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This chapter examines the different forms of plural marriage and provides some historical background and context, focusing on the long-running conflict around polygamy in the Mormon Church in North America. It asks whether we can justify prohibiting or denying recognition to polygamous marriages, whether we ought to drop restrictions based on numbers and focus on the quality of people's relationships, and on what grounds nonrecognition and discouragement of polygamy can be justified. It also considers the so-called “polyamory” and argues that same-sex marriage and polygamy have little in common, aside from being deviations from “traditional” monogamy. Finally, it explores plural marriage as a doctrinal tenet of the Mormons and the 1947 Supreme Court case Reynolds v. United States.

This chapter deals with the religious movement that was challenged by the Government of the United States in Reynolds v. United States (1878). It found, in biblical accounts of the lives of highly esteemed patriarchs, divinely sanctioned precedents for the polygamy permitted, perhaps even required, by the directives of an American Church. The chapter notes that this polygamy, in the Utah Territory of the United States, ran afoul of an Act of Congress. It also deals with another curious development seen in the animal-sacrifice case, Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah (1993). It notes that what is most curious about this case is the fact that the cult (known as the Santeria religion) dared to assert itself as it did, insisting upon the right to defy City of Hialeah directives that attempted to restrain some of the practices of this cult.

The United States became recognizably modern in several key ways in the half-century after the Civil War. Changes such as the end of slavery, urbanization, and the suffrage movement posed formidable challenges to religious authority. Many of the most significant writers on religious politics in this period were not government officials but reformers who sought to remake Americans' public life. This chapter presents the following documents: Reynolds v. United States (1878), the Pittsburgh Platform of Reform Judaism (1885), Frances Willard's Woman in the Pulpit (1888), Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible (1895), W. E. B. Du Bois' “Of the Faith of the Fathers” (1903), Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), and William Jennings Bryan's “Mr. Bryan's Last Speech” (1925).