual or other abuse means that the tradition it gave rise to is silent about it, because a lot of the ethical directives in Christianity have been extrapolated out from the Bible rather than being explicitly written in it. For example, Catholicism was and is *strongly* against all forms of incest, because an exegesis of what stands in the Bible about certain forms of incest logically seems to lead to prohibitions against any sexual relations with family members. The Church interpreted this very expansively, sometimes even prohibiting marriage between 3rd cousins. A more incisive example is slavery, which the Bible famously does not condemn in so many words. But the Gospels also show Jesus treating slaves and free people equally — for example, healing the centurion's slave and the high priest's slave — and St. Paul writes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, free nor slave. The universal ethic that proceeds from the Imago Dei led many Christian societies to slowly abolish slavery as a kind of rational consequence of working out what was implicit in the Bible's logic; there hasn't been slavery on English soil since the late 11th century, for example, and even after slavery made a comeback with the African slave trade and the colonization of the New World, it was Christian principles that powered the arguments that led to its re-abolition in the 19th century. So whether the Bible is "silent" on something only matters if one is *extremely* sola Scriptura Protestant, which clearly I am not. The Bible leaves a pattern that we work out under the guidance of tradition, and sexually abusing children (or anyone) is very clearly against that pattern. I would need to see a lot of data to convince me that Christian societies have somehow been more prone to sexual abuse of children than other societies — the Ottomans, for example, practiced child sexual slavery pretty much without batting an eye, and if you were an ancient Roman paterfamilias you could (and often did) rape your slave girls as much as you liked.
I'm generally not in agreement that the solution to any of our troubles is an ethic of autonomy. We are not autonomous. The bodies of husbands and wives actually do belong to one another, and if you're not married you got your body from the bodies of your parents (and from God). Of course living out this vision of interdependence entails a respect for the integrity of the other's body, but that's only the *beginning.* Sexual ethics has to be about a lot more than consent, for example. Consent is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.
As for whether sexual abusers are more sexually conservative, I was able to find a study that indeed suggested that more religious abusers tend to have more victims and more sex offense convictions (https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/religious-affiliations-among-adult-sexual-offenders). I could see this making sense in that, if you want to get access to kids or vulnerable victims without attracting too much scrutiny, displaying your religious creds would be one strategy. But that doesn't mean that religious people are more likely to be abusers — stats don't work like that. In fact there does seem to be evidence that specifically religiously conservative values are protective against child abuse rates (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25524270/), which are better predicted by indicators of community disorganization (poverty, etc.). Since church attendance is often protective against poverty (increases social connections and self-regulation), it would make sense that disorganization would be anti-correlated with religious conservatism. Other research finds that conservative Protestants have more satisfying marriages and lower spousal abuse rates than the nonreligious: https://www.christianitytoday.com/2017/12/evangelicals-domestic-violence-christian-men-domestic-abuse/
…So, overall, I don't think there's too big a hole in what I'm arguing here. Thanks for reading, as always.
Really insightful. This paragraph is a powerful and succinct summary: "It’s only religious communities within secular societies that seem to be able to resist this tradeoff. Alloparenting makes it possible for religious moms to garner help not only from committed mates, but also from a wide-flung network of kin, grandparents, and co-believers, which increases their overall fitness while contributing in kind to fitness for other members of their communities."
Although I agree with and appreciate the above, t the pain, unfairness, and thrwarted lives caused by the sexual double standard remains. You mention this, but end up noting that Christianity broke new ground by at least overtly requiring men to be faithful also (and I agree with that, it was a cultural advance that helped women). But, it was lipservice; there were plenty of loopholes. Just pretend you aren't having extrapair sex (if you were a man). Religions gave men paternity certainty and handed them dominion over women; allowing high-status men to reap the benefits of their partners restricted sociosexuality while still having extra-pair mating (as long as they were pretended they weren't).
The need to control women's sexual agency (to give men paternity certainty and to reap those benefits of high-investment parenting by the culture at large) meant women's agency in general was painfully curtailed.
Thanks. I think the sexual double standard is a human-general problem, because cuckoldry is a bigger danger for men and men are larger and stronger and can often, unfortunately, force women to do what they want. Christianity, while not perfect, did a lot to push back against that double standard in a pretty unprecedented way. Even the Greco-Roman culture, which spurned polygamy, allowed men to go off and chase other women as much as they liked, especially if they were rich. Christian societies were the first large-scale societies to hold even high-status husbands to a monogamous standard. Certainly it didn't always work, but I don't think it was just lip service, either. To expect otherwise is to assume that norms have no influence on behavior, which is rarely true. And the culture of normative monogamy that developed in Europe seems to indicate that the norm was pretty strong: https://bigthink.com/series/devils-advocate/monogamy/
As for our present situation, I don't think the current post-1960s dispensation is any better than the Christian one in terms of women's experience of oppression. No, scratch that, I think it's far worse. Sure, you don't get stoned for being an adultress, but the relaxation of monogamous standards has mostly come at the expense of commitment, long-term provision, and stability, and it's benefited almost exclusively high-status males — who are taking the opportunity to move back toward the other, deeper attractor position in the human biocultural landscape, polygamy or serial monogamy (Exhibit A: Elon Musk). Polygamy is always bad for women: the intense competition for mates pushes men to look for younger and younger brides, so the age of first marriage is younger in polygamous societies, and the dangers that come with adolescent pregnancy, etc., are magnified, plus the competition between wives depresses total solidarity and reduces paternal investment by polygamous fathers. Also, lots of low-status, unmarried, loser men are a recipe for social chaos, as Joe Henrich argues. Social chaos always hits women hardest. So the sexual revolution has made the marriage/mating landscape far more precarious and reawakened the human default of sexual exploitation. And a *lot* of young women are not happy about living this way: https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/the-age-of-abandonment
HI, I really appreciate these points, and am still thinking about them:
Christian societies were the first large-scale societies to hold even high-status husbands to a monogamous standard.
and
Polygamy is always bad for women: the intense competition for mates pushes men to look for younger and younger brides, so the age of first marriage is younger in polygamous societies, and the dangers that come with adolescent pregnancy, etc., are magnified, plus the competition between wives depresses total solidarity and reduces paternal investment by polygamous fathers.
I agree that Christianity developed and spread innovative ideas that improved people's lives. One you didn't mention but it part of the parcel of innovations is: Christianity required that parties to marriage consent. What a huge boon this was for women because daughters couldn't be as easily outright sold.
And: I agree with this: but the relaxation of monogamous standards has mostly come at the expense of commitment, long-term provision, and stability, and it's benefited almost exclusively high-status males — who are taking the opportunity to move back toward the other, deeper attractor position in the human biocultural landscape, polygamy or serial monogamy (Exhibit A: Elon Musk)
But: vis-a-vis secular norms vs. religious norms; for women, this is more a situation of contrasting advantages and disadvantages.
Right, marriage consent was a big part of it. And like Joe Henrich points out, so were bans on cousin marriage (forced communities to spread out looking for marriageable partners, reduced the dominance of clans and elders over young women).
Sure, it's pluses and minuses for everyone. But for people who are looking for high-commitment, long-term mates, the religious norms tend to look more attractive.
Regarding the disadvantages of polygyny -- I wondered how widespread this is today and googled, How many wives do Muslims have on average? This answer, from Quora:
https://qr.ae/p2qSs3.
is eye-opening. Is it global secular norms that have created monogamy through-out the Muslim world? or the impracticality of it? This observation from the Quora post was new to me: "Pakistani courts have even jailed men for marrying without the first wife's permission, a sign of Muslim society's increasing liberalisation and hardened stance against men misusing religious laws to subjugate women."
My understanding is that the Muslim rules for polygamy place a pretty high burden on men who want more than one wife. Like the Quora piece says, polygamy is accepted in Islam, but (with exceptions, probably more so in the past) not exactly encouraged. The change toward monogamy in younger generations is interesting, and I hadn't heard about it before. Maybe a Western prestige thing?
It takes about 20 years to launch a healthy child into the world as an adult, 20 years in a safe and stable home.
And—how did I not foresee?—parenting doesn't stop then, either.
Unless it's just a single mom or dad with a series of boyfriends/girlfriends. Then the kids might never become adults.
Whenever I read about people saying "I believe in biblical sexual morality," I wish I could ask them, "Does that mean you ignore sexual abuse? Because the Bible ignores sexual abuse." More specifically, the Bible does not condemn the sexual abuse of children, nor does it condemn rape as a crime against a woman. Despite its lengthy prohibitions of incest, the Bible does not directly forbid father-daughter or father-son incest (although it does forbid sex with both a mother and her daughter). The Bible often fails to distinguish between sexual activity and sexual violence, and in some passages the Bible seems to condone sexual violence. The Bible was written in a culture that had a moral blind spot toward sexual abuse, and Western society has inherited that blind spot. Unfortunately, ignoring sexual abuse allows it to flourish.
So, Connor, even though this is an excellent essay on the science of religion and sex (and I would not be critiquing it if I were not a fan of your work), it suffers from our cultural blind spot by ignoring what science has to say about religion and sexual abuse. More than 100 reports in the scientific and professional literature, involving more than 35,000 subjects, indicate that rapists, child molesters, incestuous parents, and sexually motivated murderers are typically very conservative in their sexual and social values and sometimes more religious than average—suggesting that in many cases traditional sexual morality is a contributing factor in sexual abuse rather than a deterrent. At the First International Conference on the Treatment of Sex Offenders in 1989, there was broad agreement that Western societies with repressive sexual attitudes and traditional male/female roles are more likely to have high rates of all forms of sex crimes. So yes, the long-term sexual strategy has great benefits, but it also promotes a dark side of widespread sexual abuse.
I started writing a book on this subject thirty years ago, but the need to make a living prevented me from finishing it. But I have posted the draft online at hules.org, and I encourage anyone to read it and share your feedback, and I would love to discuss it with you. The research is decades old and needs to be updated, but I have no reason to think that new data would support a different conclusion.
Although your essay does not suggest that we just turn back the clock and go back to the way society used to be, I think it could easily be misread as suggesting it. If we want to create a society that actively values monogamy without the horrid side effects of abuse, we need to create a new ethical and spiritual synthesis based on the sanctity of bodily autonomy. It won't look like anything that has ever existed before in Western culture, and that's a good thing. I think the elaboration of the ethics of autonomy is where the Holy Spirit is working in contemporary society.
Hi John, I don't think what the Bible says or fails to say directly about sexual or other abuse means that the tradition it gave rise to is silent about it, because a lot of the ethical directives in Christianity have been extrapolated out from the Bible rather than being explicitly written in it. For example, Catholicism was and is *strongly* against all forms of incest, because an exegesis of what stands in the Bible about certain forms of incest logically seems to lead to prohibitions against any sexual relations with family members. The Church interpreted this very expansively, sometimes even prohibiting marriage between 3rd cousins. A more incisive example is slavery, which the Bible famously does not condemn in so many words. But the Gospels also show Jesus treating slaves and free people equally — for example, healing the centurion's slave and the high priest's slave — and St. Paul writes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, free nor slave. The universal ethic that proceeds from the Imago Dei led many Christian societies to slowly abolish slavery as a kind of rational consequence of working out what was implicit in the Bible's logic; there hasn't been slavery on English soil since the late 11th century, for example, and even after slavery made a comeback with the African slave trade and the colonization of the New World, it was Christian principles that powered the arguments that led to its re-abolition in the 19th century. So whether the Bible is "silent" on something only matters if one is *extremely* sola Scriptura Protestant, which clearly I am not. The Bible leaves a pattern that we work out under the guidance of tradition, and sexually abusing children (or anyone) is very clearly against that pattern. I would need to see a lot of data to convince me that Christian societies have somehow been more prone to sexual abuse of children than other societies — the Ottomans, for example, practiced child sexual slavery pretty much without batting an eye, and if you were an ancient Roman paterfamilias you could (and often did) rape your slave girls as much as you liked.
I'm generally not in agreement that the solution to any of our troubles is an ethic of autonomy. We are not autonomous. The bodies of husbands and wives actually do belong to one another, and if you're not married you got your body from the bodies of your parents (and from God). Of course living out this vision of interdependence entails a respect for the integrity of the other's body, but that's only the *beginning.* Sexual ethics has to be about a lot more than consent, for example. Consent is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.
As for whether sexual abusers are more sexually conservative, I was able to find a study that indeed suggested that more religious abusers tend to have more victims and more sex offense convictions (https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/religious-affiliations-among-adult-sexual-offenders). I could see this making sense in that, if you want to get access to kids or vulnerable victims without attracting too much scrutiny, displaying your religious creds would be one strategy. But that doesn't mean that religious people are more likely to be abusers — stats don't work like that. In fact there does seem to be evidence that specifically religiously conservative values are protective against child abuse rates (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25524270/), which are better predicted by indicators of community disorganization (poverty, etc.). Since church attendance is often protective against poverty (increases social connections and self-regulation), it would make sense that disorganization would be anti-correlated with religious conservatism. Other research finds that conservative Protestants have more satisfying marriages and lower spousal abuse rates than the nonreligious: https://www.christianitytoday.com/2017/12/evangelicals-domestic-violence-christian-men-domestic-abuse/
…So, overall, I don't think there's too big a hole in what I'm arguing here. Thanks for reading, as always.