POLYGAMY: Critiquing Mike Winger’s Response to Rob Kowalski
Alright, the gloves are off.
Any of my regular readers probably know I don’t like to get involved in stupid he-said-she-said debate responses.
I know, I know, I made an exception for Michael Knowles vs Pearl Davis, because he was just so obnoxious about it and brushed over every good point she made.
But I’ve been really good for six months now about not getting involved in silly YouTube debates.
Alas, I must relapse.
Because, again, we have another prominent Christian guy with a large online following punching down to silence an up-and-coming voice raising attention to an important men’s rights issue, and that issue is “polygamy” (polygyny).
And yet again, the guy’s name is also Michael; Mike Winger. (What is it with Mikes being a bit obnoxious?)
So, this Mike Winger guy, he’s got a YouTube channel with nearly 800k subscribers (at the time of writing this), and he mostly makes videos addressing various Christian, Bible-related topics.
Just like with Michael Knowles, my impression of Mike Winger has always been pretty favorable. He’s like a less-grumpy Matt Walsh. A Christian family man with morals. Says some sensible-sounding things. I may disagree with about 30% of what he says, but hey, we’re generally on the same team, sort of.
At least, I genuinely believe he’s not paid opposition intentionally trying to quash the truth and subvert the youth.
If you’re a follower of his, and you trust the guy’s opinion, you will probably assume much of what he says in his response video against polygamy to be pretty credible. He sounds like an honest, credible guy. And he’s very good at what he does.
In fact, if I weren’t so very well-researched on the particular topic of Biblical polygamy, and I’d just come across this video, I probably would have sided with Mike on most of his rebuttals against Rob Kowalski’s “5 Reasons Christian Men Should Pursue Polygamy” video (which you can view here).
As it turns out though, I’m no rookie on this topic. I’ve got the intellectual goods.
So, without making an hour-long video about it, I’m going to simply walk you through Rob’s 5 initial “reasons”, and I’m going to summarize for you everything Mike offered in response to his mainstream Christian audience.
You can view Mike’s full 43-minute video here. But for everyone else, here’s my summary:
Rob argument #1:
Most women, even Christian women, are no longer high-quality virtuous anymore, therefore monogamous marriage has become an increasingly risky prospect for men.
Mike response #1:
You think there aren’t enough good women to go around, so you’re solution is to marry more than one of them? There are plenty of good, virtuous women at my church.
My critique:
That’s called a straw man fallacy, Mike. You’re attacking a mischaracterized version of Rob’s argument instead of addressing the actual problem he’s pointing out. And then to top it off, you’re appealing to anecdote to brush the whole issue aside like it’s not a real problem millions of Christian men are facing.
Maybe your personal experience isn’t as common as you think. Maybe it’s actually a comparatively rare one nowadays. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones. Maybe, being married for fifteen years now, you’re even a little bit out-of-touch with the modern dating market, two-thirds of which takes place entirely online.
You know, if Rob had made more than a five-minute-long TikTok style video addressing these issues, I’m sure he would have gone into much more detail about the actual statistics, and then you might not have been able to rebut him and brush him aside so easily, Mike.
Did you know that in 2024 only 3% of women in the US are virgins on their wedding night (and 90% of those are probably Mormons and Mennonites) compared to 85% of American women a hundred years ago? Most Christian women looking for marriage right now are “born-again virgins” while most Christian men looking for a wife are actual virgins.
But you, Mike, you know plenty of good, virtuous, available women at your church just waiting for a solid Christian guy to come marry them and wife them up? I doubt it. I don’t think you’re lying, but I do think you’re a little out of touch right now.
Rob argument #2:
Because there’s 20 million MORE Christian women than there are Christian men in the US, a monogamy-only marriage culture either limits those women to a lifetime of celibacy or yokes them with an unbeliever. Polygyny not only gives every woman the opportunity of having a good Christian husband, but gives many women their own helper in the form of a sister wife.
Mike response #2:
So what, now there’s too many women? First not enough good women, now not enough good men? Gosh. Sounds like it all actually balances out really well. Now, I don’ t actually know any polygamous Christian families but I’m sure it’s not actually easier for women to have a sister wife, because they would get so much less one-on-one time with their husband!
My critique:
Again, Mike, this a straw man argument. You just hand-waved away Rob’s actual inconvenient statistic like a Jedi trying to make it disappear from your audience’s mind. Yes, there are tens of millions more women in Christian churches across the US than men.
And it doesn’t just even out. Men and women have different standards, different things they look for in a potential spouse. Men value fertility, peace, humility, joy, loyalty/exclusivity. Women value high status, provision, protection, leadership and consistency.
All the statistics show that in practice half or more of women really don’t care about whether they get exclusivity from a man/having to share a man if it means they get a man with enough status and financial provision. Exclusivity is actually comparatively low on their priorities. They understand it’s the nature of men to find almost all women attractive.
In fact, most women perceive a man who is desired by multiple women as being inherently higher status (in other words, more attractive) than men who don’t get a lot of female attention.
We live in a modern era in which we’ve been sold this spell of Romance (Rome + mancy) as being this monogamous ideal in which one man and one woman complete each other. But where is God in that equation?
As Christians (and particularly Protestant Christians who reject Rome’s claim to spiritual authority), we should be very wary about these toxic ideas in our spiritual practice. Monogamy laws were first instituted in Ancient Rome solely upon the slave class as a means of preventing them from gaining the generational, familial wealth to challenge the elite Roman bloodline families.
As for your made-up conjecture about the satisfaction of polygamous women, Mike, Rob’s interviewed dozens and dozens of ACTUAL polygamist families, and you know what? Turns out the women almost universally say it’s easier and better than being a solo stay-at-home mother. Not only do they get to share the load at home with one or more other women, but they actually find around 80% of their emotional needs met in having other women present to live their lives with, so they don’t actually need all that emotional energy from their husband at the end of the day.
In the same way that having more and more children in your family provides way more benefit/gain than actual difficulty, having more adults in the home to help out is actually way better.
Rob argument #3:
Men and women have God-given physical natures that inherently lead to a polygynous conclusion. ie. Women are hypergamous, they want one older, more established, high-status man, but can’t reproduce that often or for that long when compared to their lifetime. Men, on the other hand, can reproduce far more often and far longer in their lifetime than women, and generally desire to do so with multiple women.
Mike response #3:
Eww. That’s just man’s fallen, carnal nature. Just because I want to steal other people’s stuff doesn’t mean I do it. Don’t you know that Paul said that as a man, your body belongs to your wife, not yourself. 1 Corinthians 7 says all women should have their own husband.
My critique:
You want to steal stuff, Mike?
I don’t know you personally, but statistically speaking, I’ve probably been more poor, more broke than you ever have in your life, and I’ve never wanted to steal other people’s stuff. Do you not have any of your own moral standards?
Do you need God to remind you that it’s wrong to take other people’s property?
Like, do you just read the Bible as the rule-book for your life, like a little child would, incapable of really questioning things or thinking for yourself?
If a rabbi explained to you that the Hebrew/Aramaic for the commandment against theft/stealing is actually a law against kidnapping/enslaving your fellow Israelites, would you suddenly think it might be okay to steal from people?
Mike, most mature adults (especially those of us with a personal relationship with God) don’t need to read it in scripture for God to tell us what’s right and wrong. We live under the new covenant with the Law of God written on our hearts. That’s what it means to be a born-again believer. You have direct access to God.
This is precisely why, as the religious trappings and false traditions are falling away, more and more born-again believers, as you have observed, are recognizing that God doesn’t have a problem with polygyny. In fact, he’s called many of us into this lifestyle directly.
Now, to address your other points, no, our natural desires for polygyny is not part of a fallen, carnal nature. Most animals are by nature polygynous because it’s ideal for survivability, fertility/birthrate and quality genes. God made them that way. He made us that way too.
And as for 1 Corinthians 7, Mike, there are two different ownership words at play here in the Greek for men and women. A more correct rendering to highlight this distinction would be- “to avoid prostitution, let each man have their own woman, and each woman be within the ownership/household of a man/master.”
This isn’t a proscription for monogamy as the default standard for Christians.
Rob argument #4:
Polygyny means bigger Christian families and communities. God wants us to be fruitful and multiply.
Mike response #4:
Eww, why would you want so many kids. That’s not a quiver-full. Don’t you know, lots of stuff in the Bible is DE-scriptive, not PRE-scriptive. Except of course for these things from the Bible that I am sharing because I have authority here. Paul Paul Paul Paul Paul. But only I am interpreting Paul correctly here because I read other people’s interpretations in the commentaries. And now I will misinterpret Jesus for you so that you think Jesus was against polygyny too.
My critique:
Wow, Mike. You do realize, I hope, that we’re on the verge of a major depopulation crisis? Fertility rates are dropping like flies. Less marriage and less children and more immigration than ever before in history.
Do you really want your Christian followers to think God doesn’t care about whether they are fruitful and multiply? One of the first commandments God gave to mankind… to fill the earth?
I hope you remember that Satan’s first words to Eve were all about trying to create doubt in her mind about what God actually commanded/desired of her. Did God really say…?
Yes, Mike, yes, he did. He wants us to multiply and fill the earth.
You know, most of the political problems in the US would be fixed within a generation if we could get Christians to start averaging 10 babies per family instead of the current measly 3.2 kids per couple. The progressives are barely procreating. We can turn this tide super quick if we can just up up up the Christian birthrates.
Man, the gall of you, Mike, telling Christians God doesn’t want them to multiply and fill the earth. That’s subversive and abominable, Mike. (The Hebrew word for abomination specifically means “that which is antithetical to or destructive of life/procreation”.)
Speaking of prescriptive parts of the Bible, Mike, in Exodus 21, literally the very next chapter after God give the Covenant (ten commandments) to the kingdom of Israel, he gives the “constitutional amendments” or case law precedent for judgment in Israel, and one of the very first rights he enshrines in the Law there is the right of men to take additional wives based on means, desire and the consent of all parties involved.
And because you touched on Deuteronomy 17:17 which forbids a king from “multiplying wives”, you should know that in the Aramaic version of the Torah from after the Babylonion exile (which is likely the version Jesus read growing up) it actually gives more detail and forbids a king from multiplying wives more than 18 in number.
This is reaffirmed in 2 Samuel 12:8 God tells King David (who had a dozen or so wives at this point) that all his wives were given to him by God specifically, and that he would have happily given him more if David had asked.
You also have several references in Ezekiel and Jeremiah and even from Jesus in the New Testament of God describing himself as the polygynous husband or bridegroom to multiple tribes/nations/churches.
But hey, let’s address your Paul and Jesus claims.
Elders/deacons/bishops should be “husband of one wife” in Timothy and Titus. What does it actually say in the Greek?
It says they should be “having a woman” men.
That might sound a little weird until you understand that there’s no word for “married” in Koine Greek. It’s clearly just saying “they should be married men”, not necessarily limiting them to one-wife.
And there are two chief reasons we know this.
Firstly, the Greek word “mia” doesn’t mean the numeral “one”, it means “a”, as in having something vs having nothing.
ie. If I offer you a banana, that doesn’t inherently mean you can’t have a second one if you’re still hungry. One is just the default, in much the same way male is the default in the word “mankind”.
Secondly, in the very next chapter of the epistle, the writer of 1 Timothy warns specifically against doctrines of devils that would arise in the church forbidding some people to marry (ie. celibate priests and nuns in church leadership).
Anyone who reads the Greek for coherency can see the clear picture here, there is no limitation of only one wife for elders, deacons or bishops in the church, it’s just been repeatedly mistranslated into the English because of false Roman traditions in Christianity.
On the Jesus topic, this one is ridiculous, but it frankly comes from a misunderstanding of the concept of adultery.
In the Hebrew, Aramaic and the Greek, the verb “to adulterate” is always translated into English “commit adultery” to obfuscate that it was a one-way act.
Just as, Biblically, a man marries and a woman is given in marriage, likewise, in the original languages, a man adulterates and a woman is adulterated (by the seed of a second man).
You can only adulterate another man’s chaste wife, not a virgin or a harlot. And certainly, a man (as the one whose flesh the woman takes into herself when they marry their bodies together) is not adulterated by the act.
Rome hid this fact in Latin when they controlled Christianity to promote their slave-class monogamy-only doctrine forbidding marriage to many faithful people.
So, when Jesus says that it is taking part in adultery to divorce your wife and marry another, that’s because divorcing your wife essentially ensures her inevitable adulteration. She’s not expected to remain celibate the rest of her life, she needs a provider/protector. That’s on you as the man.
When you take a woman’s virginity and put your essence into her so that she is one-flesh with you, you’re responsible for her in God’s eyes for life, so long as she’s faithful to you and doesn’t let another man adulterate her one-flesh bond with you.
It’s super clear when you actually understand how languages work. So, no, Jesus definitely doesn’t teach monogamy-only, he teaches lifelong commitment to any women who gave you their virginity and stayed faithful.
Rob argument #5:
Monogamy-only marriage culture places an unbiblical strain and pressure on Christian men that pushes many to make poor choices or go do incorrect or harmful paths that negatively impact the church and broader society, when God never intended that.
Mike response #5:
So gross, these red pill guys just want more power for themselves so they can manipulate women. So narcissistic. So worldly. Ugh. We need masculine men who will serve their wives and put them on a pedestal and lose their lives for their wives and Jesus did for his bride the church, which is totally one wife and not multiple wives/churches.
My critique:
Honestly, audience, you can probably tell from my summaries of Winger’s rhetoric that I’ve just gotten more and more annoyed at how weak and gehhhh he sounds.
He’s not really dealing honestly with any of Rob’s arguments. He keeps circling back to his same emotional appeals and straw man fallacies.
Rob brought up an excellent final point about how patriarchy isn’t really possible without the option of polygyny on the table. Winger just avoids the point and tries to reframe masculinity as being subservient to women.
And yes, I will fully grant that Jesus taught that those who would be chief among you should have a servant-like mentality. A good leader does. I’m not disputing that.
What I’m disputing is the sneaky way Winger reframes this idea to mean monogamy-only.
I contend that your average man with multiple wives will likely spend more time as a leader contemplating and acting on what serves his wives and children that a man with only one wife.
More responsibility requires more power. And most men are incredibly benevolent to women. They’re not biding time, rubbing their hands, looking for opportunities to abuse and manipulate women.
And it’s probably a shade of this same underlying benevolence why Winger here is simping so hard for the Christian women against big ‘old scary red pill Rob here.
Problem is, Mike, you’re wrapped up in false traditions and not really looking at the bigger picture here or engaging seriously with the arguments.
If you had, you probably would have shifted your position on this one, assuming you’re not a paid ideological gatekeeper.
