People who are against same-sex marriage often go out of their way to say, “Marriage is between one man and one woman.”

I noticed that while reporting a story about gay marriage for the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, California, some years ago.

Why “one” man and “one” woman, I wondered? Isn’t it obvious that a marriage is between two people?

I see now that my conservative sources – many were Evangelical Christians – were looking warily at polygamists. Specifically, fundamentalist Mormon polygynists.

Men with more than one wife.

Same sex marriage for those conservative-thinking folks was a slippery slope. If gays could get their marriages legalized, what was to keep all those polygamists from seeking legalization of their status as well?

At the time I thought the anti-gay marriage conservatives were way too sensitive. No way was our society going to sanction polygamy. Polygamy was barbaric. Polygamists were weird. Everybody knew that.

Not so fast.

Since researching that story on same-sex marriage, I have watched season after season of TV’s “Big Love” (one man, three wives, lotsa kids).

I’ve also watched a couple of episodes of “Sister Wives” (one man, four wives, more kids).

And I’ve read Love Times Three: Our True Story of a Polygamous Marriage (one man, three wives, 23 living children), by Joe, Alina, Vicki and Valerie Darger.

And I can’t help concluding that polygyny – as practiced in fiction and in fact by these three families – is neither barbaric nor weird.

Love Times Three is a great read. All kinds of juicy details about how two of the Darger wives courted and married their husband at the same time. How the sister of one wife – her twin! – joined the marriage later on. How “date nights” are managed. And how this huge family manages to live together under one roof (11 computers, 5 bathrooms, 10 cars).

Journalist and co-author Brooke Adams did a fine job of winning this family’s trust, asking the tough questions, and providing background on a polygamous culture that is more prevalent – and dare I say more viable – than most Americans would like to believe.

c 2011 BF Newhall

Love Times Three: Our True Story of a Polygamous Marriage

Joe, Alina, Vicki, and Valerie Darger

With Brooke Adams

2011 HarperOne $26.99 Hardcover

Alina, Vicki and Valerie with their husband Joe Darger at the RNA conference. c 2011 BF Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I’m just back from the annual Religion Newswriters Association conference, where I got a close-up look at the polygamous Darger family – three wives, one husband – who inspired the TV series “Big Love.”

It was a great TV show, and I’m expecting the book, Love Times Three to be pretty interesting as well. The TV show’s final season ended with a bang last spring — though one of the Darger wives told me that she hadn’t seen the finale and didn’t know how it ended (she was too busy caring for the family’s 24 children, maybe.) 

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the show ends with the husband getting shot to death .

The “Big Love” TV wives were all very different. There’s Barb, the sensible one; Nicki the uptight product of an abusive polygamous family, and Margene, wilful and sexy.

When  the three Darger women were asked which one was the Margene in the family, they laughed and replied none. Indeed, the  women spoke of taking a little quiz, which revealed that all three of them were Barbs to the core.

Based on my quick glimpse of this family, I believe it. The three sister wives even look alike (two are twin sisters), with shoulder-length dark hair, handsome faces, and — despite producing and caring for  24 children between them – trim figures.

The Darger family uses the term polygamy, but technically, since it involves three wives, it is polygynous.

Personally, I just don’t see how the math works out here. All four Darger adults grew up in polygynous families. All told, they have produced 11 boys and 13 girls. What’s to become of their 11 sons when they grow up and want to follow in their father’s, mothers’ and ancestors’ footsteps and marry two, three or more women? Will there be enough women in their community to go around?

A polygamist Independent Fundamentalist Mormon family steps forward with a book about their life together

I asked Alina about this, but her answer doesn’t add up. A man has to be affluent enough to support a family of three wives and a couple dozen children, she said, and it isn’t often that three women and a man will fall in love — so  it just doesn’t happen very often.

But that belies the family’s statement in their book that their primary charge, along with abiding by the gospel, is to perpetuate plural — that is,  polygynous — marriage.

More details to come when I’ve had a chance to look more closely at the book.

btw, the Religion Newswriters Association met in Durham, NC, this year. Next year, Bethesda, where the topic will be religion, politics and the election.

© 2011 BF Newhall

Love Times Three: Our True Story of a Polygamous Marriage. By Joe, Alina, Vicki, and Valerie Darger, with Brooke Adams. HarperOne, 2011.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

No doubt about it. After opening up the short, sweet and succint In Praise of Doubt by sociologists Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld, I’m feeling really good about my doubter status.

John Shelby Spong's latest book arrives in bookstores this month.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Former Episcopal Bishop of Newark John Shelby Spong says it’s time to ditch the two principle beliefs of Western religion.

The first one, he says, is that God is other, “a supernatural being who can do for me that which I cannot do for myself,” a situation that requires getting and staying on God’s good side.

The second outmoded belief is that human beings are alienated from the sacred and that our alienation requires some kind of atonement — which is another way of saying that we are all guilty as hell. 

On these two premises, says Spong,  have Western believers placed their dearest hopes for eternal life.

And it’s bunk.

Modernity, science, knowledge and reason have demonstrated once and for all that these premises are flawed, Spong argues in his latest book, Eternal Life: A New Vision – Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell.

To continue to believe in this sort of religion is to be naively, hopelessly and pathetically stuck in denial. To cease to believe, on the other hand, means accepting that the universe – and we ourselves – are meaningless accidents.

Spong profers a third way, however, one that involves being “fully human.” We are not really separated from God, he asserts. Rather “we are part of what God is and we are at one with all that God is.” We are finite, but we share in infinity. We are mortal, but we share in immortality.

Spong, who turned 78 this year, says that “when I die I will rest my case in the ‘being’ of which I am a part . . . I step beyond words at this point into the wonder of a wordless reality.”

I like Spong’s sense that human beings are “at one with all that God is.”  And I can cheerfully recommend this book to readers who don’t accept the idea of a  miraculously parting Red Sea, or a Jesus risen bodily from the dead.

But, for me, questions remain: Is God an other, a person with whom we can enter into a relationship? Or are we part of God, each of us an expression of the Infinite? Or something else entirely?

Unlike Spong, I don’t think I have the answers to these questions. I have no certainty regarding God’s otherness vs. God’s me-ness. I’m not at all sure that traditional, God-as-other religion is delusional. Hey, for all we know, there may be an actual God out there creating and loving the Universe even as we speak — even as we debate the fine points of God’s time-and-space-shattering nature.

As Huston Smith repeats often in his recent autobiography, Tales of Wonder, “We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.”

Or, as I am wont to say: God is Big.

Eternal Life: A New Vision, by John Shelby Spong, HarperOne, 2009, hardcover $24.99.

© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall