Who Told You One Wife Was God's Rule?

By Don Jackson | Prodigal Breaking News | prodigalbreakingnews.com

Prodigal — The Podcast, Episode 41, with Don Jackson and Daysha Voss. 🎧 Listen to the full episode on Substack

---

On Sunday, October 25, Pastor Lydia Ford stood up in front of her congregation at LifeWorks Church outside Cleveland and introduced the room to her husband's second wife.

"Y'all know her. Y'all love her," she said. The woman beside her, Minister Shakayla Ford, formerly Shakayla Talley, a member of the church, kept it short: "Cat is out the bag." Lydia said the three of them had been married for nearly three years.

Then Pastor Israel Ford, who founded the church with Lydia in 2009, posted the moment online: "As a nation we have been taught that a man should have one wife only. This is unbiblical." He called it "an unpopular truth" that "many Pastors will not preach," and he told anyone who didn't like it they were free to leave: "People may not accept this and choose to disconnect, and that is ok!"

The internet did what the internet does. Half of it cheered and half of it quoted 1 Timothy 3:2: an overseer must be "the husband of one wife." Nigerian commentator Solomon Buchi called pastors like Ford "ministers of Satan" chasing "polygamous fantasies." Christian outlets put the word "pastor" in quotation marks.

Here's what almost nobody did: ask where the rule came from in the first place.

That's this episode. Not whether you should have two wives. You can decide that for yourself. The question is who decided for you, and whether what you were handed as God's law was really God's, or somebody's.

1. Plural marriage was here before the Bible was

Polygyny, one man with more than one wife, wasn't invented in Africa, and it wasn't invented by the Bible. It's older than writing. For most of recorded history, in most human societies, a man with means could take more than one wife. In ancient Egypt, pharaohs kept several royal wives. Across West and Central Africa, plural marriage was woven into how families built alliances, shared work and land, and cared for widows and children. It was an institution with rules, obligations and ceremonies of its own, not a free-for-all.

Africa is where it's most visible today. Pew Research Center's 2019 household data found that only about 2% of the world's population lives in polygamous households, but about 11% of people in sub-Saharan Africa do. In Burkina Faso it's 36%, in Mali 34% and in Nigeria 28%. Some African nations write it into law. Kenya's Marriage Act of 2014 recognizes polygamous marriages under customary law; when Parliament passed it, women lawmakers walked out because the bill let a man take another wife without consulting the first. South Africa's Recognition of Customary Marriages Act of 1998 allows it too, but a husband must go to court first, and the court weighs the interests of the wives already in the marriage. Former President Jacob Zuma has four legally recognized wives.

So when someone says plural marriage is "un-African" or "un-Christian," the history says: slow down.

2. The Bible's own family tree

Open the book and count.

• Lamech took two wives in Genesis 4:19, only a few chapters in.
• Abraham, the father of faith, had Sarah and Hagar, and later Keturah.
• Jacob, whose sons became the twelve tribes of Israel, married Leah and Rachel and had children with their servants Bilhah and Zilpah. The nation of Israel was born out of a plural household.
• David, a man "after God's own heart," had multiple wives.
• Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3). The text condemns them because they turned his heart to other gods, not because there were more than one.

The law of Moses didn't ban the practice. It regulated it. Exodus 21:10, the verse Pastor Ford quoted, says if a man takes another wife, he can't reduce the first wife's food, clothing or marital rights. Deuteronomy 21:15 sets inheritance rules for a man with two wives. Deuteronomy 17:17 tells the king not to "multiply wives," which is a limit, not a ban for everybody.

The other side has scripture too. In Matthew 19, Jesus goes back to Genesis: "the two shall become one flesh." Paul's letters to Timothy and Titus require church leaders to be "the husband of one wife." Christians have argued for centuries about whether that means "only one wife ever," "one at a time," or "faithful to your wife." That disagreement is honest. But notice that the strongest New Testament line is a qualification for church leadership, not a law for every believer. And notice that the Hebrew scriptures never once describe a woman with two husbands.

The Bible doesn't hand you a simple answer on this. It hands you a fight. Anybody who tells you it's simple is selling you their side.

3. So where did "one man, one woman" come from?

Monogamy as law came out of Greece and Rome. Roman law recognized one wife at a time, and as Christianity grew up inside the Roman Empire, the church carried that norm forward and preached it as God's design. For more than a thousand years, the European church was both the moral authority and the legal one.

Even then, the line moved when it was convenient for powerful men. In 1540, Philip of Hesse, a German prince protecting the Protestant Reformation, wanted a second wife. Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, gave him confidential counsel that reluctantly allowed it. That's the same Luther whose name is on half the church buildings in America.

Then Europe went out to colonize the world, and it brought the rule with it.

When Anglican bishops gathered at the Lambeth Conference in 1888, they voted 83 to 21 that "persons living in polygamy be not admitted to baptism." Plural husbands could sit in church as "candidates" and wait "until such time as they shall be in a position to accept the law of Christ." In practice, that meant: put away your other wives, and then you can be saved. On the mission field, that turned real women into ex-wives overnight, often with no land, no standing and nowhere to take their children. Some missionaries saw the cruelty. In 1855, Bishop John Colenso of Natal published an argument for tolerating polygamy among Zulu converts, and his fellow bishops later moved to depose him over his theology.

It took the Anglican Communion one hundred years to soften. In 1988, Lambeth voted to let a polygamist be baptized if he promised not to take any more wives, while still calling monogamy "God's plan." A Kenyan bishop, Manasses Kuria, made the case plainly: converts "should not be forced to separate from their wives because of the social problems it would create."

America wrote the same rule into its law. In Reynolds v. United States (1879), a case against a Mormon man, the U.S. Supreme Court said polygamy "has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe," and until the Mormons it was "almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people." Read that again. The highest court in the country defined the moral line by European custom, and it put Africans on the other side of it.

So "one man, one woman" didn't come down from heaven to the Black church. It came through Rome, through the colonial mission, and through the courts. Our ancestors were taught it along with the Bible, at the same time they were taught their own family traditions were heathen.

4. What colonization did to the way we read

Here's the part that's hard to say and needs saying.

A lot of us were raised to believe that if the King James Version says it, that settles it, and if Africa did it first, it was probably sin. We learned to trust the colonizer's book over our own grandmother's memory. That's not because Black people can't think. It's because the people who brought the Bible also brought the whip, the plantation chapel and the mission school, and for generations, questioning the book could cost you everything.

Some people describe this as trauma passed down in our very biology. Be careful with that. Researchers have found early evidence that severe stress in parents can leave chemical marks on genes that show up in their children. A 2023 scientific review of the human studies calls the evidence "preliminary": promising, but based on small samples, and not yet able to prove cause. What we know for certain is how beliefs get passed down: preached from the pulpit, taught in Sunday school, enforced by the church mothers, and absorbed before you're old enough to question them. Whether it lives in our genes or only in our habits, the effect is the same: a rule somebody else wrote feels like our own conscience.

That's why the reaction to Pastor Ford is so fast and so uniform. One verse, quoted on reflex, and the conversation is over. Very few pastors are asking the harder questions out loud: Why did our church adopt the colonizer's definition of marriage? What happened to the African wives who were put away so their husbands could be baptized? And if we're going to be biblical, which part of the Bible do we mean?

5. Choice is the line

None of this is a case that polygyny is good, or that every man should go get a second wife. History doesn't hand out permission slips. What history does is show you who has been making the rules and why.

So here's where we land. The moral question isn't "one wife or two." It's whether every adult in the household chose it freely, with full knowledge, and with the power to say no and leave. By that test, a plural marriage that all three adults chose can be more honest than a "monogamous" one built on secret affairs. And a monogamous marriage can be a prison too.

The same test cuts the other way. Plural marriage has historically been one-directional: men with many wives, almost never women with many husbands. In Kenya, the law let a man add a wife without consulting the first. If a tradition only offers freedom to one gender, call it what it is. If Pastor Ford's congregation would never accept First Lady Lydia taking a second husband, then the conversation isn't about the Bible. It's about who holds power in the house.

Right and wrong in marriage have always been shaped by culture, tradition and who held the pen. You can practice monogamy, practice something else, or practice nothing at all. What you can't do anymore is pretend the rule fell from the sky.

6. Back to Source

At Prodigal, we start from a different place than the pulpit does. Before any religion, any law, any book, there's Source: the one consciousness every one of us is a wave of, experiencing itself through billions of lives. From there, marriage isn't a commandment handed down to obedient subjects. It's an agreement between conscious beings who are free.

That's the crack in this story. Not that a pastor took a second wife, but that so many of us felt certain about something we never once looked into. Notice the certainty. Ask where it came from. And then decide for yourself.

Notice the pattern. Interrupt it.

---

Go deeper: Process this episode with the Prodigal AI companion guide at prodigalai.app.

This episode is brought to you by FemChoice, Don Jackson's own company, full disclosure. A private, standalone cycle tracker: no app, no phone, no account. Your Cycle. Your Device. Your Privacy. Shop FemChoice on Amazon

📖 Don's book, Prodigal: Leaving Church and Finding God (Iff Books): https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/iff-books/our-books/prodigal-leaving-church-finding-god

---

Tags: Religion & Power, Black Church, Marriage, Colonization, Prodigal — The Podcast

Hashtags: #NoticeThePattern #ProdigalThePodcast #BlackChurch #Polygamy #Colonization #Marriage #WeAreSource #ProdigalBreakingNews

Sources:

• Israel Ford's Facebook/Instagram post and church video (Oct. 25, 2026), as reported by The News-Chronicle, YEN.com.gh, Protestia and theJasmineBRAND
• Legit.ng: Solomon Buchi's reaction (Oct. 26, 2026)
• Pew Research Center, "Polygamy is rare around the world and mostly confined to a few regions" (Dec. 2020)
• Jurist: Kenya's Marriage Act signed (April 29, 2014)
• Polygamy in South Africa; Recognition of Customary Marriages Act, 1998
• Anglican Communion: Lambeth Conference 1888, Resolution 5
• Christian Science Monitor: Lambeth 1988 resolutions on polygamy (Aug. 10, 1988)
• John Colenso, Remarks on the Proper Treatment of Polygamy (1855)
• WELS: Luther's counsel to Philip of Hesse
• Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879), via Teaching American History
• Scoping review of intergenerational epigenetic transmission of stress and trauma in humans, PMC10454883 (2023)
• The Bible: Genesis 4:19; Genesis 16, 25, 29–30; 1 Kings 11:3; Exodus 21:10; Deuteronomy 17:17, 21:15; Matthew 19:4–6; 1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6