by E. J. Graff
It took awhile—but radicalizing is exactly the right term. As Christianity consolidated from a lot of squabbling sects into a unified Roman Church, it pursued an astonishing mission that, eventually, all but brought down the Church. As it gained power across medieval Europe, the Church attempted to break open the tightly intermarried clans by insisting that it was illegal for them to “approach to any that is near kin to him, to uncover their nakedness” (Lev. 18:6). But what counts as near kin? Leviticus had been pretty explicit—but not, the Church decided, comprehensive enough, when it decided around 385 A.D. that that verse barred cousins from marrying. For the next thousand years, the Church kept changing its incest prohibitions, occasionally pulling back in to allow some individual to manipulate power by marrying close by, and then pushing it out wider and wider again. That included an extremely creative interpretation of the Genesis verse saying husband and wife became “one flesh”: because you and hubby were now one, your husband’s brother (even once you were widowed) and uncle and cousin and so on were just as off-limits as your own. The exegesis got even more creative: since you became “one flesh” by having sex, even if you’d had a single illicit roll in the hay with some boy, all his relatives were forever off-limits. And let’s not forget your godparents—or your parents’ or your brother’s godparents—and all their relatives, also one flesh with you in Christ. By the eleventh century, the Church was banning marriage as far out as the seventh degree, or fourth cousins—via blood, marriage, sex, or godparenthood.
Picture this geometrically, spinning out like a Calder mobile: you’re barred from marrying anyone, out to fourth cousins, to whom you’re related by ancestry, marriage, sex, or godparenthood. That might not mean too much in today’s Los Angeles, but for eleventh-century peasants it could easily bar everyone in the village and scores of miles beyond; for feudal lords, everyone within the clan; for aristocrats, just about every other aristocrat in Europe. Or as one historian puts it, men were forbidden to marry “all the marriageable girls they could possibly know and a great many more besides.”
Why? Why did the Church let its incest rules—based on the very same verses from which Jews created such skimpy prohibitions—get so ridiculously vast? Historians have speculated endlessly. The Church wrinkled its nose at marriage to begin with, of course, so making it hard for you to find a spouse might not have struck theologians as a problem. And—as a theological matter, at least—the Church disliked the earthly piling up of goods and power, precisely the goal of marrying in. What’s more, the Church was concerned about protecting the individual spirit: if individuals had to marry out instead of into the family, theoretically they could be treated less as pawns in the family power strategy and might even have some say in their partner. But most important, the goal of the Christian Church was the opposite of that of the Jews: it wanted to break open families into a wider society, bound not by ethnic or clan or tribal solidarities, with “no Greek or Jew, male or female,” united only in Christ.
And the Church succeeded. In forcing people to marry beyond kinship, to traffic emotionally and financially among many groups, the Church changed the face of the West. In flinging society open wide, it forced the West to find a way to organize society based on something other than clans. To put it differently, in part because incest rules barred people from putting kinship first, we now live in a world based on capital and the nation-state, an anomaly in world history and culture.
Catholicism also won a smaller political victory: with almost everyone forbidden, rulers across Europe had to bargain with bishops and popes to marry their chosen spouses. After all, Church administration was reasonable: you could always apply for a dispensation and—after paying enough fees—marry your brother’s godmother’s niece after all. Meanwhile, for people in unsatisfactory marriages (say, a marriage in which the wife was not producing any sons), the incest rules were a godsend: almost any marriage could be annulled. All you had to do was pay: pay some lawyer to dig up or invent a seventh-degree relation, pay enough dispensation fees to your ecclesiastical authorities to review your case, pay more dispensation fees to be free to marry again. Which is one reason the Church started asking, right there in the marriage ceremony, whether anyone knew a reason you two should not be married.
The incest system seriously backfired. The Protestants insisted that this side of Church doctrine—a scandalous and constant source of ecclesiastical litigation, ever-flowing dispensation fees, loopholes, manipulable decisions—was so far from reality as to be rotten, and they diminished incest back to a somewhat expanded version of the Leviticus limits. And yet it should be no surprise that changes in the incest rules can and have brought on the same feverish language of abomination and family collapse that we’ve seen elsewhere in this book. The late nineteenth century, for instance, saw a bitter debate over whether kinship by affinity—i.e., relationships through your spouse, living or dead—should be forbidden as incest. One nineteenth-century American quoted the Bible as saying that to allow a man to marry his dead brother’s widow “is an unclean thing. . . . Is there no danger of pollution to the soul, to the church, and to society from acts, for which Canaan vomited out its inhabitants? . . . It would destroy all order and morality in society to allow men to marry their relatives.” Less feverishly but with no less vehemence, an American judge insisted that marriages between in-laws were horrifying to consider, since “prohibitions of natural law are of absolute, uniform, and universal obligation . . . founded in the common reason and acknowledged duty of mankind, sanctioned by immemorial usages.” In 1840, the American Presbyterians, in an uproar, defrocked a North Carolina minister who “incestuously” married his dead wife’s sister.
But by the nineteenth century, the financial and emotional realities of family had shrunk down to the new, nuclear version—and so there was no longer any justification for allowing outdated biblical strictures to guide secular law. “Natural” law or not, no one would any longer consider actually outlawing marriage to your in-laws.
So what? Why, except for its entertainment value, should we care about these blips in the marriage wars, a battle that has nothing to do with “real” incest—dad/daughter, mom/son, brother/sister? First, they remind us that the most fundamental marriage rules— even the rules of incest—are not natural but social, revised by each culture to match its sense of justice and purpose. Which means that, throughout history, groups with profound disagreements over what counts as a “real” marriage nevertheless acknowledge each other’s marriages. For instance, from the Christians’ Year Zero to our own times, Jews governed their own marriages. Which meant that, on the very same acreage and at the very same time that their next-door neighbors were trooping past priestly courts for annulments because of some fifth-degree relation-by-marriage, the consanguine marriages of this troublesome archipelago through Christendom were honored. A few centuries and an ocean away, a similar thing happened in the American plantation South. The white land- and slave-owners “were most amazingly interwed, the marriages of cousins being almost the rule rather than the exception,” consolidating property and power by staying close. But enslaved Africans and African-Americans living on the very same territory flatly refused to marry first or even second cousins. Are you and your spouse legitimately married? The answer—as always—depends on whose social map gets superimposed.
Second, the shifting boundaries of incest force us to think about the real purpose of the incest taboo. We usually explain it as based on genetics and family psychology, scriptures our society subscribes to more widely than Leviticus. But neither genetics nor family psychology can possibly be the reason for incest rules that let you marry one brother or cousin while barring the other—or to use the Hebrews’ example, lets a man marry his niece but not his aunt—or to use the medieval Catholic example, forbids you to marry your husband’s or godfather’s relatives. Meanwhile, in a small community, marrying your niece and marrying your neighbor are genetically not that different: premarital genetic testing wo
uld do more to prevent, say, Tay-Sachs disease than a law that automatically separated Sam and Fannie May. Nor can family psychology—the idea that allowing Dick and Jane to marry would cause too much household tension—have mattered to the many societies that sent an affianced girl off to her future husband’s house at a young age.
So why do human beings ban incest—however it may be defined at the time? Anthropologists insist that it really doesn’t matter what the incest taboo is, so long as your society has one. The point, they say, is to force families to break open, every generation—to force families to give up their children, to force you to leave your father and mother—in order to create new kin, and therefore, a common society. Families thus become fluid cells in a larger society rather than sternly defended turrets—tied to others, loaning their members out, sharing obligations that range from delivering all your yams to your new brother-in-law or babysitting the new nephew every Thursday. The incest taboo insists that the basic human impulses toward sex, affection, food, and mutual support must be routed in a way that weaves a larger social web.
But how that breaking apart and weaving together must happen—exactly how family units might turn inward, like bad toenails, hobbling the larger society, and therefore what rules must guide families out of their self-absorption and into a common civilization—varies according to how a society is organized. Some groups want to keep marrying inward as closely as possible, like the ancient Hebrews, letting each marriage strengthen tribal power (while refusing to let any given father horde his daughters, cutting the small family off from the tribe). Others do not want to pull up the drawbridge to outsiders: they want to build power by having a far-flung network of kin, tied to a wider human community. The incest rules that keep turning a group’s members outward—whether Africans’ careful prohibition against marrying “parallel” cousins, or Catholicism’s outrageously broad sense of family—can have surprising effects. According to historian Herbert Gutman, under American slavery, the African prohibition on marrying cousins turned into a wide network of kin to turn to in extremis, a kind of cross-plantation resistance network.
Our own society scarcely worries about the power problem that preoccupied the early Church: clans marrying inward so often that they consolidated too much power and didn’t have to recognize other families as human. Rather, now that our public ideal of individual freedom has been translated into the sexual values of willingness and consent—and now that feminists have spoken up about being used by brothers, fathers, uncles—the West worries about those too young and powerless to say no. If we really believe that marriage must be a meeting of peers, and if we believe that each person should grow up with a sense of personal integrity, emotional security, and bodily independence—urgent concepts to an economy whose motor is the individual personality—then we must be especially concerned about that invisible abuse of power, about adults who take advantage of the vulnerable ones in their charge.
If the anthropologists are right, and the point of the incest taboo is to force us to leave our parents and create new kin, then the incest prohibition really is the very fiber of civilization—the basic rule that prevents the war of all (families, that is) against all. Or as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss puts it,
if each small biological unit does not wish to lead a precarious existence, haunted by fear and prey to the hatred and hostility of its neighbours, it cannot remain turned in upon itself. It must instead sacrifice its identity and continuity and open itself up to the great game of matrimonial alliances. By resisting the separatist tendences of kinship, the prohibition of incest succeeds in weaving networks of affinity which give societies their framework and without which none could sustain itself.
So what is marriage for? Seen from this angle, it’s for creating obligations beyond one’s own household, for creating a society that’s wider than blood. Marriage between two people of one sex—who are just as likely to visit the in-laws, send birthday cards, and take on all the other family obligations of our era—will serve.
Marrying Early and Marrying Often: Polygamy
Perhaps the most famous way to make kin is to make babies—seeding heirs to carry on your personal tribe. And if making children was good in God’s eyes, then traditionally, making more children was even better. We all know that men have a far greater ability to fertilize than women do to grow new life. And so if you put that vertical proliferation of kinship at the top of marriage’s to-do list, it’s easy to guess the resulting marriage rule: polygamy. Is polygamy, as many suggest, the next stop after same-sex marriage? Or is it a form that firmly endorses male power, a form we’ve outgrown, in which women are not the moral equals of men but are treated as incubators, a social arrangement in which fertility trumps love?
Polygamy (or to be verbally strict, polygyny) is one of the most traditional marriage forms: one man, several wives. Most of the ancients took it for granted that if a man’s wife was not producing children, she should hand over a surrogate—as Sarah offered Hagar—to handle the job in her name, or he should take on an additional wife; early medieval Jews considered a second wife mandatory if a marriage hadn’t produced children within ten years. Jacob launched the twelve tribes with his two wives—the sisters Leah and Rachel—and two concubines, his main wives competing with each other to “give” him more children from their own and their handmaids’ wombs. As time went by, the Jews frowned more and more on that agrarian and tribal marriage form. Some Jewish families actually wrote into their daughter’s ketubah, or marriage contract, that she was to get her dowry back if her husband ever took another wife—although officially the tribe kept the polygamous possibility until roughly 1300 A.D.
The Romans were a bit appalled by Jewish polygamy, in part because they felt free to make heirs via adoption. And yet the Romans excelled at serial polygamy, or as we’d know it, divorce, and unofficial polygamy, what with the panoply of slave and semi-free males and females available to each Roman patriarch and his sons.
Polygamy was a given among early medieval Germanic and Frankish clans. Since no ambitious or powerful man could afford to lack an heir, and since half your children could easily die before adulthood, one wife was never enough. A powerful man had at least a chief wife, second wife, and a back-up chorus of concubines. One well-known Carolingian lord had seven simultaneous wives and concubines—or more, reports one historian, if you count adultery and rape. And all those marriages and their offspring were “legitimate,” in the sense that any one could inherit if necessary.
Christianity’s most controversial marriage innovation was the idea that marriage was an either/or proposition. You were married or not: there were no more grades of marriage, no more wives of different ranks. A woman had just one husband—and a man had just one wife. Period. Male or female, lord or laborer, everybody had to play by the same marriage rules: one spouse at a time, forever. Adultery no longer meant invading another man’s sexual property but straying from your own; keeping a concubine was now as adulterous as shtupping another man’s wife. Part of what fueled the Church’s new doctrine was its dislike of two things: first, sex for pleasure’s sake, and second, marriage’s grubby interest in dynasty-building. But also important was the Church’s respect for women. The early Church’s vision of marriage may have been far from egalitarian, but it did offer a step up from women’s status in the past: frankly opposed to seeing women treated like meat, the Church insisted on monogamy as an acknowledgment that their inner lives were as valuable as their husbands’.
We take monogamy for granted now as “traditional” marriage, but at the time it was such an outrageous and radical leveling of society—taking away such key political (let alone personal) options from the men in power—that imposing this concept took more strength than the Church had for hundreds upon hundreds of years. One wife, and only one, was an incredible—not-to-be-believed—concept. No concubine? No repudiation? No way out? Explains one historian, the older world’s key distinction had been between freeborn and sla
ve-born; the Church changed that into a line between legitimate and illegitimate, which “can be considered as no less than a social revolution.”
Jump forward more than a thousand years to a time when monogamy had become synonymous with morality. Certainly by the time of the Protestants, serious Christians believed fiercely in monogamy’s mutual respect and sexual control. Meanwhile, as the West shifted from a farm-based to an urban world, families no longer needed that vast tribal brood. By the late nineteenth century, during the sentimentalizing Victorian era, young people chose their mates for themselves, falling in love with another’s unique inner spirit, then joining their hearts and souls and bodies in a romantic fusion. In the midst of a world like this, what possessed the Mormons to try to resurrect polygamy?
The story of Mormon polygamy is instructive in part because of its wholesale rejection of the Western beliefs in individual emotional freedom and gender equality that undergird today’s political and marriage philosophies. What the story also tells us is how opposed are the impulses toward polygamy and same-sex marriage. Or to put it differently, for the very reasons that polygamy was so definitively trounced in the nineteenth century, recognition of same-sex marriage is edging into Western law.
But first, some background. The nineteenth century, aboil with political and economic upheaval and with disturbing shifts in the roles of women and men, saw a proliferation of sects, revivals, and religious and political utopias that puts the 1960s to shame. The next section will look at some that believed in personal, social, and sexual emancipation, including such radical ideas as that husbands and wives should be fully equal. The sect focused on here, the Church of the Latter-Day Saints (LDS), had an entirely different vision: a hope of eliminating its era’s chaos by returning to the clear and crisp patriarchal rules of the Old Testament.